Hong Kong’s education authorities have urged four schools to bolster their national security education curricula, including two institutions for special needs students.
The government reports have been prepared by the Education Bureau under the School Development and Accountability (SDA) framework since the 2003-2004 school year. In all, reports on ten schools were published.
The Education Bureau only began uploading the concluding chapter of the reports to its website starting from the second term of the 2023/24 school year.
The bureau singled out Tsuen Wan Government Primary School as one of the schools that needed to step up its efforts to develop national security education.
“The school needs to expedite the development of various curriculum focuses, including STEAM [Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts, and Maths] education, national education, and national security education,” the report read.
It also said that some students in the upper classes sang the national anthem “weakly” during the school’s flag raising ceremonies.
Special needs schools
The bureau also singled out two special needs schools as failing to fully implement national security education.
It said Caritas Resurrection School, a special needs school for children with moderate intellectual disabilities, was “lagging behind” in implementing national security education.
Its General Studies curriculum had also failed to cover China’s constitution and Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, the bureau said.
General Studies is slated to be replaced by a new humanities curriculum in the next coming school year, which will require Primary Three pupils to study topics including Hong Kong’s social development, Chinese culture and significant historical events, China’s achievements, and China’s international relations.
National security-focused curriculum guidelines were introduced months after Beijing imposed a national security law directly into Hong Kong’s mini-constitution in June 2020.
Chief Executive John Lee announced a slate of patriotic education initiatives to enhance national identity in his policy address last October.
Po Leung Kuk Law’s Foundation School, a school for children with severe intellectual disabilities in Yuen Long, only had a small number of subjects linked to national security, the bureau said.
“The school must fully implement national security education as soon as possible to help students comprehensively learn national security education content,” the report said.
The bureau also said schools were encouraged to create an atmosphere on campus “conducive to the development of a national identity.” It added that the Po Leung Kuk Law Foundation School students lined up neatly and courteously during flag-raising ceremonies, demonstrating their respect.
While Tseung Kwan O Catholic Primary School had taken measures to allow students to appreciate and understand Chinese customs as well as China’s national development, only its Chinese Language and General Studies classes were aligned with the government’s national security education curriculum framework, the bureau said.
All subjects should be linked to national security education, the bureau said, “to enable students to understand the importance of safeguarding national security, and to cultivate their awareness of and sense of responsibility for safeguarding national security.”
Some of the bureau’s remarks on the need for specific schools to step up national security education were left out of the documents uploaded to the government’s website, and were only available in the full reports on the schools’ own website.
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