XN000022-1996-07-11 — Page 4

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"The Education Department, for example, has set up a Central Placement Unit to assist new arrival children to gain admission to a school in a location convenient to them and at a suitable educational level as soon as possible.

"It also subvents a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in providing special induction and extension programmes to help new arrival children to know more about the Hong Kong living environment."

Noting that HAD had been tasked with the direct responsibility for monitoring and assessing the services provided for new arrivals from China in order to ease the process of integration, Mrs Lau said the department was making the best efforts to put in place mechanisms to assess the needs of these new members and to ensure that the service providers were meeting those needs in the best possible way and that services were targeted at areas where they were most needed.

To implement these work targets, she said, a steering committee under her chairmanship and comprising representatives of relevant policy branches and departments had been established to serve as a forum for liaison and exchange of information among branches and departments concerned.

It also identifies new areas of need and explores new measures to meet the special needs of new arrivals.

Mrs Lau said the steering committee also invited representatives of NGOs to attend meetings on a need basis.

"Although still in the early days of its work, the committee will be making recommendations to departments concerned for better deployment of resources to target their services and to the central government for additional resources where it identifies such a need," she said.

Pointing out that a similar inter-departmental committee had also been set up in each of the 18 District Offices, Mrs Lau said through the district liaison network and frequent contacts with local associations and residents, district officers were ideally placed to identify problem areas early and to reflect these difficulties to the steering committee in the form of comprehensive reports on the situation at the district level every two months.

And in order to establish profiles of new arrivals, HAD had been conducting a survey on them since February at the Registration of Persons' Office in Tsim Sha Tsui when they apply for their identity cards.