ENG-1999 — Page 213

EDUCATION

Executive Director of the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation, and government officials.

A task force under ACTEQ has finalised, in 1999, language benchmarks for teachers of English in lower secondary schools and for Putonghua teachers in primary schools, while those for other school levels are expected to be available by the end of January 2000. All new English and Putonghua teachers joining the profession in the 2000-01 school year will be required to meet the relevant benchmarks within one year of employment. Starting from September 2001, all trained new English and Putonghua teachers should meet established language benchmarks before joining the profession and untrained new English and Putonghua teachers should meet benchmarks within one year of employment. All serving English and Putonghua language teachers should meet the benchmarks by 2005. Ample training opportunities will be provided by the Government to serving teachers to help them meet the benchmarks within the prescribed period at a cost of $72 million per

annum.

University Grants Committee

The University Grants Committee (UGC) is appointed by the Chief Executive to advise on the development and funding of higher education and administer public grants to eight publicly-funded tertiary institutions. It comprises non-local academics, local academics and local professionals and businessmen. Civil servants staff its secretariat.

When the UGC was established in 1965 to administer grants to two publicly-funded tertiary institutions, there were only 4 000 full-time equivalent students. After decades. of development in higher education, eight institutions are now under the UGC's aegis and the number of full-time equivalent students increased to 70 040 in the 1998–99 academic year (see Higher Education above).

The UGC plays a major role in monitoring quality assurance in its institutions. It continued with the first round of Management Reviews of the institutions, which were started in early 1998, and completed in August. This exercise was successful in supporting the institutions in enhancing their quality of management, discharging the UGC's accountability for ensuring that devolved funds and resources are managed appropriately, and enhancing the effectiveness of the institutions' internal resource allocation, planning and financial processes.

To assess the research output performance of the UGC-funded institutions, the UGC conducted the third Research Assessment Exercise in 1999. More than 18 000 research output items were submitted by the institutions for assessment in the exercise. The findings will be used as the basis for allocating some of the research portion of the institutional recurrent grant for the 2001-04 triennium.

The UGC also launched a scheme to support the development of Areas of Excellence in the UGC-funded institutions. This aims to identify existing areas of strength in the UGC-funded institutions and develop them into excellent groups which would be recognised internationally as of equal status to their peers elsewhere and which would justify substantial investment in state-of-the-art facilities. The first round, which was concluded in September, awarded $126 million over five years to three projects, which seek to develop information technology, biotechnology, and

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