TNAG-1073-FCO40-1323-Policy-of-the-Government-of-Hong-Kong-on-education-including-1981 — Page 50

(c) supervision of the use of resource materials in schools.

(a) Remedial teaching

5.32

The practice of repeating a year of primary education is widespread. It is estimated that up to 30% of primary school children repeat a class at some stage in their primary school course. Some of this repetition occurs when pupils move from one school to another and in a later chapter means are proposed to prevent this type of repetition from happening. However, even without this, repetition within a school is still too high. The basic reason given by teachers and parents for repeating a year is that the pupil has not done well in his end-of-year examinations and needs the additional year to catch up.

5.33

Repetition is a very inefficient way of helping a child to catch up. The child repeats all subjects and not only those he is weak at and he is simply given the same lessons as before with no guarantee of any better under- standing the second time round. In addition there is rarely any attempt to analyse a child's difficulties. Furthermore, there is a strong risk of boredom slowing down educational progress. There is another strong educational objection to repetition namely that repetition takes a child out of his peer group and puts him in a group often at a different level of physical and emotional maturity.

5.34

Most educators believe that the real solution to dealing with children with difficulties is to give them individual attention, find out what their difficulties really are and help him to overcome them. This is best achieved by remedial teaching i.e. providing a teacher who can take these children out of their class and by working with them in small groups help them to catch up with the rest of the class. The role of repetition should be to cope with children who through ill health, difficulties at home or other similar problems have either been away from school or distracted from their school work for the greater part of the year.

5.35

It is difficult to estimate the provision of teachers necessary to undertake this work. However, assuming that around 30% of children repeat once during their primary course and that up to 10% can be attributed to hidden repetition when pupils change schools, the balance of something over 20% could be reduced to acceptable proportions if 15% of all primary school children could, instead of repeating, receive at the appropriate time remedial teaching to make that repetition unnecessary.

5.36

In general, the need for remedial teaching is estimated to be spread fairly uniformly throughout all types of school, as it is the individual child's ability relative to the rest of his class rather than his overall intelligence that presents the problem.

5.37

Teachers carrying out a substantial amount of remedial teaching should receive the equivalent of one additional increment.

(b) Teachers on Refresher Courses

5.38

Although it is possible to run courses for teachers of a.m. schools in the afternoon and for p.m. schools in the morning, this is not entirely satisfactory.

43