Hong Kong education authorities will tighten the requirements for public secondary schools to continue operating as the student population declines. Plans include raising the minimum enrolment number and cutting some alternative options that allowed schools to survive, starting in September.
Members of the sector said on Tuesday they expected the new measures would speed up the closure of less popular schools, while students with poor academic performance might even be asked to repeat the same grade to meet the enrolment threshold.
The Education Bureau, which announced the measures in a circular to secondary schools, said the move aimed to protect students’ interests.
“The Education Bureau estimates that the number of Form One students aged 12 will drop from 58,800 in 2025 to 49,800 in 2031,” Ida Lee Bik-sai, Ida, deputy secretary for education, wrote in Insider’s Perspectives, the bureau’s online blog.
“The Education Bureau must … revise the arrangements related to class structure and support measures to safeguard students’ learning interests.”
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The measures included raising the minimum number of students required for secondary school to operate a Form One class from 25 to 27 starting in the new term in September.
The threshold will be further raised to 29 in 2026-27.
Under the current policy, secondary schools must secure at least two Form One classes to survive, or a total of 26 students to continue operating.
With the changes, a school will need to enrol at least 28 students to run two classes to survive the coming academic year. They will need 30 pupils in the 2026-27 academic year.
In Hong Kong, public secondary schools receive resources based on the number of classes they have, with a headcount exercise conducted every September for Form One and Form Four.
But from September 2027, the headcount exercise will be conducted in the two other lower grades, as the bureau said the minimum two-class requirement for Form One would also be extended to Forms Two and Three.
Schools that failed to have a sufficient number of classes would need to submit survival plans to the bureau.
But two of the survival options for school will be scrapped, namely “special review” by education officials and “collaborating with other schools to offer more subject choices”.
The bureau has kept survival options such as merging with other schools, switching to a privately run mode and injecting resources to offer a broader curriculum. A new option is to collaborate with tertiary or vocational training institutions to provide diverse educational courses.
The school can carry on if its survival plan is approved by the bureau.
Hong Kong has 385 public secondary schools.
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The bureau also allowed some popular schools with four Form One classes to apply to operate five Form One classes, provided the number of applications was the same or greater than the number of places it would offer at the discretionary stage in the citywide admission system. Their campus will also need to fulfil conditions to accommodate more students.
But only five schools will be allowed to expand the number of Form One classes they offer to the maximum of five.
Lee Yi-ying, chairwoman of the Subsidised Secondary Schools Council, said the new measures would put additional pressure on schools that enrolled academically weak students.
“The survival risk for those schools will get larger as the student population is now declining, with the number of From One students falling to 30,000 in the future in the worst situation,” she said, pointing to the city’s low birth rate.
“There will be more schools facing a dire situation.”
