Leveraging positive educational outcomes or creating impoverished separatist education? 'Reading' the effects of Hong Kong support measures and language courses for non-Chinese speaking ethnic minority students

Equity is the ‘elephant in the room’ in Hong Kong educational discourse – much remains unsaid. Government policy over the last five years has finally responded to pressure and acknowledged the ethnic minority education ‘condition’. However, the government’s official declaration of broad ranging support measures and a specially designed Chinese- Language supplementary curriculum (but not a Chinese-as-a-Second Language curriculum) for the majority groups of non-Chinese speaking students – from India, Pakistan, Nepal, and the Philippines – have been slow to improve the reality that few ethnic minority students complete their final years of schooling and fewer still proceed to further study. This paper reports on findings from research that evaluated some of the support measures with the aim of determining the extent that they assist NCS/EM students and teachers face the educational challenges of the tri-lingual and bi-literate language and cultural diversity of their school contexts.