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Visual Education Centre

EDUCATION

The Audio-Visual Education Centre of the department provides on loan to all schools a large range of audio-visual materials. A wide range of modern equipment is on display at the centre which also houses photographic and graphics facilities.

During the year, 14 titles of colour slides, sets of photographs and 8 mm loop films were completed. A series of 42 audio-visual workshops was held for primary and secondary school teachers. An exhibition on Audio-Visual Materials for primary schools was mounted at the Primary Schools Heads Conference held at the Grantham College of Education in April. Supplements to the main catalogue of Audio-Visual Materials are distributed to schools together with the Quarterly A-V News Bulletin published by the centre.

Teachers and Teacher Education

In March there were 36,001 full-time and part-time teachers employed in govern- ment and registered day schools, of whom 8,293 were university graduates and 16,512 were non-graduates qualified for the teaching profession. Other teachers were engaged in tutorial, evening and special afternoon classes, and 227 were in special schools. At the end of the 1971-2 school year, the ratio of pupils to teachers in primary day schools was 33.4 and in secondary day schools was 27.6.

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 unqualified 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 and the number of students attending these courses has been considerably expanded as from September 1972 in order to provide 2,000 additional trained teachers by 1976. 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.

In September 1972, there were 1,165 students in the two-year courses, 19 in the special one-year course, 44 in the specialist third year course, 1,256 trainees in the in-service training courses, and 17 in the one-year and 46 in the two-year course for special full-time training of technical teachers.

New premises for the Sir Robert Black College of Education are now under construction and are expected to be completed by mid-1974. In addition, an extension to Grantham College of Education is being built to provide increased facilities.