TNAG-1073-FCO40-1323-Policy-of-the-Government-of-Hong-Kong-on-education-including-1981 — Page 89

Teaching centres

11.34

The Advisory Inspectorate currently runs a number of teaching centres specialising in individual subjects. These centres conduct courses for teachers at both primary and secondary levels, and are equipped with the necessary teaching aids to demonstrate new teaching techniques. The English Language, Chinese Language and Mathematics teaching centres are particularly valuable for primary schools. It is anticipated that with the proposals made in Chapter 5 to allow teachers to attend the courses run by these centres partly in school time, they will be even more utilised by primary school teachers than at present.

11.35

Proposals for a Teachers' Centre run by a committee of teachers and not limited to one subject area have been made and will be implemented in due

course.

The Educational Research Establishment

11.36

The Advisory Inspectorate is responsible for the Educational Research Establishment, which in addition to general educational research monitors standards at all levels of education. In particular, it is concerned with the effect of educational change on the standards of pupils especially in the basic areas of language and mathematics. The monitoring process will be particularly valuable in evaluating the effect of the proposals contained in this paper.

Educational Television

11.37

An educational television service is provided by the Services Division of the Education Department. This service provides support for primary education in language, mathematics and social studies and a recent decision to provide colour receivers and video-cassette recorders will greatly enhance the system.

11.38

It is now proposed to improve the system further by establishing regional libraries of video-cassette tapes which schools may borrow. The tapes would consist of programmes that had already been broadcast, especially prepared general interest programmes (not necessarily broadcast), and films dubbed on tape. Use of these tapes would enable the television set to act very much like a 16 mm projector and so dispense with any need to issue schools with these projectors. However, the latter would still be available on loan from the Education Department and it would still be useful to continue to dub films with cantonese sound tracks to make them suitable for primary school use. The cost of providing these libraries is estimated to be $0.45 million.

Allocation of Secondary School Places

11.39

Another service to schools carried out by the Education Department is the allocation of places in secondary schools.

11.40

Pupils are divided into five bands, based on ability determined by scaled school assessment, and allocation, based on parents' choices, is carried out band by band starting at the highest ability band.

82

}

¡

}