President, the subject of my motion debate today is, “That this Council urges the Government to comprehensively review the effectiveness of the small class teaching mode in primary and secondary schools”.

Looking back at history, the Government has progressively implemented small class teaching (“SCT”) in public sector primary schools since the 2009-2010 school year. The objective is to encourage classroom interaction through SCT strategies, thereby facilitating diversified teaching and enhancing students’ learning effectiveness. For schools implementing SCT, the standard class size under Primary One Admission is 25 per class, whereas that for other schools is 30 per class. By the 2025-2026 school year, the percentage of public sector primary schools implementing SCT will increase to about 95%. 

As for secondary schools, the basis for calculating the number of approved Secondary One classes is 25 students per class. Under such a relaxed criterion, schools admitting not less than “25+1” (i.e. 26) students are allowed to operate two classes, with an average number of 13 students per class in such case. President, SCT is a policy of the Education Bureau (“EDB”). Although SCT is not implemented in secondary schools, their class size has been substantially reduced. According to the figures provided by EDB, secondary schools now have an average class size of 28 students, which means that they are practically implementing the SCT mode. This is the situation in reality. For this reason, the original motion uses the descriptive term of “small class teaching mode” instead of “small class teaching” in order to differentiate between the two. 

President, the number of primary and secondary school students has been decreasing over the years, mainly due to structural factors such as the declining birth rate and emigration. However, the Government’s funding for primary and secondary education has been increasing rather than decreasing. According to official figures, the numbers of primary and secondary school students in the 2007-2008 school year were 385 949 and 482 414 respectively, and the numbers have dropped to 325 564 and 328 474 respectively in the 2023-2024 school year. Yet the Government’s recurrent funding allocation to primary and secondary schools has been increasing rather than decreasing. For the 2007-2008 school year (i.e. the year since official records were kept), the recurrent expenditures for primary and secondary schools were $11 billion and $18 billion respectively. Since then, the respective amounts have increased to $26 billion and $33 billion in the 2023-2024 school year. The increases for both primary and secondary schools are quite astonishing. 

Although we should agree that education is a society’s investment for the future rather than an expenditure, the Liberal Party and I have all along opposed the use of GDP as a hard indicator of education expenditure because what we are now facing is a structural problem of student wastage. It should be noted that key performance indicator (KPI) is only meant to measure the effectiveness of administrative work, while the amount of education expenditure should depend on the number of teachers and students, especially when the number of teachers has been decreasing in recent years, along the same trend as the number of primary and secondary school students. It will be a waste of money if the Government continues to maintain the same proportion of GDP on education expenditure. 

The Liberal Party takes the view that SCT is definitely not implemented for the purpose of reducing the number of students per class per se. Instead, schools should make good use of the small class environment to enhance students’ learning effectiveness. Teachers’ teaching skills and competence are crucial to the effective implementation of SCT. There is a need for EDB to provide professional development programmes for teachers in schools to help them develop appropriate teaching strategies through theoretical learning, classroom practice and experience sharing. Help should also be given to make them understand how different modes of teaching can be applied in an SCT environment.

The SCT mode can enhance the effectiveness of learning and teaching, and cater for students’ learning diversity. In my opinion, teachers can increase the level of questioning to enhance students’ thinking skills and cater for their diversity. Questioning techniques that can be used by teachers include prompting, asking follow-up questions or asking questions in a different way. Teachers should also allow sufficient time for students to discuss, supplement or clarify their answers so as to help them build up knowledge step by step. In addition, group activities can be enhanced with elements of discussion and collaboration so as to maximize the effect of co-learning through brainstorming, and with the stronger students leading the weaker students.

President, my original motion urges the Government to review the effectiveness of the existing small class teaching mode in primary and secondary schools, so as to bring optimized benefits for both students and parents. Through today’s motion, I hope to draw on collective wisdom in this Chamber to enable EDB to consider the way forward for the planning of public sector primary and secondary school places in the light of changes in the school-age population. What is more, EDB should also review and optimize the existing curricula, teaching methods and even lesson arrangements, etc., so as to make SCT truly effective. 

Given the lesser number of students in each class, classes in schools are already “small” in terms of scale. Yet some teachers are still using the same old method of teaching large classes, which is exactly where the problem lies. Even in the face of the hundreds of billions of dollars of fiscal deficits, the Government has not reduce the provision for primary and secondary education. But, precisely because of the deficit, should we not cherish our existing resources and make better use of them? The motion I propose is precisely to urge the Government to review the effectiveness of the SCT mode in primary and secondary schools from a macro perspective. 

Regarding the amendment proposed by Mr CHU Kwok-keung, I think it has changed the original intent of the original motion by narrowing its scope to request the Government to review only the effectiveness of SCT in primary schools, whereas for secondary schools, the Government is only requested to assess the feasibility of adopting the SCT mode, which is far less than the request in the original motion. Such an amendment has taken away the macro perspective and broad coverage of the original motion, which is tantamount to defeating its original purpose. 

President, under the Rules of Procedure, every Member of the Legislative Council (“LegCo”) has the right to propose motions for debate in this Council, and they also have the right to propose amendments to such motions. That said, there is also a good “unwritten” convention in the Council, that is, Members shall respect each other. When a Member proposes a subject for debate, other Members may of course oppose it or propose their amendments, but the purpose of such amendments is to bring focus on and fortify the original motion, in the hope that the motion as amended can become a more potent measure or policy that the Government must put into implementation for the sake of benefiting the community as a whole. Such amendments will never and should never hijack the original motion by changing it beyond recognition such that the essence of the motion dissipates, the policy discussion loses focus and the intended effect becomes unforthcoming. 

If Members have different views on the original motion, an effective way to make them known is to speak on their opposing arguments and debate them with other Members. And when it comes to voting, they can abstain or vote against the motion, or even move their own motion in the future.  The above has been a well-established convention in this Council. Regrettably, the amendment proposed by Mr CHU this time has blurred the original motion, thus depriving us the opportunity to conduct a comprehensive review of the SCT mode in primary and secondary schools.

President, the opportunity for Members to propose motions for debate is very precious. In each term, each Member can be allocated with two to three debate slots at most to urge for actions from the Government or specific organizations. We have to treasure these slots, but I notice that on more than one occasions in this term of LegCo, the original motions proposed by Members have been amended beyond recognition. Despite the absence of regulation in this regard under the existing Rules of Procedure, I think Honourable colleagues should respect each other, adhere to the ethics of the Council and use the amendments properly, instead of hijacking the original motion. I hope this incident can arouse Members’ concern about the issue, and perhaps it is time for LegCo to conduct a review and formulate guidelines or impose appropriate restrictions on amendments to Members’ motions, so that Members’ motions can reasonably achieve their intended purposes. I apologize to Honourable colleagues who have prepared to speak today, and I implore the President to take this opportunity to lead us back on the right track and improve the rules of this Council. 

For the above reasons, I now decide not to move my motion. Thank you, President.