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Note: This article represents the view of the author and not the University of Hong Kong.

Small-class teaching is a rather controversial subject under current discussions of educational reform. How the Education and Manpower Bureau would handle the issue will directly affect the popularity the Secretary for Education and Manpower, and the public's receptiveness of the entire reform package. There is little doubt that the crux of the matter lies in the distribution of resources, amidst the very stringent government budget. However, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa has already promised that he has no hesitation to invest in education.

In recent years, the problems of low birth rate and ageing population have already raised wide attention. While the number of births in 2003 (47,000) was only half of that of 1983, it is not surprising that Donald Tsang, the Chief Secretary, encouraged married families to have 3 children. Yet, this is really difficult to be achieved under present economic and work conditions. To compensate for the future shortage of manpower, the most practical solution is to enhance the quality of our future pillars in order to raise their productivity. Comparing to 1983, the author hopes that the amount of care received by today's primary school students from their teachers can be doubled. This is their right.

Is small-class teaching the right way to education? The author just hopes to provide her, as well as some frontline education workers' opinions, from the actual situation. Mr. Ho Hon-kuen, has said in Mingpao Forum on 11 January that when prestigious priests and monks were giving their lectures, the more people there were, the more influential they were. However, today's lessons are completely different. Definitely, incapable teachers cannot give full play to the effect of teaching no matter how many students they are facing. The key is that when teachers need to face 30 to 40 "problematic" students, together with the requirements of interactive teaching, guided discussion and adequate feedback under the educational reforms, even the capable ones cannot teach effectively, as only economic efficiency is emphasized in those large-class lectures.

In recent years, students have encountered quite a lot of obstacles in learning, including those on reading and writing, attention, as well as emotion. With the introduction of integrated education, students who have difficulties in their growth, such as autism, are also included into the normal lessons. Together with those children from broken families, teachers now need to handle not only teaching problems, but also various kinds of behavioural problems in lessons. Social workers and educational psychologists cannot share the teaching burden of the frontline teachers. Of course, the quality of lessons will vary according to the quality of schools, such as traditional famous schools. But these differences are now expanding, just like the gap between the rich and the poor. Today, many quality schools have gradually transformed themselves to directly subsidized or private schools. What are left are those mediocre government and subsidized schools, which are also usually chosen by the underprivileged society. If the government really wants to combat poverty, it should then pay more efforts on education, which can improve the mobility among social classes.

Professor Hau Kit-tai has mentioned in Mingpao Forum on 21 December that studies showed that the effect of small-class teaching was the most influential among junior forms of primary school and underprivileged students. No doubt small-class teaching is more suitable for junior students, as this relates to its teaching objectives.

It is also not hard to understand why small-class teaching is more suitable for the underprivileged society. If the weakness of a group is reflected in students' results, then definitely the improvement scope will generally be more apparent among the students with poor result. On the other hand, among the well-performed students, although an improvement of a few marks is not that apparent, it could be "valid" differences statistically. If these research results have reference value, should the Education and Manpower Bureau consider implementing small-class teaching at least in primary schools? As for those directly subsidized and private schools, they are financially more independent, and their quality are under parents' scrutiny. Therefore, more flexibility is allowed when implementing small-class teaching.

Professor Hau has also pointed out that according to educational economists, the effect derived from those ordinary reforms like teachers' training and salary increase will double that of small-class teaching, while the expenses of the former are far lower than the latter. The author has no way, and is also unwilling to evaluate the scientificness of the research method and the applicability of the deduction. The author only wants to discuss the effectiveness of small-class teaching basing on Hong Kong's actual situation. First, teachers in Hong Kong have already received different types of continuous training. Under the pay-cut trend, it is also difficult to expect a salary increase. Besides, some educational experts have suggested specialized teaching and reduction of lessons so as to raise the teaching standard. Could these methods achieve more practical effect than small-class teaching? Specialized teaching undoubtedly can drive the teachers to equip themselves with knowledge in specialized subjects. However, while the teachers suddenly need to attend frequent trainings as a result of the educational reforms and benchmark exams, their care towards students will be weakened on the contrary. As a matter of fact, the teachers' valuable teaching experiences can always stimulate students' learning interest more effectively than their knowledge in specialized subjects. This is especially true in junior forms. In some foreign schools, teachers are encouraged to teach several subjects in one class, so as to have a better understanding of the students' potential, and hence can teach according to individual students' abilities.

In the author's view, an ideal education is an all-round education. In order to achieve educational objectives such as being eager to learn or good at communication, new teaching modes emphasizing self-learning, such as topic-based learning, are important. Small-class teaching has just provided an ideal learning environment for this teaching mode.

Regarding measures such as lessons cutting, just like small-class teaching, they aim at reducing the burden of teachers, so that they can have more time to prepare for lessons and equip themselves. Yet, small-class teaching can help teachers solve some teaching problems in lessons and students can be directly benefited. Can cutting lessons reduce teachers' workload effectively? This would depend on the availability of supporting facilities. In fact small-class teaching is the same.

What the author can see, however, is that the educational experts did not only evade expressing their standpoints on small-class teaching as the policy goal, but also willfully criticized the priority of the introduction of technical supporting measures such as number of students included, forms covered, training of teachers, flexibility of the system, etc. In fact these questions can be solved completely through discussions. Radical speeches are unnecessary, as they will only impede the communication channels. If cost-effectiveness is advocated, for those investments in hardware such as expansion of the campus and improvements in facilities, how effective they are in raising the teaching standard apart from being reflected in figures? Those experts did not question the teaching efficiency of the rash "3+3+4" educational reforms, but were so mean with the small class teaching. Their harsh and changeable standard is so unreasonable.

The effectiveness of small-class teaching may not be quantified by simple scores. The objective of primary school education is not to load the students with knowledge, but just to build a solid foundation for their future learning. It is not the wish of the author to see that the Hong Kong's education system is just producing a group of so-called elites who have "high intelligence but low abilities", or who even lack the basic life goal. It is believed that most frontline education workers will not doubt the functions of small-class teaching as well.