Hong Kong students’ English skills plummet to 20-year low. Photo: Shutterstock The English competency of Hong Kong’s Form Three students has dropped to its lowest level in nearly two decades. Education sector leaders are attributing the fall to learning challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Proficiency in Chinese, English and maths among Primary Three pupils also fell to their worst levels in about 20 years.
The results from the Territory-wide System Assessment, announced by the Education Bureau on Monday, also prompted an academic to call for urgent efforts to address the problem if the trend continued next year.
The annual assessment was introduced in primary schools in 2004 before being extended to secondary schools. The data on competency levels is based on the percentage of students who pass its tests for the three subjects.
“Compared with last year, the performance of the Primary Three and Form Three students taking the assessment for Chinese, English and maths remains generally steady this year,” a bureau spokesman said.
The latest figures were compiled from the scores of Primary Three and Form Three students who sat the assessment in the 2023-24 academic year.
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According to the data, 67 per cent of Form Three pupils passed the English section, a drop of 0.8 percentage points from the previous year and representing a new low since the assessment was introduced in secondary schools.
The results also showed 78.7 per cent of Primary Three pupils had a basic level of English competency, the lowest since 2005 and a drop of 0.8 percentage points from the previous year.
According to the bureau, 80.9 per cent of Primary Three students passed the Chinese test. The figure was the lowest since the assessment was launched in primary schools.
Their performance in maths also suffered a decline, with 85.3 per cent of Primary Three pupils passing the test, the lowest level since 2005.
Form Three students fared better in Chinese and maths than their peers from past years.
Lee Yi-ying, chairwoman of the Subsidised Secondary Schools Council, said the students’ performance in the latest English tests were tied to disruptions to learning during the pandemic.
“During Covid, the suspension of classes and the switch to online learning affected language learning the most. Almost no English activities could be held at the time,” said Lee, who also works as a secondary school principal.
“Students lacked interactions with their teachers and peers. And due to everyone wearing masks, they could not learn how to pronounce words by looking at their teachers’ mouths. Speaking and listening skills were all affected.”
The most recent batch of Primary Three and Form Three pupils to sit the test would have been in K3 and Primary Six at the start of the pandemic.
Polly Chan Suk-yee, vice-chairwoman of the Hong Kong Aided Primary School Heads Association, said members of the education sector shared the view that students who entered primary school during the pandemic suffered from relatively poor academic performance, self-care abilities and discipline compared with their pre-Covid peers.
“K3 is the year when all students formally learn how to write and it is the year for students to get prepared for Primary One, but those classes were mostly suspended [during the pandemic],” the principal said.
“This prompted primary teachers to put extra effort into teaching them basic skills when they reached primary schools.”
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Chan said she expected the situation to start to improve in the next one or two years.
She also noted that pupils who had parental support and guidance during the pandemic fared better than those who were primarily looked after by domestic helpers and grandparents.
“After all, it really depends on how much effort parents put into their children on an academic basis,” she said.
Professor Hau Kit-tai of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s department of educational psychology agreed that students’ poor performance, particularly those in Primary Three, could be attributed to the impact of the pandemic.
Hau, who is an expert on the assessment system, noted the academic performance of students around the world had generally suffered during the health crisis.
“But if the continual fall lasts one more year, some remedial measures may have to be implemented to improve their learning,” he said.