The government's school management reforms have hit another major setback after more than a third of aided schools snubbed the final deadline for submitting the constitutions of the new governing committees the reforms require.
Of the city's 842 aided schools - those which are government-subsidised but run by other organisations - 314 had failed to set up an incorporated management committee or to hand in their draft constitution by the end of working hours on Wednesday, the Education Bureau said.
The official deadline is today but because it is a public holiday schools were given until yesterday to comply.
The government faces a campaign of defiance from the Catholic Church, the Sheng Kung Hui - Hong Kong's Anglican Church - and the Methodist Church.
The 2004 Education Ordinance gave schools until July 1, 2009 to set up the 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 deadline was extended 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 Church.
The Catholic Church mounted a legal challenge to the reforms on the grounds that they broke a provision in the Basic Law giving sponsoring bodies the right to run schools according to 'previous practice', but lost the case in 2006. Its appeal against the ruling was dismissed in February last year.
But in December the church won an application to the Court of Final Appeal to hear its challenge on the grounds it was a matter of 'great, general and public importance' .
The number of schools refusing to set up the committees has fallen by 61 over the past seven months, but many schools are waiting for the outcome of the case. Religious groups are among the sponsoring bodies of schools that snubbed the government deadline to submit the constitution of their incorporated management committees.
An Education Bureau spokesman said the authorities would continue to liaise with schools to remind them the deadline had legal implications. They urged schools to submit their draft constitutions as soon as possible.
Timothy Ha Wing-ho, education adviser to the Anglican archbishop of Hong Kong, said none of its 70 aided schools had established incorporated management committees. 'Religious schools are different from other schools,' he said.
The Reverend Yuen Tin-yau, executive secretary for the school education division of the Methodist Church, said it opposed the setting up of the committees because the 'vision' of sponsoring bodies could not be implemented under the policy. He said the majority of the Methodists' 19 primary and secondary aided schools had snubbed the deadline.
The Sheng Kung Hui and the Methodist Church also opposed the legislation, with the former leaving its schools to decide, while the latter followed a line of passive resistance.
40%
The proportion of parents, alumni, teachers and independent required on the new school management committees