Early departures from Hong Kong’s elite secondary schools have significantly decreased, with withdrawal rates falling to pre-emigration wave levels.
The SCMP reviewed the annual reports of 14 top schools and found the withdrawal rates had declined for the second year in a row. The figures emerged just weeks after the UK said the number of fresh applications for a bespoke immigration pathway for Hongkongers fell to 5,102 in the third quarter of this year.
Applications for the British National (Overseas) Visa scheme have fallen from a peak of more than 30,000 in each of the first two quarters of 2021.
Lee Yi-ying, the chairwoman of the Subsidised Secondary Schools Council, said the early exit rate in most schools had been slowing further after beginning to fall in 2022-23.
“The rate definitely came down from the peak from two to three years ago, and we saw the number of students studying in junior forms withdrawing from schools has been decreasing,” she said.
Lee said most students withdrawing early in recent years either chose to study overseas independently or emigrated with their families.
The SCMP looked at the annual reports of the 14 schools to compare the rates with those of the past five Academic years. The reports were published in the past two months.
All but one school recorded a drop in the number of students withdrawing last year. The rate remained the same as last year’s at that school.
The decline was sharper than in 2022-23, with most recording exit rates at even lower levels than the year before the city’s emigration wave started.
Early departures from elite schools have been under the spotlight after surging in 2021-22 in the wake of the United Kingdom’s launch of the BN(O) scheme.
The high exit rates led some elite schools to allow students to be admitted during the year, in a departure from regular practice.
Britain rolled out the pathway after Beijing imposed the national security law on Hong Kong in June 2020 to ban acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers following the anti-government protests in 2019.
St Paul’s Co-educational College, a prestigious semi-private school in the Mid-Levels, logged a rate of about 5 per cent for last year, with 60 students leaving.
In 2020-21, the rate stood at 9.8 per cent, or 114 students. It recorded a rate of 6.4 per cent in 2019-20.
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The exit rate at Baptist University Affiliated School Wong Kam Fai Secondary and Primary School, another popular semi-private school in Sha Tin, fell to about 3 per cent in the last academic year. The figure was close to the rate five Academic years ago and well below the 13.3 per cent in 2021-22 and 8 per cent in 2022-23.
Wah Yan College Hong Kong, an elite aided boys’ school in Wan Chai, also reported a significant drop from about 8 per cent in 2021-22 and 5 per cent in 2022-23 to below 2 per cent in the last academic year.
St Paul’s Secondary School, a popular aided girls’ school in Wan Chai, recorded an exit rate of 6.2 per cent 2021-22, which had declined to 1.84 per cent in the last school year. The rate was even lower than the 2.3 per cent logged in 2019-20.
The elite girls’ school said 14 students withdrew before the end of the last academic year, mainly to study abroad. The figure was well below the 53 students who left in 2021-22.
Marymount Secondary School, a top girls’ school in Wan Chai, said in its report that “90 per cent of students who withdrew during the school term continued their studies overseas”.
Its early exit rate in the last school year fell to below 4 per cent, a level similar to 2019-20.
The British government said last month the numbers for BN(O) scheme applications between July and September this year marked the lowest quarterly figures since the pathway’s launch.
“When this route first opened, there were over 30,000 applications per quarter (in January to March and April to June 2021) on in and out of country routes combined; but the number of applications has since decreased with 5,102 in the most recent quarter,” the Home Office said.
More than 215,000 Hongkongers have applied for the route since its launch, with 158,000 people having arrived in the UK as of September this year, according to the country’s government.
