TNAG-1073-FCO40-1323-Policy-of-the-Government-of-Hong-Kong-on-education-including-1981 — Page 269

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The Development Plan

4.9

A key process both in the development of education policies

and in routine forward planning within those policies is the Development

Plan, which was introduced in 1976 to cover the entire range of services

provided by the government. The declared aim of the Development Plan is

to provide an information system for policy makers, to enable them to

evaluate competing claims for the government's resources of finance,

manpower and land and to match the government's policies more closely

with the resources likely to be available over a given period of time.

In order to do this the Plan is intended to provide Secretaries with

clear statements of Branch and Departmental policy objectives and the

degree to which these objectives are being achieved and will be achieved

over the planning period (i.e. over five financial years, beginning with

the current year). The Plan also provides an opportunity for contributors

to suggest alternative courses of action which might enable the objectives

to be achieved more effectively and which might, in time, lead to new

policies. However, the Development Plan is not intended to create policy

(though the regular and systematic re-examination of policy objectives

and assumptions within each programme area, which its annual revision

entails, is seen as a means by which the formulation of new policy can

be stipulated). The Development Plan and the Five-Year Forecast of Revenue

and Expenditure are regarded as complementary, the value of each depending

on the degree to which the narrative information in the former can be

seen to relate to and justify the financial information in the latter.

4.10

For the purposes of the Development Plan the entire range of

government activity is divided at present into sixteen services, with

each service sub-divided into programmes.

While it could be said that

in the broadest definition of 'education' elements of education policy

are included in several different services, for all practical purposes

such policy is confined to three services subdivided into eight programmes,

viz: