On Hong Kong's Pre-school Education Voucher

Pre-school education constitutes an important and organic part of Chinese national education system. It plays an important part in the healthy and orderly development of individuals and our country.However, preschool-education in China now facing a series of difficulties, such as the misunderstanding of people, the inadequate total input by the state finance on pre-school education, the unreasonable internal structure of the fiscal expenditure on pre-school education, imperfect administrative system etc. The key to solving these problems is to smoothing relationship between preschool education and our government, figuring out functions of government in the development of pre-school education.Based on theories of the leading role of government on preschool education,this research takes the pre-school voucher project of Hong Kong as an example and analyzes the background,essence, general situation, effects and disputes of Hong Kong's pre-school education voucher by case analysis and literature research. The study also discusses the difference of the development of pre-school education between mainland China and Hong Kong by comparison method and history study method to find out the referential meaning of Hong Kong pre-school education voucher.The dissertation contains five parts:The first part is the introduction.This part focuses on the origin of the study,the main concept of the study and the issues that this paper discusses, and then studies the present literatures as well as introduces the procedure,thoughts, concepts and methods of the study.Chapter one mainly discusses inevitability and necessity of the leading role of government in the development of pre-school education. It explains why government must interfere and control pre-school education by using the theory of pre-school education studies, market failure, government failure, public goods theory and human capital theory. Firstly, It is the duty of government to lead the development of pre-school education,which is highly related to the development of individuals and our country as well as the accumulation of human resources. Secondly, the theory of market failure tells us that it is unsuitable to let the market itself guide the development of pre-school education. And it is also wrong to advocate the domination role of government when it comes to the question how can the government control pre-school. As pre-school education is a public good,it is advisable to balance the function of government and market in the development of pre-school education, and emphasize the leading function of government.Chapter two is the comprehensive introduction of Hong Kong's pre-school voucher scheme. It includes the background, main contents, operational flow and internal operation mechanism. This research is based on the method of case study and literature research by collecting, analyzing and summarizing all the related materials, such as Government Reports of Hong Kong, research paper etc.The third chapter is the comprehensive evaluation of Hong Kong's preschool voucher project. It consists of the principle, aims, effects and controversies of this project. The main research method in this chapter is contrastive study. It analyzes the similarity and differences of Hong Kong's pre-school voucher scheme and these voucher schemes implemented in other counties and summarizes the traits of Hong Kong's pre-school voucher scheme. It also collects and contrasts different opinions of people towards this scheme to find out the controversy of the scheme. It summarizes the effects of Hong Kong's scheme by contrasting the situation of Hong Kong's preschool education before and after the implementation of this scheme.The last chapter summarizes the straits and problems in the development of pre-school education in mainland China and analyzes the referential importance of Hong Kong's pre-school voucher scheme in solving these problems listed above.