XN000022-1995-03-29 — Page 44

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Child Care Centres

Many Members mentioned the interface between kindergartens and child care centres. The Working Party on Kindergarten Education, which includes representatives from both the kindergarten and Child Care Centre sectors, has been tasked with reviewing, as its first priority, the qualifications, training and pay of workers in both sectors. Our aim is for the Administration to decide the way forward on those key issues well before the subsidy to kindergartens starts in September and, in this way, avoid any adverse impact the subsidy scheme may have on the Child Care

sector.

In dealing with problems faced by children, our priority is prevention. And in this case, prevention means doing all we can to support the family which should, when functioning well, provide the best support for a child. For this reason in 1995/96, we are providing 92 more family case workers and 9 more clinical psychologists to improve counselling services. But I agree with Members, including Messrs Eric Li and Tam Yiu- chung, that the caseloads of our case workers remain too high in spite of our ongoing efforts to increase staff resources to bring loads down. The problem, of course, is that with increasing public awareness of our services and of the nature of the problems involved which, in turn, reflects the success of our own educational programmes, the demand for services is increasing. And this unfortunately neutralises our best efforts to bring caseloads down by increasing staff numbers. I know the Director of Social Welfare would like to do more in this regard and I shall be examining with him options for diverting even more of our welfare resources towards tackling the caseload problem in future.

Rehabilitation

On rehabilitation. I am grateful to a number of Members for their concern about employment for people with a disability. We believe that our goal of community acceptance would be undermined if people with a disability were only given jobs because their employers would get tax concessions. But we are firmly committed to increase job opportunities for people with a disability. For example, this month we are providing 330 more supported employment places. And our ongoing public education programmes combined with the Disability Discrimination Bill, which we will introduce into this Council shortly, will be powerful tools in promoting further integration.

I should now like to turn to healthcare -