Hong Kong’s Rosaryhill School to be taken over by private institution, prompting famous alumnus to call for more ‘energy’ in sponsoring body
- Dalton School Hong Kong to assume stewardship of Rosaryhill Kindergarten and Rosaryhill School next academic year
- ‘The sponsoring body needs to be energised enough to address new challenges,’ says Bernard Chan, former Executive Council convenor
A decision by a well-known Hong Kong school to be folded into a private institution has led alumnus and former top government adviser Bernard Chan to underscore challenges in the city’s education landscape and call for more “energy’ in the sponsoring body.
The Dalton School Hong Kong on Friday said it would assume stewardship of the privately funded Rosaryhill Kindergarten and Rosaryhill School in the Mid-Levels the next academic year. They will merge with Dalton’s primary schools and kindergartens on the other side of the city in West Kowloon.
Rosaryhill Secondary School will shift from an aided school to a privately funded one as part of the merger.
It was not immediately clear whether the change was due to falling enrolment, as Rosaryhill stakeholders offered competing accounts of the health of its student intake.
Chan, the former convenor of the key decision-making Executive Council, noted the religious body that sponsors the school, founded by the Dominican Monastery of St Albert the Great in Hong Kong in 1959, was not a professional body.
“The sponsoring body needs to be energised enough to address new challenges and I just do not think that as a religious group, the Dominican fathers are prepared to do that,” said Chan, who attended Rosaryhill Secondary School from 1977 to 1980. “After all, they are not professional, they are a religious group.”
While the Dominican Missions said the change in ownership was the result of falling enrolment, Rosaryhill principal So Pui-ting said in a statement on Sunday its numbers had been increasing and criticised the sponsoring body for failing to give enough advance warning to parents.
But her statement, which did not say how many students were enrolled, was pulled from the school website just hours after it was released.
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A Dalton School spokesman told the Post that the Rosaryhill Secondary School had seen its numbers drop from more than 2,000 at its peak to about 400. But Dalton remained optimistic about the merger, he added.
“We have been very fortunate that our student numbers have increased by over 50 per cent since 2019,” he said.
The Dalton School would offer current Rosaryhill students a “substantial discount” so that they could continue their studies, he added.
The Education Bureau said it had learned that Rosaryhill Secondary School, an aided institution, had decided to “reorganise resources” and would not participate in the school place allocation exercise next year.
Government statistics showed the number of children eligible for Form One will fall by nearly 14 per cent to 60,000 in 2029 from the current 71,600. The city has recorded a wave of emigration in recent years and is contending with one of the lowest birth rates in the world. As a result, the government has been encouraging schools to merge.
Chan said several factors, including the falling birth rate and the emigration wave, had presented challenges to educational institutions.
“Where other schools have improved, Rosaryhill has been unable to keep up with the demands,” he said. “I myself am on the board of an international school and we are having a tough time right now because of the number of students, but we are trying to think out of the box.”
On Saturday, the Precious Blood Primary School (Wah Fu Estate) in Pok Fu Lam said it had decided not to admit any Primary One pupils in the 2025-26 academic year as it had been struggling with a decline in the school-age population since 2019. The school, established in 1968, will shut its doors in 2029.
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More than 80 Primary One classes were cut from public schools across the city in the current academic year, according to the Primary School Profiles published on Friday.
The Precious Blood Primary School had only a single Primary One class for two consecutive years, putting it at risk of being forced to close should it fail to secure enough enrolment for the same class in the next school year.
Rosaryhill Secondary School will know how many Secondary One classes it can offer by the end of September, after the bureau counted how many students each school received last Friday.
Schools that can only run a single Form One class in the future will also be required to submit a survival plan to officials for approval or no longer accept new secondary students and begin winding down operations.
But figures released by the Census and Statistics Department last month showed the population rose to 7,498,100 in mid-2023 from 7,346,100 in the same period last year, following the full reopening of the border and the launch of various schemes to attract talent.
