ESF Cat 1 and Cat 2

Mornington

Dear Popolung

Did you know the category for your kid (as referred in BabyMiMi below) when you were informed of offer to ESF kinder ?


Dear BabyMiMi

Thanks for telling us that "the Cat. was clearly chopped on the return slip of the application form". Do you have any personal experience as referred in Mighty's thread below?  Do you think there are improvements which ESF need to consider particularly in determining or setting up criteria for Category 1 /2?


Dear Mighty

Instead of saying correct or wrong here,  I want to point out the Category system set out by ESF may not be clear/good enough when assessing which category a child pertains to.  This system, without having considered the (dual) nationality of a kid, may give back ESF an absolute authority when they consider it is Cat 1 or Cat 2.

For Child A, it does sound it satisfies Cat 1 criteria if HK family parents speak to the kid in English all the time.  The parents would feel tough and have hard time because they needed to give up speaking in cantonese to their kid.   In my personal opinion, in doing this it would reduce the kid's ability to listen/speak cantonese as s/he needs to grow up in HK.  
Apart from that, has the Child lived in overseas for a period of time and hold other foreign passport?

For Child B, it would sound unreasonable / illogical because students would not only learn English but also mandarine at ESF kinder.  It is surprised if ESF do really treat this kid as Cat 2.  But it would probably fail if s/he spoke mandarine during the ESP P1 interview.

No matter it is Cat 1 or Cat 2 or whether evetually admitted by ESF, in my opinion, English are an important language for next decades whilst mandarine become more common in HK and a more popular language to be learnt by foreigners.  

The above are purely my opinion.  Hope we can share our view.

BR