With funding of HK$90 million from The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, The Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) has begun preparation for Phase II of the project ‘C-for-Chinese@JC’. The project is co-organised by EdUHK, two other local universities and two non-governmental organisations. The objective is to cultivate culturally responsive education in kindergartens. 

Phase I of the project was launched in 2016. It adopted a ‘home-school-community’ collaborative model to foster a pleasurable and meaningful learning environment for children from non-Chinese-speaking ethnic minorities (NCS-EM) to learn Chinese. Phase II of the project is to refine the service model to make co-ordinated support in school, home, and community domains more scalable with capacity-building training. The practical framework ‘Culturally Responsive Education Benchmarks’ will be developed for kindergartens to enhance Chinese learning and the social-emotional competence of NCS-EM children and Chinese-speaking children, and promote culturally responsive education from policy to execution level in kindergartens.

The project is expected to support 42,000 kindergarten children, including 5,100 NCS-EM children and their families by 2026.