Mainland study tours leave teachers on 24-hour duty with no safety tools

A teacher accompanying an EDB-funded secondary-school study tour to the mainland is forced to bunk in the same room as a student with an infectious disease. These tours carry systemic gaps in how they are managed: accompanying teachers are made to shoulder round-the-clock supervision duties, working through the night under an inadequate teacher-to-student ratio, and in some cases sharing rooms with infected students — a serious breach of labour rights.

Mainland hotels sit in entertainment districts where students easily slip out on their own, and the safety holes in leading a tour are almost impossible to plug, leaving schools and teachers liable for risks they cannot reasonably control. The situation reflects strong demand within Hong Kong's education sector for proper safety-management tools for overseas study travel, labour-protection support for teachers, and an independent assessment mechanism.