National Excellent Primary and Secondary Teacher Training Plan to help bring in STEM teachers from Mainland

The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China launched the second round of the National Excellent Primary and Secondary Teacher Training Plan, emphasizing curriculum construction, including artificial intelligence (AI) and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) education.

Hong Kong's education sector believes that the Plan will help to bring in STEM teachers from the mainland, and yet there will also be some challenges in instruction languages and cultural differences.

Many Hong Kong teachers have left their posts in recent years.

It is recorded that 3,610 teachers have left public sector schools in the current school year (2023/24), among which 2,820 are non-retired teachers. The overall wastage rate is 8%. It is only a slight year-on-year decrease of 1.2% but is still much higher than that of the 2020/21 school year, which stood at 4.4%.

Wong Kin-ho, the Hong Kong Education Workers Union Chairman, supports the National Excellent Primary and Secondary Teacher Training Plan. He believes that it will help bring in more high-quality teachers, especially in the STEM fields, in Hong Kong's primary and secondary schools and that the international teaching environment here can also broaden the scope of mainland postgraduates who come to study education programs in Hong Kong.

He also points out that the universities concerned should enhance teachers' training and internationalize the design of their programs to ensure the quality of teaching and learning, given the challenges posed by instruction languages and cultural differences.

Chu Kwok-keung, a Member of the Legislative Council from the Education Functional Constituency, points out that these postgraduates still need to finish local education programs such as the Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) before teaching in Hong Kong, which entails high costs in terms of money, time and adaptation to the living environment, etc.

He further explains that the quota for relevant programs is also limited, for which it is estimated that mainland postgraduates who come to teach in Hong Kong through the Plan have a relatively limited impact on the employment opportunities of local prospective teachers.

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