Decline in Hong Kong teachers leaving professional in last academic year amid emigration wave, HK$10.1 billion withdrawn from retirement funds

Each teacher has taken out about HK$3 million on average, according to the Post’s calculation.

Before the emigration wave in 2019 and 2020, about 2,000 teachers had quit and cashed out around HK$5.2 billion from the two provident funds each year.

A representative from the education sector said the city still needed to “wait and see” the potential impact of a coming domestic national security law on teachers’ turnover rate.

The number of educators who left the profession at local schools has reached a record high in recent years.

The turnover rates at kindergartens, primary and secondary schools reached 17.6 per cent, 8.5 per cent and 9.8 per cent respectively in the 2022-23 school year, with the teachers leaving by August 2022.

About 65 per cent of teachers working in subsidised schools had resigned, while the rest retired, according to the report.

The figures mark a significant increase compared with the 2019-20 academic year, before the emigration wave, when less than 40 per cent of educators withdrew their retirement funds due to resignation, with retirement being the main reason.

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About 61 per cent of teachers from subsidised schools who withdrew their provident fund had more than 15 years of experience, while 28 per cent had 10 years or less and 11 per cent had worked in the profession for 10 to 15 years.

Lee Yi-ying, chairwoman of the Subsidised Secondary School Council, said that the number of teachers quitting the profession had only come down slightly from 2022.

“It is not a significant drop but at least it has reversed the increasing trend,” she said.

Lee said it was too early to determine whether the domestic national security law, expected to be passed this year, would lead to more teachers resigning.

Teachers quitting over the last few years would not significantly impact the sector as there had been a reduction in the number of classes amid a shrinking student population, she said.

The anti-government protests in 2019 and the imposition of the national security law the following year has had an impact on the teaching profession.

The Professional Teachers’ Union, which was the city’s biggest teachers’ union with more than 95,000 members, disbanded in 2021. It said it was left with no other option after Beijing in state media called it a “malignant tumour” that should be removed over its role in the 2019 social unrest.

At least four teachers have been deregistered for life, including one for using “one-sided and biased” materials to talk about political issues, another for drafting teaching material that included the topic of Hong Kong independence, an educator who gave pupils incorrect details about the first opium war between Britain and China from 1839 to 1842 and one who was convicted of a crime relating to the 2019 protests.

Another 150 teachers who were accused of involvement in the social unrest received disciplinary actions such as reprimands, warnings, advisory letters and verbal reminders.

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In 2022, the Education Bureau revised the code of conduct for the profession, stipulating that teachers must actively promote national education and report potential illegal activities or “morally deviant information”, with failure to do so potentially triggering deregistration.

New teachers at publicly funded schools and those promoted at public sector schools have to take part in study tours in mainland China starting from this school year.

The education authorities said teachers would be offered more study opportunities across the border to learn about the development of the country to strengthen their ability to cultivate students’ sense of national identity.