The following is issued on behalf of the Quality Education Fund Steering Committee:
On the advice of the Quality Education Fund (QEF) Steering Committee, the Trustee of the QEF, the Permanent Secretary for Education and Manpower Incorporated, has approved grants totalling $89.9 million for 276 projects, out of 1,035 in the sixth call for applications to the Fund.
Announcing the application results today (May 29), the Chairman of the QEF Steering Committee, Mr Tai Hay-lap, said he was pleased to see that the majority of the applications had fallen under the priority themes of learning and teaching effectiveness, language enhancement, professional development and moral and civic education. These themes are meant to give the sixth call a clearer focus in support of the Government's education reform.
Projects that obtained the highest amounts of grants were school development projects including a secondary school teaching evaluation and mentoring project, a school enhancement project and a net-interactive teaching and learning scheme. The costs of these projects ranged from $3.5 million to $5 million and they were initiated by the tertiary education sector. Amongst those initiated by the school sector, a learning development project on intervention for students with specific learning difficulties obtained $1.2 million to proceed.
It is worth noting that in the sixth call, the QEF has made some new arrangements in its assessment process, having regard to the recommendations of the consultancy studies on its operations and processes last year. "The marking scheme was re-engineered so that special emphasis was placed on the dissemination potential of the proposed projects, their sustainability and impact as well as vigor of their built-in self-evaluation mechanisms," Mr Tai said.
With applications re-opened to the non-school sector and the imposition of a funding ceiling, competition was keen among the applicants. "Not only did the funded projects need to meet the minimum assessment criteria, they also needed to satisfy the Steering Committee that they possessed greater merits over the others," Mr Tai said.
"Furthermore, to ensure quality and innovation of the funded projects, applications repeating similar projects approved in previous calls and having a low dissemination value were given a much lower priority."
Applications for the sixth call were assessed by a 14-member Assessment and Monitoring Sub-committee and the QEF Steering Committee. To enhance the quality and objectivity of the assessment process, expert consultants were also engaged to assess applications of relatively complex nature.
The QEF was established in early 1998 with a capital fund of $5,000 million to support self-initiated projects that promote quality education and to disseminate good practices of successful projects to the wider education community. Since its establishment, there have been six calls for applications during which 4,889 applications were approved with grants totalling $2,937.8 million. As at April 30, 2003, the QEF has an uncommitted balance of about $3,700 million.
End/Thursday, May 29, 2003
NNNN