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plans?
longer term Hong Kong must itself generate the majority of staff for its tertiary education institutions, and the recruiting and training of the research students who will become that future staff is an area where UK help could be of value. In the meantime the British Council could help greatly with staff development through its Academic Links programme.
All institutions we visited expressed the desire for wider recognition of themselves in terms of their high quality. Naturally they feel that their international reputation must be firmly established in 1997.
We also noted the desire to participate fully in the opportunities. offered by the Single Market in Europe.
We observed considerable concern that the level of English was deteriorating, both in the population at large (particularly school children) and crucially in the higher education institutions themselves. We make some comments on this later (para 5).
3.2 The programme outlined below gives an indication of schemes we recommend. All will require some work to organise, and some will entail a small amount of development. The schemes will need staff and resources in Hong Kong and in British Council London. But most of all they will need the goodwill and cooperation of the higher education constituency in the United Kingdom. financial input on the British side will consist almost entirely of providing travel and subsistence.
The
We based most of our meetings on a discussion paper that sketched out the schemes, and found a warm welcome for all of them. Naturally reactions varied, and different schemes found more favour in some institutions than others. Nonetheless we see the
programme as consisting of five interlocking schemes.
None of the schemes involve traditional scholarships but we would like to recommend to the British Council that the integration of a scholarships scheme into the programme sketched out here would add impetus.
We are conscious that our Terms of Reference asked us to suggest particular subject priorities, but we were unable to cover this thoroughly in the time available. However, priority areas mentioned to us were biotechnology, information technology, management of manufacturing, mathematics, food sciences, chemical engineering (not petroleum), biomechanical engineering, political science, health and social services, industrial design, manufacturing engineering, quality control and precision engineering. The Hong Kong government has designated three broad priority areas: environmental control, energy, and infrastructure
and transport.
I
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