XN000022-1995-02-14 — Page 7

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We've established, I hope this doesn't fill you with dread, they're quite often sort of 'Yes Minister' words, but we've established a committee which is going to, as you may know, look at the issues that are raised by the whole question of unification and I hope that it can report as soon as possible because candidly I think it's going to be extremely difficult to plan provision for pre-school children without looking at the relationships between kindergartens and childcare centres. I think to look at them separately would be wrong and would create a lot of real difficulties in social policy and in the provision of training for childcare workers and for kindergarten teachers. We've put a lot of emphasis on encouraging more trained kindergarten teachers in kindergartens and that has implications that we have to face up to.

Question 3: My name is Joyce Chan (phonetic). I'm going to ask a question on behalf of the Social Welfare Manpower Training Committee. The existing social welfare manpower planning prompts to be very uncoordinated. In the past few years, when there was a short fall in welfare manpower service provision, blister programmes were created... and this was introduced to increase the required manpower. In coming years, the use of blister programmes will continue to be a means to alleviate the existing manpower short fall. There seems to be a lack of long term forward looking planning, direction in relevance of social welfare manpower policy.

Another sore point which troubles our.. is the manpower wastage among our professionals. The Council has the opinion that one of the contributing 3 factors is the poor fringe benefit package. Compared to our counterparts in the government, or other government funded institutes such as training institute, Hospital Authority, fringe benefits of practising workers in... are... low. The Council would like to know the government's position and plan for increasing the parity of benefit between employees of Social Welfare Department or Hospital Authority and the.. staff.

Governor: Two slightly separate questions there. First of all there is certainly a shortfall, a projected shortfall of social work diploma graduates. I think the calculations, though they're inevitably a bit rule of thumb are that they'll be a shortfall of over 400 by the end of the decade and we are looking at a number of options to deal with that, including and you mentioned it yourself, the possibility of setting up a blister programme to produce, not only enough social work diploma graduates to meet the shortfall but to cover the wastage that you mentioned as well, with we hope a bit of room to spare. We're also, which I imagine will have some effect on the recruitment and retention, improving salaries for social workers at diploma level from April this year and I hope, to repeat myself, that that has some effect on shortage.