On the advice of the Quality Education Fund (QEF) Steering Committee, the Trustee of the QEF, the Director of Education Incorporated, has approved grants totaling $76.3 million for 271 projects in the fifth call for applications to the fund.
Announcing the application results today (June 20), Chairman of the QEF Steering Committee Mr Irving Koo said that a more focussed approach has been adopted for the fifth call.
"It is most encouraging to see that 562 applications were focussed on the three designated themes of education reform - 'Project Learning and Curriculum Integration', 'Moral and Civic Education' and 'Reading Proficiency', and 121 of which were approved with grants of about $24.6 million," he said.
The application results showed that of the 857 applications received, 779 were eligible seeking grants of $433.5 million. Out of the 779 eligible applications, 271 have been approved, representing a success rate of 34.8 per cent, which is similar to the average success rate in the first to fourth calls.
"Under the fifth call, only schools which have never obtained funding from QEF apart from grants for installing air-conditioning were allowed to submit applications beyond the three designated themes and only one application was allowed from each school," Mr Koo said.
"Moreover, only members of the school sector are eligible to apply, provided that they do not have any ongoing QEF projects in hand as at 1 September 2002 in the capacity of a grantee," he added.
The Hong Kong Jockey Club has again generously agreed to provide a matching grant of 50 per cent of the cost of air-conditioning projects under the fifth call. A total of 117 applications under this scheme were received and 115 of which were approved with grants of $30.2 million.
"Since launching this scheme in the fourth call, the QEF has provided a total matching grant of $93.1 million, benefiting 344 schools," Mr Koo said.
"The scheme has been well received by the school sector and is a welcome demonstration of community support for school education," he said.
On continued funding for projects which have been funded in previous calls on a pilot or phased basis and have proven successful, ten applications were received and five were approved with grants of $10.5 million.
"They were considered on a strictly case-by-case basis and on their own merits," Mr Koo stressed.
The fifth call had attracted 150 school applicants which had never applied to the QEF for funding, representing 14.2 per cent of this category of schools. Nearly half of them were approved.
"We are delighted to see that the 5th call has been successful in enticing these schools to make use of the QEF to help realise the bottom-up, school-based initiatives which can help improve the quality of education in their schools," Mr Koo said.
The QEF was set up in early 1998 with a capital grant of $5,000 million to fund sector-initiated projects which promote quality education and to disseminate the good practices of the successful projects to the wider education community. So far, a total of 4 611 applications were approved and the total grants amounted to $2,838 million.
The QEF is conducting several reviews to further improve its operational efficiency and enhance its overall effectiveness, including a study by the Management Services Agency on process re-engineering, an opinion survey on QEF and a study by an external consultant on performance indicators and dissemination strategy. The QEF Steering Committee will make use of the findings of these reviews to deliberate on the way forward for the fund.
End/ Thursday, June 20, 2002
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