Wing On Tam
MA TESOL
Abstract
Through applying a Stagist framework process model to policy development pre- and post-Handover in Hong Kong, the impact of the Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) on the provision of private schooling is examined. While the DSS is recognised as a neoliberal inspired attempt to marketise education in Hong Kong to develop both choice and improved outcomes for students, its impacts have been variable over time. The Stagist analysis reveals growing elitism and the development of undesirable practices, which moving forward must be overcome to ensure social justice for all.
Introduction
This essay adopts a ‘Stagist’ framework process model attempting to explain and analyse each stage of policy activities in two consecutive cycles which led to the enactment of the Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS). This policy impacted policy stakeholders including funding bodies, all school staff, parents and students of Hong Kong territory before and after the 1997 Handover, with the Handover acting as a watershed in this policy due to the change of sovereignty.
As the origin of the DSS policy was inspired by neoliberal economic reforms introducing privatisation and marketisation in schools, the goal of the policy was to set up a long-term private education provision sector replacing the Bought Place Scheme (BPS) (which supported private schools in acquiring resources). The DSS policy allowed for an increased diversity of school and increased the variety of choices for parents. However, the practice of this policy was effected due to being side-track by political agendas in the first cycle. In the second cycle, the policy was more focused to economic incentives and regulations to allow more eligible schools to participate. The schools which joined the policy were tremendously increased from 13 to 64 in the second cycle.
Colonial Education Policy
Modelled after the UK educational system in 1970, Hong Kong’s colonial government strived to provide nine-years of compulsory and free education for all youngsters to gain an advantage among the Four Asian Tigers (or Asian Dragon) countries (of South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong). Public funding played a dominant role in the supply of school places which were mainly government and aided schools. 90% of Hong Kong schools were remarkably homogeneous because they were directly controlled or indirectly subsided by the 2025
Government. These ‘state’ schools were not able to meet the growing needs of society, parents and students’ expectations; however, the private education sector including pro-leftist, independent and international schools contributed 10% of school places. Due to a post-colonial nine-year compulsory education policy and the expansion of the population, there was a huge demand for school places from 1980.
From UK influence, there were neoliberal economic reforms of marketisation and privatisation with a focus on choice and diversity drawing on Thatcherite policy developments. As a British colony, this policy shift was a replication of education reform in the UK since 1980 with the Conservative Government breaking the Local Education Authority (LEA) monopoly of state schooling (Whitty, Power and Halpin, 1998; Gillborn and Youdell, 2000; Power, 2002). The UK neoliberal model of education reform was imported into Hong Kong to develop the private educational sector.
The Birth of the DSS Policy
In 1988, the DSS policy was originated from the government’s dissatisfaction with BPS, which was regarded as a supplementary financial arrangement in order to guarantee sufficient school places for nine years of compulsory education. The private schools only served the purpose for providing enough school places for the government and catering for those students who failed to obtain a government or aided-school place. With the subsequent growth in the number of ‘state’ schools, the government no longer needed to buy places in the private schools.
Because of ECR3 (Education Commission Report Number 3), the DSS policy (launched in 1991), amended the objective of providing a wider choice of schools and improving their quality. As the policy was ‘a specification of actions and principles which are followed or which should be followed and which were designed to bring about desired effects’ (Trowler, 2003), the implicit effects of the DSS policy was to end BPS. Politically, this policy chose to provide a safety net for independent school bodies, pro-leftist and international schools. Unluckily, the policy (1991-1997) was not accepted by most aided schools due to political uncertainty.
Immediately after the 1997 Handover which was a watershed moment, the first Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region (HKSAR) Policy Addresses strived to build up a vibrant private school sector. As a policy this was an ongoing and unstable process (Ozga, 2000), the DSS policy did however improve financing to existing schools in the public sector and to new schools which were eligible to join the policy. In 1999, the government allowed aided schools to apply for the policy from 2000 onwards.
In a breakthrough in 2001, the Chief Executive through his Policy Addresses committed to train a large pool of talent for tomorrow’s Hong Kong. Aided schools with distinct characteristics or elitist schools were then encouraged to join the policy. In policy Academic Year (AY) 2001/02, this was extended to primary schools and eligibility covered all aided primary and secondary schools.
