The Education Bureau (EDB) issued circular memoranda today (March 11) to all public sector primary and secondary schools to announce the enhancement arrangements and application details for the Understanding Adolescent Project (UAP) for primary schools and the Enhanced Smart Teen Project (ESTP) for secondary schools.
An EDB spokesman said, "The EDB has been actively organising diversified programmes for students' personal growth and encouraging schools to enhance students' resilience through adventure-based, team-building and problem-solving training as well as parent-child activities. This is to nurture their positive values and enhance teacher-student and parent-child relationships so as to promote a healthy life for whole-person development of students. To further cultivate students' sense of dignity, self-discipline, responsibility and courage to make changes and take on challenges, the EDB will provide more resources to enhance the two student projects on personal growth. The annual additional expenditure amounts to about $26 million."
The UAP for primary schools is a comprehensive support programme for personal growth, which includes the Universal Programme (UP) and the Intensive Programme (IP), aiming at helping students acquire the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes for facing adversities. The UP is a guidance curriculum on resilience for all Primary Four to Six students. The IP is a series of small group, adventure-based and parent-child activities, targeting Primary Four students identified to have greater need for guidance. Since its launch in the 2004/05 school year, over 95 per cent of the eligible public sector primary schools have been implementing the project. Students who joined the project were found to have generally made progress in emotion management, problem-solving skills, goal setting and building relationships with others. Starting from the 2019/20 school year, the EDB will enhance the arrangement for the IP with additional student group activities and training for parents so as to enhance the support to both the students and their parents. Furthermore, the group size of the IP will also be lowered to provide more appropriate services for students in need.
For secondary schools, since the 2006/07 school year, the EDB has collaborated with various disciplinary forces, including the Hong Kong Police Force, the Fire Services Department, the Correctional Services Department, the Customs and Excise Department, the Immigration Department, the Civil Aid Service and the Hong Kong Adventure Corps, to implement the ESTP. Training on discipline and team building has been provided for secondary students to enhance their self-discipline, self-confidence, team spirit, resilience and relationship with teachers. As the project has yielded remarkable outcomes and has been well received by schools, the EDB has regularised the project and started to increase the training quota in phases from the 2018/19 school year so that more students will benefit. In addition, the EDB will continue to provide a series of professional training for teachers responsible for the project.
The spokesman said, "The EDB encourages public sector primary and secondary schools to actively participate in these two projects on personal growth, and appeals to schools to optimise the use of resources to enhance students' resilience in collaboration with us, with a view to helping students face the challenges in different developmental stages with an optimistic and positive attitude so as to facilitate their whole-person development."
Details of the projects can be browsed on the EDB website (www.edb.gov.hk).
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