Exploiting the cultural divide: Effective deployment of native speaking English teachers in the primary sector

The Native English speaking Teacher Scheme is often wrongly termed an innovation, whereas in fact the involvement of expatriate teachers in the system is one aspect of Hong Kong Education “Then” as well as “Now” and “Tomorrow”. The broadening of the Scheme to the primary sector from 2002 is also nothing new, but it does pose some interesting challenges for the majority of primary schools where expatriate teachers have not played a role before. The Monitoring and Evaluating of the Native English speaking Teacher Scheme, the official evaluation of the mainly secondary scheme introduced in 1998, also explored the joys and frustrations of NETs employed in twenty local primary schools from 1998 to 2000. Since then what might be more properly termed innovations in the deployment of NETs have been introduced in the Tsuen Wan district and in the Government PSED Scheme. This paper draws on the results of the official NET evaluation and the successes of these other initiatives to identify possible pitfalls and issue pointers for potentially very exciting successes associated with the wider deployment of expatriates in the local primary schools.