The Education University of Hong Kong received further funding of HK$18 million from the Simon K.Y. Lee Foundation to launch a new three-year project in September 2022, entitled ‘Early Advancement in Resilience: A Downward Extension of the 3Es Programme that Promotes Children’s Social-emotional Competence’ (the EAR project). This project is an extension of an initiative, ‘Early Prevention, Early Identification, and Early Intervention: A School-Based Support Model of Social-Emotional Development for Kindergarten Children’, which came to fruition in 2021.

The EAR project is led by Professor Kevin Chung Kien-hoa and Dr Ian Lam Chun-bun, Director and Co-Director of the Centre for Child and Family Science. It focuses on the social-emotional development of two- to four-year-old students from socio-economically disadvantaged families. The project will develop a teacher-rated inventory that allows schools to measure nursery school and K1 children’s social-emotional abilities quickly and reliably, as well as a multi-faceted programme that promotes children’s social-emotional competence using games, play-based activities, and storybooks. It is expected to benefit 1,100 nursey and K1 children, their teachers and parents from 18 kindergartens and nursery schools.