Limited educational resources for minorities, combined with some parents’ apprehensions, account for divergent experiences and opportunities, new study finds
When Aruna Rana started looking for a kindergarten in Hong Kong for her two children, she wanted them to be immersed in a Chinese-speaking environment. After all, and despite their Nepali heritage, the city had been her family’s home for three generations.
But finding a school willing to accept them was more challenging then she had ever imagined.
“It was a complete nightmare,” she recalled. “It was very hard to enrol my children in a local kindergarten. The vibe we got was that they did not want them there.”
A study released on Monday shines a light on the segregation that ethnic minorities in the city face from an early age. It found that many kindergartens do little to promote multicultural interaction between children, as teachers struggle with a lack of instructional resources and materials for non-native speakers to learn the Chinese language.
Some kindergartens also avoid accepting pupils from ethnic minorities because that dissuades Chinese parents from enrolling their children, according to social policy think tank the Zubin Foundation.
There are about 250,000 people from ethnic minorities in Hong Kong, accounting for 3.8 per cent of the city’s population, according to government figures which did not include the city’s hundreds of thousands of foreign domestic workers. The surveyed kindergartens – of which 29 were Chinese-medium schools – were selected from the six districts with the highest percentages of ethnic minority residents.
Foundation project manager Maggie Holmes, one of the study’s authors, believed the heart of the problem to be a lack of instructional resources for teachers, who are often busy and have difficulty giving individualised attention.
