choice on those schools which attract the greatest number of able students in the new secondary school allocation arrangements, so as to minimize transfers between schools after Form III.
4.7 There will be some restructuring of pre-vocational schools, to enable a limited number of senior secondary streams to be started for students capable of becoming technicians. Most students from prevocational schools are expected, upon completing Form III, to continue to enter craft-level courses in technical institutes.
4.8 Flotation is designed to achieve a more intensive use of teaching facilities by providing more classes than classrooms in a school, with special rooms being used as form bases. The Government considers that flotation represents an efficient use of school accommodation, without any sacrifice in quality, and the system will be used in all types of class structure described in the preceding paragraphs. Extended day, an arrangement whereby classes are staggered through- out the day, enables flotation to be practised without loss of practical facilities. It has proved unpopular with schools because it is cumbersome to administer, and the Government does not intend to require schools to continue with it, as laboratory and workshop facilities can be provided through the alternative means described in Chapter 5.
4.9 Finally, the Director of Education may open a limited number of extra Form IV classes in some new schools, using accommodation which will be spare until the junior secondary streams have been fully developed.
4.10 Part of the 15 year-old population will be in subsidised places in other types of schools, such as special schools, English-speaking schools and certain special institutions such as the Police Cadet School. There are approved expansion schemes covering all these forms of education.
4.11 The number of subsidised senior secondary places available in 1981 may be sufficient to meet the full demand from students for whom a senior secondary course is suitable and who wish to remain in full-time school education, rather than to pursue other alternatives. If any shortfall should remain, this will be met in subsequent years as the population in the age-group continues to fall. The building programme will continue between 1981 and 1986 only insofar as is necessary to make up the loss in junior secondary places resulting from the restructuring of classes and the opening of special classes. For this purpose, in addition to the 102 new secondary schools already in the building programme, nine prevocational schools and five standard schools may be required, mainly in the developing New Towns, thus raising the number of new schools in the programme to 116.
4.12 While the Government's aim will be to meet the full demand from suitable students for subsidised senior secondary education, it is important that available provision does not run ahead of this demand. The sizeable surplus of primary places arose because of the need to meet a local demand, in addition to demand throughout the territory as a whole. While the school building programme has been designed to place new secondary schools in areas of population growth, additional schools will not be built purely to meet a local need, if there is spare capacity in subsidised secondary schools elsewhere. If a surplus of senior secondary places should develop within the approved class size of 40, some of the schools that have been allowed to develop a fully symmetrical structure will be required to revert to a structure providing six junior secondary streams and four senior secondary streams. This would create additional Form I-III places to meet the increase in the 12-14 year-old population, which will begin in 1983, and thus reduce the requirement for new school building. An improved distribution of schools will be achieved through re-provisioning schools from the existing urban areas into new areas of population growth.
4.13
The achievement of major policy targets within available resources depends on the Director of Education's ability to prescribe the structure and size of classes within public-sector
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