Macao has been developing at a fast pace in these last few decades. Based on the agenda of the New Urban Zone, there will be more infrastructures and casinos built. It's believed there will be a high demand for human resource for the prosperity of the future. Therefore, education for the next generation is the key for the future. However, there is a group of youngsters who have failed to fit into the local education system, being neglected and left behind by the mainstream. They are considered as a marginalized group, who lack higher academic certification which makes them unable to attain a higher social status.

 

Peter Zhuang, a 21-year-old Form 6 student, who has repeated his grade four times in his middle school, said that it's nice of Macao to have such a middle school like Sam Yuk which accepted his application after several second expulsion by other schools, adding that there aren't many options for the students with poor academic performance.

 

"I failed to form a good foundation in my primary education, hence I may have a difficulty adapting to the formal education in Macao," said Zhuang.

 

It's believed that there is an issue facing the education of Macau, a global journal article published by The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development a few years ago showed that there were nearly 45% of students under 16 years old who repeated at least one year of schooling in Macao, and it was the highest repetition rate in the world. In other words, almost half of the Macao students repeated their grade. Also, another report done by the Macau Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) in 2015 showed that there were 1,260 teenagers over 15 years old dropping out of school, which accounted for nearly 1.8% of the total number of the formal education students.

 

Ko Seng Man, a local scholar with a PhD in education, discussed the grade repetition issue in Macao in a conference article. He claimed that this issue happens in Macao because over 90% of the schools in Macao are private and they don't share a common recognition of the standard of repetition while they hope that their students can achieve better results in the admission examination.

 

"I have already wasted much time on my study and I think rather than keep studying, I should get to work once I have finished my high school," said Zhuang.

 

However, according to a report by the DSEJ in 2017, over 4,700 high school graduates seek higher education standing for 92% of the total.  That's to say, there are still 8% of students who would be left behind with only a high school diploma or even lower. They are the least competitive in the job market.

 

To conclude, there is a group of teenagers who fail to fit in the education system in Macao and they are very much marginalized and left behind. The public should not ascribe their misfortune to their poor academic performance, instead, the government should assist these people by establishing a guideline for schools to educate students with poor performance and build more vocational institutes like the Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (IVE) to provide more education options.