Achieving quality through a focus on strengths
More than 80% of early childhood and primary school teachers, and about 25% of secondary school teachers in Hong Kong are graduates of the Institute or its forerunners.

The quality of our graduates and the positive comments they make testifies to the relevance and quality of our programmes. This is the result of focused planning according to agreed priorities which, in turn, relate closely to our mission of developing caring and professional teachers who will serve the needs of Hong Kong schools.

In line with our mission and with Government policy to create an all-graduate and all-trained teaching profession, in 2002-03 we provided a number of high quality initial teacher education programmes and a range of opportunities for serving teachers to upgrade their qualifications.

For the preparation of early childhood teachers, sub-degree programmes remain of key importance though our focus has moved from the basic Qualified Kindergarten Teacher level to the higher level Certificate in Early Childhood Education. Our bachelor's degree in early childhood education, the BEd(ECE), continues to contribute significantly to the professionalisation of early childhood teaching.

Our programmes draw on our areas of strength. As well as early childhood and primary education, they focus on language education, special needs and inclusive education, and cultural and technology subjects across all levels of schooling. We consolidate and improve our programmes constantly in response to identified needs and in pursuit of greater coherence.

Upgrading our programmes
In all our programmes, we continue to move steadily to a concentration on degree and postgraduate level studies. Our programme profile has seen a dramatic change with 62% of our full-time student population studying degree and postgraduate level programmes in 2002-03, compared to 47% in the previous year. During the reporting year, we offered eight degree and four postgraduate diploma programmes, five certificate programmes and 18 courses focusing on the professional development of serving teachers. During the same period, our Division of Continuing Professional Education (CPE) offered four associate degree and pre-associate degree programmes.

We continued our longstanding tradition of offering support for the continuous professional development of teachers and our Professional Upgrading Courses continued to be highly regarded and popular with serving teachers.

Finally, our CPE Division continued to provide further opportunities for teachers to engage in lifelong learning and professional development.

Our programmes target the needs of Hong Kong's future teachers. Thus emphasis is currently placed on language development, Hong Kong studies, international exposure and the acquisition of competence in Information Technology.