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HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 1st October 1970.
[MR PRESIDENT]
and, as I have already mentioned, real wages are rising. The back- ground situation is therefore now by no means unsatisfactory, and the necessary basic facilities are, in short, becoming much more readily available.
How then do we proceed to help those families who have not been able to hold their own in this new environment? Their first need, of course, is to be able to earn an adequate livelihood. This requires education, which in turn requires, in so far as the children are concerned, that they be enabled to attend school without having to help their parents augment an inadequate family income in one way or another. Lack of education, leading to low family income, leading to children kept from school constitutes something of a circular problem, and this circle has to be broken. The situation requires that the next generation be launched on a new course, since unfortunately it is not easy to do this always for adults. The first step, which we have nearly achieved, is to be in a position to offer six years of aided primary education to all, at rates which all can afford. The very small primary school fee asked for up to now has for some years been remittable in the case of the needy, and the primary school fee should not therefore have been a bar to a primary education for any child. We intend however to make sure of the matter by suggesting to honourable Members in due course that we do away with the existing primary school fee entirely in the generality of Government and aided primary schools after this coming Lunar New Year.
Having eliminated whatever residual bar to a primary education the primary school fee may have been, the more complicated problems of eliminating whatever other grounds exist for not sending children to primary school can be tackled. One that I have already mentioned has been the need for children to assist in one way or another with the augmentation of family income. The revised public assistance scheme, now getting under way, comes in here. Grants under this should help in some cases to reduce the need to make children earn rather than go to school.
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There is also the problem of the care of small children while parents are away at work, and the temptation to keep elder children away from school to look after the younger ones. While our now very large com- mitment to education proper does not permit us as yet to aid kinder- gartens and day nurseries generally to any very great extent, we do nonetheless have an agreed programme for increasing the number of subsidized nursery places and we can and are assisting non-profit organizations interested in running nurseries to a limited degree by helping them to find premises and to train staff. Here again public assistance should help the neediest parents here also by relieving them of some of their other financial problems.
HONG KONG LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL 1st October 1970.
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But none of these measures solve the problem of parents who wilfully and unnecessarily neglect to send their child to primary school. To introduce a law enforcing compulsory primary education is a very great temptation, and could easily be done: but we all know that such a law could not be sufficiently effectively enforced. Legislation of this kind would be very unpleasantly close to mere window-dressing, and window-dressing legislation is something that we have always sought to avoid.
Nevertheless, the problem of the irresponsible parent remains. I am sure that there are comparatively few such here; but they do exist, and must not be allowed to make their children suffer for their own folly. We are therefore now examining what I might call an intermediate solution on lines somewhat different from the more usual compulsory education laws. Subject of course to further study, we hope to be able to suggest that where cases come to notice, from whatever source, of parents who appear to be unnecessarily withholding their children from primary school, the family's circumstances will be investigated and arrangements made for the child to attend school for such period and in such a manner as best suits the family's circumstances. Should the parents prove unwilling to accept such arrangements, the Courts would be empowered to make an order enforcing them, subject of course to the Court being satisfied that these arrangements were as good as could be devised in the interests of both the child and the family as a whole.
A flexible system on these lines should go far towards meeting the main need in a practical way, and will be all the easier to introduce with fee-free primary education and the support of a public assistance scheme to help the parents and the family generally.
As we consolidate our position at the primary school level in the ways I have ascribed, we are at the same time, as honourable Members are well aware, planning the provision of at least three years of aided post-primary education for all children.
Finally, I cannot here do more than merely mention that our programmes for assisting the mentally and physically disabled to support themselves as far as is possible are steadily expanding their scope. The facilities we have been able to provide in these fields have always been of very high quality; much higher quality than is perhaps generally recognized; but we have had a limited coverage. It is now quantitative expansion that is needed, without loss of quality.
What is missing in these plans for comprehensive social services are those elements which are elsewhere based on schemes of compulsory social insurance; old age pensions, sickness benefits, survivorship and so on; although all these contingencies can be alleviated to some degree by public assistance. Unfortunately, I still see no early prospect of
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