The following is issued on behalf of the Quality Education Fund Steering Committee :
The nomination period for the Outstanding School Awards (OSA) closed on 15 October 1999. Following the Quality Education Fund (QEF) Steering Committee meeting today, Mr Irving Koo, Chairman of the QEF Steering Committee and Task Group on the Outstanding Teacher and School Awards, announced that over 200 OSA nomination forms were received, nominating 190 schools for around 310 awards.
"We are very pleased and excited by the enthusiastic response from the education sector and the public. The response has considerably exceeded our expectations, and it clearly reflects the willingness and readiness of the school sector to strive for excellence in education," said Mr Joseph W P Wong, Secretary for Education and Manpower. "The Outstanding School Awards is a significant step forward in the development of a quality education culture in schools." he added.
The most popular domain was the "Outstanding School - Award for Support for Students and School Ethos", for which over 110 schools were nominated. The three other domains, namely "Outstanding School - Award for Management and Organisation", "Outstanding School - Award for Teaching and Learning" and "Outstanding School - Award for Students' Attainment" have each received 60 to 70 nominations.
Seventy schools were nominated for more than one award. of these, twenty were nominated for all four awards.
"We are happy to see that the nominations cover all the four school sectors, namely, secondary, primary, kindergarten and special schools. 64 secondary schools and 73 primary schools are nominated, while the numbers for kindergartens and special schools are 47 and 9 respectively," said Mr Koo.
"The nominations will be processed starting later this month. However, as announced at the launch of the OSA scheme, if the number of nominations exceeded the human resources available to process them, cases would be handled in batches on a first-come-first-served basis. Given the overwhelming response, it is now clear that it will not be possible to process all the nominations within this school year," said Mr Koo.
"We will be doing our very best to process as many of the applications as possible within this school year. At the same time, though, we are committed to considering each nomination in the most professional and thorough manner. We do not want to sacrifice quality for quantity," said Dr Cheung Wing-ming, Chairman of the Sub-group on OSA.
"We are now working out how many cases we can complete within this school year and the timeline for the rest of the nominations. Once the schedule is confirmed, schools will be individually notified of the timing for their particular case. Present indications are that a sizeable proportion of nominations in each domain will have to be processed after the current school year," he said.
"It is still our goal to complete processing the first batch of nominations within this school year and to release those results by July 2000," added Dr Cheung.
Dr Cheung emphasised that processing nominations in batches will not affect the chances of a nominated school.
"The OSA will not compare schools against one another. Rather, each school will be assessed individually against a set of objective standards and will be awarded for its own outstanding achievements or practices. Whether a school is processed in the first or second batch should not affect its chances of winning an award," said Dr Cheung.
End/Wednesday, 27 October 1999