Rationales of DSS Policy
Eligible schools joining the DSS policy accessed subsidies in order to enhance the quality of private sector education. The government fulfilled the policy’s three rationales based on ECR3 through:
Setting up a qualified private education provision sector. The policy allowed DSS schools to charge school fees on their own initiative. Some DSS schools may charge higher school fees, so that they can purchase better equipment and have extra resources. As a result, the DSS schools can improve their teaching quality. Besides, the schools under DSS can operate with greater autonomy. The schools can recruit more teachers so that the student-teacher ratio can be lower.
Allowing more diversity in different schools as there is less restriction and schools can freely decide on how to operate. DSS Schools can also tailor their syllabus to meet the interest and abilities of their students. As a result, the Hong Kong system will be more diverse with more schools with different styles and specialties.
Increase the variety of choices for parents and students. As DSS schools can identify their own strengths and specialties, there will be more options for parents to choose. Choices can be made based on the needs and interests of the students.
Privatisation and Marketisation
As early as 1955, Milton Freidman proposed universal choice-based voucher programmes so that competition would invigorate the delivery of education services in the USA (Merrifield, 2001).
The concept behind the DSS policy was based on a similar concept of market-driven education services in which consumers buy their educational services and schools supply educational services according to their needs and through market price signals. Privatisation was considered as a way to tackle this problem by shifting most of the cost from the state to the users (Edwards et al., 1985; Psacharopoulos et al., 1986). Indeed, privatisation was brought into many sectors of the economy and society, including education, because it “was widely advocated as a mechanism to improve efficiency, cater for pluralistic preferences, make institutions more accountable to their clients, and reduce government expenditures” (Bray, 1996, p.104). It was a process of moving from public ownership, financing and control to more private ones (Bray, 1996).
As policy-making was endogenous, the policy itself was enacted to make the public sector act in a business-like way and was achieved by:
- linking funding to recruitment, consumer choice and managerial autonomy
- encouraging entrepreneurship
- improving marketing and promotion strategies
- using performance indicators
(Ball, 2008)
The ‘Stagist’ Framework Model
Jenkins (1978) provides a simple process for the creation and enactment of policy. However, the DSS policy went through two cycles and never stopped evolving. As pioneered by Lasswell (1956), and modified by Jones (1970), Rose (1973), Anderson (1975), Jenkins (1978), Brewer & De Leon (1983) and Hogwood & Gunn (1984), the theoretical framework adopted a “stagist” life-cycle approach to public policymaking, embracing logical and cyclic progression from problem definition, agenda-setting, policy formulation, legitimation, implementation and finally evaluation (Dunn, 1981; Hogwood & Gunn, 1984; Sabatier, 1999; Dye, 2002).
Presumably, such a market mechanism that promoted inter-school competition would introduce schools that offered a more diversified curriculum aligned with parents’ aspirations and to innovate both their teaching approaches and facilities, thereby enhancing the quality of education (Tsang, 2002). These DSS schools benefited from the full autonomy to choose their own curriculum, to set the fees, to determine entrance requirements and to hire teachers, etc. Schools entering the DSS policy avoided the uncertainty inherent in the Central Allocation system over the quality and number of student at intake. DSS schools tended to recruit the better and more willing-to-pay parents and students. Each DSS school set up its own admission system recruiting students from the entire Hong Kong territory (not being limited to a school’s catchment area).
The ‘Stagist’ Framework was the best model to describe different stages of the DSS policy, which ran through two life cycles with the 1st cycle -1978 – June 1997 – and 2nd cycle – July 1997 – present / 2021 and is applied below.
1st Cycle – Problem definition
Hong Kong witnessed a rapid growth primary aged children with a growing awareness that school places were not sufficient for all youngsters. Historically, the colonial government kept private school fees well below the cost of places at public schools, resulting in the quality of private schools falling well below that of public schools. The role of private schools generally catered for those who failed to obtain a proper school place, suffering from discipline problems, learning problems or being new immigrants from Mainland China.
However, the government had no overall official policy toward private schools, other than using them to provide relatively cheap school places via BPS as a buffer against fluctuations in demand and to control the existing level of financial assistance (Ng, 1995; Tam, 1993).
The private sector containing private, pro-leftist and international schools declined steadily over the years and the image was negative to the public. The private schools were run by independent school bodies. The pro-leftist schools were marginalized and excluded from the colonial government’s funding and allocation schemes. International schools mainly served youngsters whose parents had previously emigrated and returned from overseas countries.
