Few people will dispute that mobility in the job market is but a highly normal phenomenon, and employees are to a greater or lesser extent guided by rational motivations to look for greener pastures, in addition to their own career aspirations.
For decades in the city of Hong Kong, such join-and-quit behavior was only common across economic and social sectors. However, empirical observations seem to indicate that when such occupational mobility happened in the education sector, it could easily spur communitywide sensation and the statistics so compiled were often interpreted sensitively.
Recently, the Education Bureau released to the Legislative Council data showing dropouts from the teaching profession in local public-sector schools over three years from 2019-20. In 2019-20, there was wastage of 2,090 teachers in the government and aided schools around town, marking a rate of 4.5 percent from the previous year. This was followed by the loss of 2,100 teachers from the force in 2020-21, accounting for a magnitude of 4.4 percent from 2019-20. And in 2021-22, a provisional dropout of 3,580 teachers from public-sector schools was noted, which logged a 70 percent surge from the figure of 2020-21.
Meanwhile, a similar pattern of teachers’ outflows was noticed in schools operating under the Direct Subsidy Scheme. Starting with the attrition of 290 teaching staff in the sector in 2019-20 — 5.3 percent from the year before — the DSS schools lost 280 teachers in 2020-21, registering 5 percent from 2019-20. Likewise, in the current academic year, there was an obvious jump in the provisional wastage of teachers to 470, from 280 in the preceding year.
Casual readers of the statistical data of teachers’ wastage in local public-sector education establishments might have drawn hasty conclusions on the underlying reasons for the mobility which could easily be ascribed to migration from the territory. Inevitably, this would continue to be portrayed as the predominant factor for a phenomenal increase in the number of departures from the city’s teaching force. Yet, it deserves to be pointed out that the decision to remain in or leave an appointment or a field of career endeavor is influenced by an array of considerations with weights varying among individuals. Among other things, such parameters include one’s career goals and their realization, prospects for development and advancement, levels of financial reward, family circumstances, working and personnel environments of individual working places, and changes of government policies in selected fields of public or private services and the like.
For a profession involving around 20 percent of the total workforce in an economy, what merits the government’s utmost attention should be to ensure a continuous supply of trained new blood for succession arising from natural attrition of teachers for various reasons, such as “retirement, pursuing further studies, taking up employment in other types of schools or outside the teaching profession, emigration or getting married”. As the EDB has stated rightly, although the turnover rate of teachers is “slightly higher” in the current academic year, schools are basically “operating smoothly in general and there are enough qualified teachers” to replace those who have decided to give up work in the local school system. The positive replenishment role of the regiment of newly qualified teachers is further supported by the declining school-age population which would reduce the demand for teachers correspondingly. The supply of qualified teachers being projected to exceed demand is confirmed by the education authorities’ plans to reduce the admission quotas funded by the University Grants Committee for the teacher education-relevant disciplines in the coming triennium of the city’s higher education development. Despite keen competition every year for graduate teaching posts in the city’s public-sector schools, legislator Tang Fei of the Hong Kong Federation of Education Workers has said that the city’s institutions for teachers’ education have faced little difficulty in recruiting qualified students with a strong drive to develop teaching careers.
It’s no strange experience for the public school sector to handle new recruits in large numbers each summer. For 2021-22, 3,140 fresh hires were made on public-sector campuses, hitting an intake rate of 6.6 percent and an uptick of 1.6 percent from the 2020-21 school year. Among their DSS counterparts, there were 650 new teachers in the same year, ushering in an intake rate of 11.7 percent — up 3.7 percent from the year before. It should be driven home that authorities and the schools themselves attach growing emphasis to the induction of new entrants to the teaching profession. With continuing training programs for teachers at different stages of career development, there are no valid grounds for fresh appointees and teachers without high seniority in the classroom to feel diffident about fulfilling their professional role. There is, of course, no denial that senior and enthusiastic teachers are assets to any school, and it is always advisable for school management to retain them for the benefit of students and their junior colleagues.
The introduction of nine years of free and compulsory education in 1978 was necessarily associated with large-scale enlisting by the schools of higher-educated young people in the 80s, who are anticipated to retire in the next few years. A natural process of replacement has set in logically, which can be maneuvered effectively with forward-looking plans by the government capable of meeting the front-line teaching and learning needs in schools.
The author is chairman of the Hong Kong Education Policy Concern Organization.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.