The government's school management reforms suffered a fresh setback yesterday as the Court of Final Appeal gave the Catholic diocese leave to mount a legal challenge to them.
The government faces a campaign of defiance from three religious sponsoring bodies and 375 schools against the legislation, which requires all aided schools to set up incorporated school management committees.
The 2004 Education Ordinance gave schools until July 1, 2009 to set up the new committees, on which parents, alumni, teachers and independent candidates must make up 40 per cent of members, with 60 per cent appointed by the sponsoring body.
The committees have legal responsibility for running schools.
The deadline was extended to July 1, 2012 after just 20 per cent of schools set up the new committees within the first three years following a campaign of resistance by the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong culminating in a legal challenge. The Anglican Church's Sheng Kung Hui and the Methodist Church also opposed the legislation, with the former leaving it to schools to decide, while the latter followed a line of passive resistance.
Of the 845 aided schools in Hong Kong, 441 - or 52.2 per cent - have set up an incorporated management committee (IMC) and another 29 have submitted a draft IMC constitution to the Education Bureau, while 44.4 per cent - or 375 - have not.
The legal action by the Catholic diocese, which argued that the ordinance breaks a provision in the Basic Law giving sponsoring bodies the right to run schools according to 'previous practice', was dismissed in 2006.
