ENG-1971 — Page 128

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EDUCATION

VISUAL EDUCATION CENTRE

The Audio-Visual Education Centre of the Education Department provides on loan to all schools a large range of audio-visual materials. The centre, whose facilities are extensively used by teachers, houses a wide range of modern equipment as well as dark-room and pho- tographic facilities.

During the year slide sets, filmstrips, loop films and photographs on topics of interest to schools were produced. The centre also pub- lished quarterly news bulletins in English and Chinese which con- tained information about additions to the film library as well as reviews of new equipment and material. Over 1,600 copies of a new primary school catalogue of audio-visual materials were issued. Audio-visual workshops for secondary school teachers were held during the summer holiday.

TEACHERS AND TEACHER EDUCATION

In March there were 34,451 full-time and part-time teachers employed in government and registered day schools, of whom 8,148 were university graduates and 15,694 were non-graduates qualified for the teaching profession. Other teachers were engaged in tutorial, evening and special afternoon classes, and 212 were in special schools. At the end of the 1970-1 school year, the ratio of pupils to teachers in all types of primary and secondary day schools was 32.2.

Teacher training is provided at the Education Department's three colleges of education-Northcote, Grantham and Sir Robert Black. All three colleges offer full-time two-year courses designed to produce non-graduate teachers qualified to teach in primary schools and the lower forms of secondary schools. A special one-year course is offered at Northcote for diploma holders from certain post-secondary in- stitutions. Special third-year courses are offered to prepare non- graduate teachers to be specialists in domestic science or mathematics (at Northcote), art (at Grantham) and music (at Sir Robert Black) for teaching these subjects in the higher forms in secondary schools.

The colleges also provide in-service courses of training for unqual- ified teachers. These are part-time evening courses, in either Chinese or English, of two years' duration. They lead to the award of a certificate granting qualified teacher status. Since September 1969, the Morrison Hill Technical Institute has been co-operating with the colleges of education in offering special full-time one-year and two-year courses for the training of technical teachers.