Agenda-setting
The initial intention underlying the DSS policy was to replace private schools where the BPS was implemented (Bray, 1995). The government paid the private schools for the number of places allocated to students at their school for secondary education in order to insure sufficient school places for all school-age youngsters. The Government thus initiated the DSS, one of the aims of which was to replace the BPS by 2000 (Ting, 2005).
In view of the return of the sovereignty of British Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Communists in 1997, the government was politically obliged to include the pro-leftist schools in the aided school sector (Chan & Tan, 2008). After the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984, there were millions of Hongkongers who emigrated to seek political security. Those youngsters, who emigrated but subsequently returned to Hong Kong had been taught in English and faced difficulties in local schools. The government felt obliged to take care of the educational needs of these youngsters (Chan & Tan, 2008).
Policy formulation
The original objective of the DSS was to increase parental choice by encouraging the growth of a strong private sector as an alternative to public sector education (Education Manpower Bureau (EMB), 2006). DSS was first discussed in ECR3 published in 1988:
ECR3 4.4.9 reads: “We proposed a number of improvements to bring schools in the BPS up to aided school standards. Any private school which achieves those standards should be eligible to apply to join the DSS…”
ECR3 4.6.1 reads: “We recommended that DSS schools be financed by a system of block grants assessed according to school fee income. The grant to a given school should equal the difference between the school’s income from fees and the notional cost to the Government of an aided school with a similar number of pupils…”
- Initially, the new DSS policy had two explicit aims from ECR3. Firstly, the DSS was used to replace the unpopular BPS private schools, without harming the objective of nine-years compulsory education. Secondly, it aimed to constitute “a strong private sector with high standards.”
But there were political concerns in the formulation of DSS before the 1997 Handover. Owing to pro-leftist political affiliations (South China Morning Post, 1987, 1989), a number of schools commonly known as the pro-leftist schools had long been marginalized and had not been included in the Secondary School Place Allocation. (SSPA) the scheme used for allocating primary school (P6) graduates to secondary schools (S1). The Government felt that it needed to take care of the educational needs of those youngsters of those who had emigrated to foreign countries and had subsequently returned to Hong Kong. As a result, both pro-leftist and international schools were allowed to apply to join the DSS (Ting, 2005; Tsang, 2002).
Legitimation
Launched in September 1991, the DSS policy was treated as a voluntary policy but approved by the Executive Council, was set up in response to the recommendations of ECR3. This policy subsidised private schools that had attained sufficient educational standards and these schools would receive an annual subsidy based on the average per-student cost in aided schools. The DSS schools could also receive school fees from the students up to a maximum of two-thirds of the average per-student cost in aided schools while continuing to enjoy full government grants. They had their freedom to join, set their own curricula and entrance requirements but they were not required to join SSPA Scheme.
Implementation
As a private school setting, DSS schools recruited their own students and enjoyed more freedom in its school operation since AY1991-92. DSS schools continued to receive funding from the government, but also charged school fees. This provided DSS schools with more funds, enabling them to enhance their education levels without having to charge as much as private and international schools. Due to the DSS policy being voluntary, five pro-leftist schools and four international schools joined 1991.
By 1997, only thirteen private schools, including a few former BPS schools, joined the policy. With policy uptake being very slow in the early stages. From 1995, there was no response from any aided school to join the policy.
Evaluation
According to Chan (1995), there were three factors behind the lack of motivation from aided schools. Firstly, the lack of resources and external support for the participation; secondly, the lack of motivation to change on the part of the leaders of the school sponsoring bodies; thirdly, the time factor – no aided schools were willing to make any drastic move in the years prior to the 1997 Handover. Written policy is contested, changed and negotiated; few policies are implemented exactly as policy-makers originally intended (Ball, 1993). After the evaluation due to a limited progress, a revised DSS policy would be focused on finance to attract and extend more eligible schools to join the policy.
