Students sit for the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exams in Hong Kong, April, 2021.Anthony Kwan/Getty Images
On April 20, former kindergarten administrator Fatima Rumjahn was sentenced to 25 months in prison for taking bribes from parents to get their children into a top Hong Kong school, in a scandal that has already seen more than a dozen people jailed.
At a time when Ontario high schools are grappling with an attendance crisis that is threatening to undermine academic achievement, Ms. Rumjahn’s case is emblematic of the immense pressure put on both parents and children by Hong Kong’s ultra-competitive education system, which produces impressive results but can push kids to breaking point.
“Truancy is not an issue because it just won’t be tolerated,” said David Tobin, an educator with more than 14 years of experience working in local and international schools in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong’s Education Bureau does not publish regular attendance statistics, but last year, amid concerns about a spike in absenteeism at the height of the pandemic, it said there were 5,572 “chronically absent” students − those who missed school for more than seven consecutive days − in the most recent academic year, up from around 3,000 in the early 2020s.
Fourteen people jailed for paying bribes to get their kids into Hong Kong kindergarten
That still accounts for less than 1 per cent of the entire student population.
(Annual reports published by schools, reviewed by The Globe and Mail, also consistently showed an attendance rate of more than 90 per cent across a variety of educational institutions.)
Jessica De Borja, who has worked in a variety of Hong Kong schools in the past decade, said “getting into a school itself, let alone a good school, is really competitive, so that really ties into the pressures around attendance.”
One apparent incentive for the parents caught up in Ms. Rumjahn’s bribery scheme was that her former employer, the English Schools Foundation, which runs 24 international schools in Hong Kong, gives preference to children who attended its kindergarten or primary schools when considering high school admissions.
Even in cases where students are chronically absent, Ms. De Borja said, it is often as a result of “anxiety about studies.”
“Most of the time it’s a fear of lack of performance in a certain subject, and when we’ve investigated where that pressure or fear comes from, it’s normally to do with family expectations,” she said.
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The expectation placed on Hong Kong students to perform can be immense − and can bring with it devastating results. For much of the past decade, despite a concerted effort to increase mental health services and awareness around self-harm, the suicide rate among young people aged 15-24 has averaged 10.4 per 100,000, according to Hong Kong’s Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention. (In Canada, the suicide rate for the same age group is around nine per 100,000, according to the World Health Organization.)
Primary school teacher Jess Simelane said she has had students “who have had suicide attempts, who are not in school for weeks, because they are miserable.”
“In our school we have two social workers who try to handle student cases,” she said. “But teachers themselves are often not adequately equipped or trained to handle delicate situations.”
A study on suicide prevention by researchers at the University of Hong Kong, published in January, warned of a worsening “adolescent mental health crisis,” with academic stress being the most commonly identified risk factor.
“Local secondary students face the pressure of high-stakes public examinations which are crucial in determining university admissions and future opportunities, while norms and expectations of family, school, and the wider society surrounding academics can further exacerbate students’ experience of academic stress,” the researchers wrote.
Hong Kong’s Diploma of Secondary Education exams are notoriously gruelling and have long faced criticism for placing too high a burden on students, with almost their entire academic careers hinging a few weeks of exams.
“The DSE is very, very old school − the odds are really stacked up against you,” Ms. De Borja said.
Even at schools where students sit for the International Baccalaureate program, the pressure-cooker culture can sometimes be so endemic as to be self-generating, teachers told The Globe.
“It was ever present,” Mr. Tobin said. “When I would do something to supplement the curriculum, a break from just doing test practice, the students themselves would ask me: Can we go back to doing the exam papers?”
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This doesn’t mean students aren’t well-rounded, Ms. Simelane said, because often they need to have extracurricular activities to get into a good high school or university.
“So maybe you need to play the piano really well and have won competitions or dance really well,” she said. “The pressure is from all sides. So they’re going to extra tutoring after school, extracurriculars all weekend and throughout the holidays.”
Hong Kong universities are among the top-ranked in Asia, and local students face intense competition not only from their peers but from ever-increasing numbers of students from mainland China and overseas.
Unemployment has also increased significantly, while wages in many jobs are stagnant: 2026 graduates are facing the worst job market in five years, with vacancies down 55 per cent year-over-year.
Older students are highly aware of what awaits them after graduation. So while parents often have a better approach to good mental health than when she first started teaching, Ms. De Borja said, their children are still “so focused on getting the highest grade possible for everything.”