To Serve and to Lead: A History of the Diocesan Boys' School in Hong Kong

5 Explanation of Terms

376 Appendix 5 Appendix 5 Explanation of Terms 1. Terms related to the allocation of places to secondary schools The expansion of primary education in the mid-1950s caused the government to use the Joint Primary 6 Examination, instituted in 1949 to mark the completion of primary education, as a means of selecting students for secondary schools in 1955. Prior to that, a Special Scholarship Examination for Primary 6 Students had already been instituted in 1952. These two examinations were combined in 1956 and renamed the Secondary School Entrance Examination (SSEE) in 1963. In the 1970s, the SSEE was severely criticized by liberal educators for distorting the primary school curriculum and being too competitive. It was replaced by the Secondary School Places Allocation (SSPA) system in 1978. In the SSPA system, individual schools had control of only a very limited number of Secondary 1 (Form 1) places, called “discretionary places”, the majority being allotted centrally by the government based on school nets, parental choices, students’ bandings and their random numbers. The banding was based on the internal assessments of students whose aggregate term marks for Primary 5 (second term) and 6 (first and second terms) were scaled by the performance of the school in a centrally administered Academic Aptitude Test (AAT). All Primary 6 students in the same school net were ranked, based on their scaled scores, and divided equally into five “bands”. While the number of students in each band was the same within each school net, the number in each band differed among schools depending on their students’ AAT results. The banding of an individual student was determined by his or her internal assessment results as scaled by his or her school’s AAT results. Band 1 students (the top 20%) were allocated a place first, followed by Band 2, then Band 3 and so on for the other bands. For students in the same band, the order in which their choices (parents’ choices) would be processed was based on their computer-generated random numbers. Hong Kong was divided into a number of school nets drawn up basically according to the administrative districts. Generally speaking, all primary school leavers were allocated to secondary schools within the same district that their primary schools belonged to, but some secondary schools — including DBS, prior to joining the DSS — served primary schools from several nets. A similar method, known as the Junior Secondary Education Assessment (JSEA), was used to allocate subsidized senior secondary places to Secondary 3 leavers when the nine-year universal education scheme was fully implemented in 1981. Appendix 5 377 2. Terms related to education policy-making and administration An Education Committee was set up in 1847 to monitor the Chinese village schools receiving a small grant from the government. It was replaced by a more powerful Board of Education in 1860, which was further upgraded to a Department of Government Schools in 1865, later known as the Education Department (ED). Headed by a director, it functioned as a branch of the government secretariat. In 1983, this branch was also charged with the responsibility for human resource planning and was renamed the Education and Manpower Branch. It was then headed by a secretary, to whom the director of education reported. After 1997, the branch was called the Education and Manpower Bureau (EMB). In 2003, the Education Department was merged with the bureau; and since then it has been headed by a politically appointed secretary, assisted by a civil servant carrying the title of permanent secretary. In 2007, the EMB released its responsibility for manpower planning and was renamed the Education Bureau (EDB). It has been the government’s policy to institute an Education Commission as an advisory body from time to time to help it formulate educational policies. Over the years, three such commissions have been formed: the first in 1880, the second in 1964 and the third, which still exists, in 1984. Since the 1970s, it has been the general practice of the government to first issue a consultative paper, called a Green Paper, for public discussion before producing a policy paper, a White Paper, for implementation. 3. Terms related to the educational structure in Hong Kong After World War II, there were two types of schools in Hong Kong. The Anglo-Chinese schools, then commonly known as “English schools”, of which DBS was one, followed the English tradition and offered an eight-year curriculum, with Class 8 as the lowest class and Class 1 as the highest...