Special curriculum helps creative Hong Kong students gain skills
Students at a school in Kowloon City can express themselves as artists while also striving to meet academic standards
There's a liberal, university-like atmosphere at HKICC Lee Shau Kee School of Creativity in Kowloon City. Along its ground-floor "creative promenade", students and teachers engage in discussions on art and life, addressing one another by first names. It seems unlike any mainstream secondary school in Hong Kong.
Founded in 2006, Lee Shau Kee School is a direct subsidy scheme senior secondary school that offers Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education courses and a creative arts curriculum that it developed itself. Starting this past school year, incoming students in Form Four could enrol in the school's special "double track" curriculum, fulfilling requirements towards both the mainstream school-leaving qualification as well as the recently accredited Diploma in Creative Arts (DCA) before they graduate.
Most students at the school are artistically talented but lack the academic heft valued in conventional organisations.
The school's mission is to provide a liberal environment where they can develop different learning styles and chart diverse career paths.
"We nurture outliers because they are the ones who will bring diversity to our culturally and socially homogeneous society in the future," says deputy principal Lau Tin-ming. "Our students may not be academically talented in the traditional sense, but each of them has a potential that is our job to cultivate."