'Most Teachers Against Class Resumption On April 19'

The Federation of Education Workers said on Tuesday that more than 70 percent of teachers are opposed to the plan to resume face-to-face classes on April 19.

The group said the findings come from a survey it carried out involving more than 1,300 teachers at primary and secondary schools and kindergartens.

The government had announced that pupils of kindergartens, primary and international schools can go back to class from April 19, while secondary schools are set to resume normal teaching after DSE exams are finished.

But the federation’s chairman, Wong Kam-leung, said teachers do not feel that the Covid situation has stabilised to the point that classes can be safely resumed on campus, as Hong Kong is still seeing thousands of new infections each day.

The group said 85 percent of those polled agreed that the authorities should consider the daily infection figures before deciding whether to resume full-day, face-to-face lessons.

The federation’s vice-chairman Tang Fei, who’s also a lawmaker, called on the Education Bureau (EDB) to give schools more subsidies to buy anti-epidemic supplies, as well as to provide detailed guidelines as to how normal teaching can be resumed.

“Preparing a lot of materials of public health [to prevent] students and teachers getting infected with Omicron is a big problem, but the key difficulty is the lack of guidelines from the EDB,” he said.

Tang said schools are unclear about what will happen if students or teachers test positive, or whether they will need to do rapid tests each day before going onto campus.