Mr Ip, Professor Hayhoe, distinguished guests, staff, students, ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great privilege and pleasure for me to be here as guest of honour at the Hong Kong Institute of Education's first Open Day here in sunny Tai Po.

As I said on another occasion recently, I consider teacher education to be an aspect of our education system where a quantum leap forward and upward is called for, in the interests of Hong Kong. This Institute, with its magnificent new campus here in Tai Po, typifies the Government's commitment to making that quantum leap, and indeed it has a vitally important role to play in achieving it.

In his first Policy Address in October 1997, the Chief Executive announced as a new policy objective that in the foreseeable future all new primary and secondary schools teachers would have to have university degrees and appropriate professional training. The University Grants Committee and the Advisory Committee on Teacher Education and Qualifications were tasked to undertake a review of teacher education in Hong Kong and advise on the means and timing for achieving the Chief Executive's ambitious target. We duly did so, consulting extensively with educational bodies, professional associations and related organisations, as well as of course with all the teacher education providers, and submitted our reports to the Government in February this year.

Among the UGC's recommendations were, naturally, the need to phase out most, if not all the Certificate of Education programmes, as provided only at this Institute, and to replace them with appropriate undergraduate degree and postgraduate diploma programmes here and elsewhere. We also advised on the timing for the development of the Institute as a primarily degree-awarding institution, with all that that entails in terms of upgrading the qualifications (and salaries) of its staff.

We were encouraged, as I am sure all of you here today, to learn from the Chief Executive's 1998 Policy Address that the Government will start to implement these recommendations. I believe the Government is committed to improving the quality of our teacher education and I trust that a more complete response to the more wide-ranging and longer term recommendations in our and ACTEQ's reports will be forthcoming in the near future.

Meanwhile, as I said earlier, the Hong Kong Institute of Education has a vitally important role to play in achieving the Chief Executive's ambitious aims for teacher education. Through its wide range of programmes for pre-service and in-service teachers, at pre-school, primary and secondary levels, the Institute can, more than any other institution in Hong Kong, influence the quality of education in Hong Kong in a most profound way. This would represent an enormous and daunting challenge for any institution, but for the HKIEd which has only been established as a unified entity since 1994 and has only been here in its new single campus (parts of which are still under construction) for a matter of months, it may seem at times almost beyond your reach.

From my admittedly quite short association with the Institute as Chairman of the University Grants Committee since April this year, I am sure you can do it. You have a dedicated Council under Simon Ip, an extremely able and energetic Director, a rapidly developing pool of talented staff and, perhaps most important of all, a strong undercurrent of goodwill and support from the community. We all want the Institute to succeed in achieving its ambitious goal of "optimizing each child's potential through the shared joy of learning and teaching."

I shall soon step down from the Chairmanship of the UGC and join the Government's Central Policy Unit. I am sure, however, that my successor Dr Alice Lam and colleagues on the UGC will continue to give every support to the Institute in making its unique and vital contribution to achieving the quantum leap in teacher education which I am sure we all agree is crucial to the betterment of our future generations in the years to come.

Thank you