Ageing East Kowloon school campuses miss government standards
Almost 80pc of East Kowloon secondary school campuses fall short of government standards - yet most new sites go to international schools
Almost 80 per cent of public secondary schools in East Kowloon are not up to Education Bureau standards, a study by the has found, prompting warnings from educators that children's education is being put at risk.
They accused the Education Bureau of favouring elite international schools when new campus sites become available, and said the state of the schools cast doubt on plans to revive the area through a grandiose redevelopment of the Kai Tak airport site.
The studied Education Bureau statistics on 78 schools in Wong Tai Sin, Kowloon City and Kwun Tong districts, and compared them with the bureau's standards for secondary schools. Under bureau guidelines, all public secondary schools should be on a site of at least 7,000 square metres. They should have 30 classrooms, plus 21 special rooms for teaching and learning.
Those that do not meet the standards are eligible to apply for a new site - but just one site has been made available for public schools in the past five years.
All 22 schools in Wong Tai Sin fall short of the bureau's standards. In Kowloon City, 19 of the 29 subsidised schools fail, while only seven of the 27 in Kwun Tong are up to scratch.
Many of the schools are also showing their age, having been built in the 1960s and 1970s to serve new public housing estates. The majority of the Wong Tai Sin and Kowloon City schools are almost 50 years old.