2nd Cycle – Policy Succession
A second cycle of DSS policy was commenced after the first HKSAR Chief Executive, Mr. Tung Chee Hwa’s policy addresses on “Building up a vibrant private school sector” after the 1997 Handover:
Policy Address 1997 Section 101 reads: “(We should) review our policy on
private schools in order to foster a more vibrant and diverse private school system
that encourages innovation and gives parents greater choice…”
In order to attract more schools to join the DSS policy and to stimulate a wider variety of private schools in Hong Kong, the Government introduced the revised DSS policy in 1999 and made another policy address:
Policy Address 2001 Section 49 reads: “We want to train a large pool of talents for tomorrow’s Hong Kong…Subsidized schools with distinct characteristics or an outstanding performance record have been encouraged to join the Direct Subsidy Scheme…”
Agenda-setting
Beyond the political agenda, financial incentives played a key role in providing progress for the further development of the DSS policy eventually covering all elitist and all aided schools. Successive changes in the financial subsidy arrangements had been provided in order to induce school sponsoring bodies to convert from aided status to the DSS, or to establish brand-new schools (Tsang, 2002). A revised funding scheme was implemented from the AY1999/2000 school year until 2001 (Education Manpower Bureau, 2000). This funding scheme adjusted the ratio between government recurrent subsidies and revenue from school fees.
Under the revised policy, DSS schools remained free to design their own curricula, choose their language of instruction (or medium of instruction – MOI) and decide their entrance requirements without being bound by the centralized SSPA Scheme.
Policy formulation
The ECR7 (1997) confirmed provision of educational diversity and choice as “one of the essences of quality school education”. The government claimed that the DSS policy was to foster the development of a vibrant private school sector that would inject diversity and choice into the education system. In 2000, the three merits in the DSS were presented to the legislature:
Due to DSS subsidy is payable on a per student basis and government will not allocate students to a DSS school unless the students so choose, schools have to attract students on the basis of their characteristics and the quality of education. Student choice is a driving force for continuous improvement.
DSS schools enjoy a high degree of freedom in curriculum design, admission of students, and use of resources. The flexibility enables DSS schools to accommodate diverse student needs and to offer programs that meet the changing demand of the workplace and the community.
As the community becomes more affluent, there is demand for better quality education. DSS schools have more freedom in charging fees so as to provide above-standard facilities.
Legitimation
The revisions were mainly with regard to funding implications. The DSS schools would now be allowed to impose higher school fees and to absorb social donations for their Endowment Funds in order to pass a greater part of its operating costs to parents and the society. Government subsidies to DSS schools would be on a per capita basis and in inverse proportion to the fees charged. The DSS schools would be allowed to determine their own annual fees, and they could continue to receive government subsidies while their fees were below two-and-one-third of the average unit cost of an “aided school place”.
Another revision was the implementation of a “two-age category system” in the calculation of subsidies, which targeted well-established aided schools with a longer history (EMB, 2006). The purpose of circular memorandum No. 210/2001 was to announce a number of new measures which introduced from AY2001/02 to further improve the terms of the DSS policy to enable DSS schools to provide better quality education and to facilitate existing aided schools to join the policy.
Measures which apply to all DSS schools
Measures for aided schools which apply to join DSS schools as from AY2001/02
The Government then widened the base of eligibility by allowing aided primary schools to join the DSS starting from AY2000-2001 onwards. Such amendments were made to make the DSS policy more attractive.
Implementation
Particularly in 2001, Tsang (2002) explains that the DSS policy has gone through significant changes which were introduced to the policy with a clear target to attract the elitist schools to leave the public sector and become private schools through the policy below:
DSS schools will continue to receive full recurrent subsidy from Government until its fee level reaches two and one third that of the unit cost of an aided school place.
There will be no more clawing back by the government in the form of reduced subsidy.
DSS schools will be given more flexibility in the charging of school fees so as to increase income for the purpose of improving the quality of education.
When the DSS school in concern is charging above two third of the unit cost, the school should set aside fifty cents for every additional dollar received for scholarship/financial assistance schemes.
At the same time DSS, formerly confined to secondary schools, has been extended to cover primary schools.
DSS schools can choose not to receive students from the central allocation arrangements of the government and instead go by their own recruitment exercise.
After these changes, a breakthrough eventually appeared because traditional elitist aided schools, such as St. Paul’s Co- educational College and St. Paul’s Convent School (SCMP, 2001a. 2001f, 2001g) joined the policy after weighing the pros and cons of joining and after heated debates within their stakeholders. Many other elitist schools and Po Leung Kuk (PLK) Group schools (which is a long established charitable body in Hong Kong, operating over 120 schools and educational institutions) joined the scheme, schools more generally (SCMP, 2004) were keen to opt in to the DSS policy.
Evaluation
The DSS policy successfully attracted prestigious aided schools and the number of the DSS schools increased tremendously from AY1999/2000. As at AY2006/07, there were a total of 64 (comprising 46 secondary, 18 primary) DSS schools (EMB, 2006).
