Child and Youth Services
175. As regards child care, the Government will allocate an additional funding of about $156 million from 2019-20 onwards to increase the level of subsidy for services provided by child care centres to alleviate parents' financial burden; improve the manning ratio of qualified child care workers in day and residential child care centres and enhance training to improve service quality; and provide in phases a total of about 400 additional aided standalone child care centre places in North District, Kwun Tong, Sha Tin, Kwai Tsing and Yuen Long to provide long full-day child care services for children aged below three.
176. I will also allocate additional resources to increase professional and supporting manpower for the Neighbourhood Support Child Care Project to strengthen training for home-based child carers so as to enhance the quality of services. Incentive payments to these carers will also be raised. Furthermore, the Government will restructure the services of the existing Mutual Help Child Care Centres and deploy additional social workers and supporting staff. The above initiatives will involve an additional annual recurrent provision of around $52 million.
177. For early identification of, and to provide assistance to pre-primary children and their families with welfare needs, the Government has allocated $990 million from the Lotteries Fund to launch a three-year pilot scheme to provide social work services in phases for about 150 000 pre-primary children and their families in subsidised/aided child care centres, kindergartens and kindergarten-cum-child care centres. The first phase of services was launched in February 2019.
178. To enhance support for divorced families and their children, the Government will set up five centres to be operated by NGOs to provide one-stop co-parenting support services from 2019-20, and strengthen the manpower of the SWD. These will involve an additional annual recurrent provision of around $69 million.
179. To enhance teenagers' mental health and stress resilience, the Government will implement the measure of "two school social workers for each school" in more than 460 secondary schools in Hong Kong from the 2019/20 school year, and increase supervisory manpower accordingly. The annual recurrent expenditure involved will be around $310 million.
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