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 $100 million for 361 projects, out of 784 in the 7th call for applications to the Fund.
Announcing the application results today (May 28), the Chairman of the QEF Steering Committee, Mr Tai Hay-lap, was pleased that the majority of the applications had fallen under the priority themes of "Learning and Teaching Effectiveness" and "School-based Management".
"This reflects the education sector's support of the Government's priorities in education reform. For the other applications, quite a number of them are related to moral and civic education which help promote students' national identity or instill positive values and attitudes in life."
There are innovative projects initiated by the tertiary education sector including a project on promoting cultural exchange with schools in China through video conferencing facilities and a project on enhancing teachers' and students' creativity by providing training on a wide range of interesting topics such as digital comic creation, video game design, future city design/planning, computer 3D space ship modeling, etc.
Amongst those initiated by the school sector are a project on developing an e-book learning platform for the teaching of English at Primary Four level and another on developing a game-based learning platform to enhance the learning motivation and to cater for diversity of students at Secondary One level through digital game-based learning of the three core subjects - Chinese, English and Mathematics.
Student holistic development is also a concern of some approved projects. A non-school organisation has proposed to undertake a project on encouraging students to resolve disputes with a positive and rational attitude so as to create a harmonious school culture and to train a group of students as peace ambassadors to help resolve conflicts and to combat violence in the school.
About 43 approved projects are on the furtherance of school-based management, for example, development of effective school-based management systems or models for school improvement, enhancement of principals and teachers in administration and instructional leadership, etc.
"To honour the goodwill of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust (HKJC) in providing a matching sponsorship to the scheme of air-conditioners installation, all the 17 applications for the scheme by public sector schools were approved in the 7th call. Having benefited the vast majority of schools in need, the scheme will come to an end after this call. But we are exploring with HKJC on the possibility of other collaboration," Mr Tai said.
From the 4th to the 7th calls, a total of 426 applications were received under the scheme. Of these, 394 were approved. The QEF and HKJC each expended $100.8 million on the scheme.
It is worth noting that in the 7th call, the QEF has continued with the assessment process as that adopted in the 6th call. "The marking scheme is so engineered that special emphasis has been 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.
"Applications repeating similar projects approved in previous calls are given lower priority," he continued, "Unless they can indicate importance of the projects to the schools in terms of teacher development or that they are committed to providing matching contribution."
Competition was keen among the applicants. "In addition to meeting the minimum assessment criteria, the projects have to satisfy the Steering Committee that they have possessed greater merits over the others in order to obtain approval," Mr Tai said.
Applications for the 7th 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 seven calls for applications during which 5,250 applications were approved with grants totalling about $3,038 million.
END / Friday, 28 May 2004