Week 7 - Scenario Planning

Develop ideas of where you could incorporate the use of Scenario Planning in your organization.

Recently one of the hottest topics is the rapidly increased of amount of children with non-local parents are both not the citizen of HK. It brings a great impact to educational system due to the different background, culture and needs from them to children with local parents. Therefore, my school has to figure out the change and prepare well for the impact.

1. Identify focal issue

The focal issue is the amount of children with non-local parents is increasing while the amount of children with local parents is decreasing. The culture, mother language, family support, pre-school education level, etc, are different, so that the schools must prepare for the change of needs of their students.

2. Search for driving force

Here I try to take an outside-in perspective method to forecast the change of my school. For the contextual environment, most of the children with non-local parents have characteristics below:

• Their mother languages are Putonghua;
• Most of them are not grow in HK, they will live with their parents before they go to primary school or even secondary school. That mean their culture is different from children grow in HK.
• Their pre-school education level is low.
• Their English level is low.
• Their family support is low when they study in HK, most of them are guardian by the relatives or even domestic workers.
• Most of their families are grass-root level. It is because the rich families can send their children by investment immigration afterward.

However, the curriculum and school supporting resources is mainly design for children with local parents in most schools. Furthermore, the change also leads to increased of learning divergence in classroom and thus affects the education quality.

For the secondary school education, the impact will come in 6 years (and this year in primary school). That mean we have 6 years for preparation.

My school is a Band 2 Direct Subsidy Scheme (DSS) Secondary School in Hong Kong Island. My students need to pay school fees so that it is expected that the ratio of children with non-local parents to local parents with not increased rapidly. In addition, the students with non-local parents in my school are usually rich and with good education level. Their characteristics are:

• Their mother languages are Putonghua;
• Most of them are not grow in HK, that mean they have different culture with HK students.
• Their English level is low.
• Their family support in HK is low. Most of them are guardian by the relatives or even domestic workers.

3. Find uncertainties

The main uncertainty in this issue in my school is only the growth rate of amount of children with non-local parents. It is difficult to predict that how many students from mainland China will come to HK by investment immigration; especially people in mainland China are become richer and richer. I predicted that there are about 1/3 of students are come from mainland China, but the worst case is more than 2/3. Therefore the required resources and policy needs are quite different in the worst cases.

Another uncertainty is the quality of students from mainland China. At now the quality of them is a little bit better than the local students in my school. But it will become better or worse later.

4. Formulate scenario logic and 5. Strategic analysis

Among the uncertainty above, the scenario and the strategies require can be express as the graph below: