The numbers coming out of Australia’s most populous state should stop every Hong Kong parent cold. In New South Wales public schools, 10.4 percent of secondary students were suspended in a single year, compared with 2.3 percent in primary schools. Among secondary students receiving significant adjustments for disability, the figure was 23.1 percent. Among Aboriginal secondary students, the figure was 24.2 percent.
These are the Australian education department’s own figures. As the veteran educator John Frew has argued in reviewing them, they confirm what teachers everywhere have long suspected: Systems built to educate the young quietly give up on adolescents with severe behavioral problems at precisely the moment those young people require the most skilled intervention.
The same dataset contains a contradiction that no government has satisfactorily explained. Specialist provision falls by roughly 24 percent between primary and secondary school, yet suspensions for behavior that is seriously threatening or physically violent climb to 28,515 cases, some 35.2 percent of all disciplinary actions. That is not a coincidence. It is a policy choice dressed in the comforting language of “early intervention”, and its effect is to write off teenagers whose difficulties either persist through puberty or surface for the first time.
Why should this trouble us in Hong Kong? It’s because we run our own version of the same arrangement, while employing a different vocabulary. Under the dual-track system, some 8,800 students with severe or multiple adjustment difficulties attend about 62 aided special schools, while 88 percent of the 73,112 students identified with special educational needs (SEN) sit in mainstream classrooms. For the specific group at the heart of this debate, those with moderate to severe emotional and behavioral difficulties, the city offers just eight schools for social development. Placement requires parental consent, a professional referral, and vetting by the Central Coordinating Referral Mechanism, jointly managed by the Education Bureau and the Social Welfare Department.
Read the official description of what those schools are for, and one phrase is alarmingly self-explanatory. They exist to help students “tide over their transient adaptation problems” so that they can “resume education in ordinary schools as soon as possible”. Some difficulties are indeed transient. Many are not. A system organized around the assumption of transience will always be short on places for students whose needs prove enduring.
Our own statistics show that with age the need grows rather than decreases. In the 2024-25 school year, public-sector secondary schools in Hong Kong recorded 35,620 students with SEN, or 13.6 percent of enrolment, exceeding the primary figure of 32,250, or 12.9 percent. By January 2025, roughly 62,900 students required Tier-2 support and 4,360 required Tier-3. Credit is due where it is earned: Integrated education spending has risen 170 percent in eight years to HK$4.1 billion ($522 million), every public-sector school now has a SEN coordinator, and close to 1,500 SEN support teacher posts have been created. Yet the money is spread thin. One in five schools has 100 or more Tier-2 students, each entitled to attention that no single coordinator can realistically provide.
I have listened to many parents describe the same journey. A child supported patiently through primary school, with a small structured classroom, predictable routines, and teachers who knew his or her triggers by name, reaches Secondary One and meets a mainstream curriculum, eight subject teachers, a larger campus, and a social environment more demanding than anything previously encountered. The structure disappears — the routines fragment. The relationships built over six years dissolve in a single September.
Our understanding of adolescent development has advanced considerably; policy has struggled to keep pace. Neuroimaging shows that the prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control and emotional regulation, is remodeled throughout the teenage years. This is not the moment to withdraw the scaffolding. It is precisely when a young brain needs structure, consistency, and skilled intervention most. Some students who coped in primary school begin to unravel only with the hormonal and social upheaval of puberty. Others arrive at secondary school with needs already documented and discover that the provision which sustained them at primary has vanished. Their disability has not disappeared. The provision has.
Workplace safety is another issue that deserves candid dialogue. Teachers face abuse, threats, and occasionally assault. Classmates lose lesson time to disruption they did nothing to cause. Students in crisis cycle through suspension, return, and crisis again, in cases where the specialist help they need is not available. Hong Kong has not been immune, particularly as mainstream schools absorb increasingly complex needs without matching increases in trained staff. Teachers are not social workers, clinical psychologists, or crisis negotiators, and they should not be asked to improvise as all three. Teachers do not surrender their right to safety at the school gate; other students do not surrender their right to learn without fear; and children with severe behavioral needs do not forfeit their right to an education. These three rights are not in competition. Properly resourced specialist provision protects all of them.
So what should we do? First, the Education Bureau should publish annual, anonymized data on suspensions, expulsions, reduced timetables, and serious violent incidents, broken down by school level and SEN status. Second, fund the crossing. A ring-fenced portion of the Learning Support Grant should follow each high-needs student from Primary Six into Secondary Two, with a named case manager attached to the child rather than the school. Third, expand and diversify services for emotional and behavioral difficulties, including day places and outreach teams, and shorten the referral waiting line so families are not waiting out the years that matter most. Fourth, invest in secondary teachers, moving beyond box-ticking basic courses toward genuine behavior-support training with clinical and psychiatric backup on call. Fifth, parents should keep written records, ask for the school’s three-tier support plan in writing, know their SEN coordinator by name, and confirm that the SEN information transferred at secondary school allocation has actually been read and acted upon.
Every child is special and unique. That sentiment means something only when we pay attention to what each child needs. Adolescents are not too late, too hard, or too expensive. Most can be helped when the intervention is skilled, structured, and properly resourced. Parents, educators, the Education Bureau, the Social Welfare Department, hospitals, and nongovernmental organizations must work together on this because no one can solve it alone.
The author is a cofounder of Brandstorm Communications, a consultancy that specializes in education.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