Termination
In a sense everything in the policy world is really just in process and none of these initiative stays fixed for very long because the problems themselves keep moving and changing (Considine, 1994). As an on-going policy, the DSS policy grew rapidly from 13 to 64 institutions in the second cycle.
DSS Policy Affecting Practice
After the first cycle of the DSS policy, school responses were worrying and the continuation of the policy looked to be in doubt reflecting the uncertainty before the 1997 Handover because the political climate was an important factor to the success of the policy’s practice. But the practice of this policy was very much impacted by a political agenda focused on pro-leftist and international schools rather than replacing the BPS in its entirety as originally intended.
Tactically, HKSAR Chief Executive’s policy (1997) addressed “Building up a vibrant private school sector”. This was all achieved through privatization of education which introduced market competition, with a focus on contestable provision or contracting-out of services. Due to global neoliberalism, an attempt was made by the government to refine its roles in funding, producing or regulating the provision of school services. The DSS belonged to the type of privatization where the financing of private services went through contracting-out or school vouchers instead of direct government services.
on economic incentives and regulated to allow more schools to be eligible to participate because schools received a (per student) subsidy in school premises, recurrent grants and upgraded school facilities, the appointment of Native-speaking English Teachers (NET), teachers’ salary, fringe benefits and provident funding arrangements. In terms of administration, DSS schools had full autonomy to design their own curriculum, student admission mechanism, chose MOI, class size, administer fee remission, scholarship and adjusted school fees.
However, there has been a heated debate about practices within the DSS policy. The choice, diversity, flexibility, quality and autonomy rooted in the philosophy of DSS policy (Clarke, Gewirtz, & McLaughlin, 2000) divided educators and the public on the desirability of the policy (Chung & Wong, 1988; SCMP, 2003a; Standard, 1998a). So far, there is not enough data to support that the DSS policy raised academic standards and students’ achievement. But public debates of school choices were very heated related to parents’ wealth, social deprivation and class differences shown from a rapid increase of the Gini coefficient in Hong Kong from 0.48 (1991) to 0.535 (2016): high-income parents and created unfairness and social divides in the past two decades. Under school choice reform, parents were expected to move to the neighborhood of their choice so as to buy a quality education for their son/daughter. What is of greater concern was that not all parents could afford to do the same for their son/daughter or to buy them education of the same quality; consequently, parents of advantaged class background would be better able to get their children into better performing schools than are their disadvantaged class counterparts (Ball, 2003).
In the past, educational provision gave an equal chance for all Hongkongers because nearly all schools were supported by the government. But the DSS policy violated the principle of meritocracy in education because it was a selective ‘voucher’ scheme. It resulted in unequal treatment on entry to education, during compulsory study and on educational outcomes violating the basic principle of equality of opportunity (Brighouse, 2000).
Conclusion
While one coin has two sides, the disadvantages of the DSS policy have outweighed all counted advantages. Because the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the ‘cross-generational’ poverty will damage social mobility and deteriorate the stability of the entire society.
Through neoliberal economic reforms, providing school choice by means of the marketisation and privatisation sounded very good but resulted in undesirable practices and even long-term problems to society. Penetrating neoliberal market reforms brought about mass customisation, the creation and marketing of products with mass appeal (Hartley, 2008). Parents were able to choose from what was on offer, tailored to meet the perceived needs and desires of certain groups. Schools were positioned as businesses with parents as consumers.
In the case of Hong Kong there has been growing elitism aided by schools opting into the DSS policy. As Tse (2008) argues this is evidence by the Gini coefficient between rich and poor showing a widening gap from 0.48 (1991) to 0.535 (2016) biasing opportunities to high-income, middle-class or professional families.
The chances of able students from less wealthy families being able to get into an elitist school were reduced. Expensive school fees formed a barrier for lower-income families, enforcing social stratification and even hampering social mobility. The snowball effect of the DSS policy results in undesirable and competitive practices:
From schools’ perspectives, they compete with other DSS schools in school fees, MOI or curriculum, to fight for eligible students.
From the perspective of students and parents, high-income and middle-class parents have more choices.
From the perspective of teachers, they have worries of job stability and wage cuts.
To sum up, DSS schools, often known as a “quasi-private” schools, were considered as an important milestone in moving towards school privatisation from ‘state’ schools to improve Hong Kong’s educational system but future policy needs to try and balance this with social justice for all.
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