Affiliated School Recruitment Information

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust has funded the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Hong Kong to launch the Jockey Club “Peace and Awareness” Mindfulness Culture in Schools Initiative (JC PandA) since 2019. In the last four years, the JC PandA Project has made substantial contribution to the mental health of students, teachers, and parents as well as to the mindfulness culture in numerous schools in Hong Kong. Please see the current website for details. We are glad that the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust has extended the project to 2025. The 9 resources schools that have joined the project since 2019 are pioneers in their districts. They share experiences and provide training venues to affiliated schools that join the project later. So far, 34 affiliated schools have joined the project in 2022-24. We are now recruiting new batches of affiliated schools that will be admitted in 2024-25. Primary, secondary, and special schools which hope to join the project may take note of the following information:

Preparation

1. The administrators and teachers in the affiliated schools should have consensus on the mission to build mindfulness culture in their schools.
2. Each affiliated school will form a core group with 5 to 6 members. Ideally, the core group is composed of teachers who are responsible for guidance or life education. It would be preferable to include school social workers, educational psychologists, or student counselors.
3. Core group members are willing to attend an 8-week mindfulness course that lasts for 1.5 hours per week and practice mindfulness.

Undertaking

1. The core group members practice mindfulness daily for at least 20 minutes after the 8-week mindfulness course.
2. The affiliated schools will send the core group members to attend a three or four-day mindfulness teacher training course in July 2025 so that they can learn how to teach Paws b to primary school students or .b to secondary school students.
3. The affiliated schools will facilitate core group members to teach Paws b or .b courses to students during school time (e.g., life education class, tutorial and class teacher period) after they have completed the training.
4. The affiliated schools will work with the project to explore ways to build mindfulness culture in schools.
5. The affiliated schools will collaborate with the project to investigate the effectiveness of mindfulness on students, teachers, and parents.

Support and benefit

1. All trainings, including the 8-week mindfulness course (.b Foundations), Teach Paws b and Teach .b, are free of charge to the affiliated schools.
2. Our team will support the affiliated schools in building a mindfulness culture until the end of the project.
3. Paws b and .b are mindfulness courses developed by ‘Mindfulness in Schools Project’ in the UK. Affiliated schools can include these courses and resources packages developed by our project in their curriculum with unlimited use so that their students can learn mindfulness and be benefited.
4. If the school social workers, educational psychologists or student counsellors received additional training from the project, they will also be able to offer mindfulness courses to teachers, school helping professionals and parents who experience a lot of stress.

Application

Please fill the online application form or click here to download the application form in Word format.

The applications will be reviewed starting from 15th May 2024. Successful applicants for the year 2024-25 will be informed in late June.

For enquiry, please contact us by email at jcpanda@hku.hk or by phone at 3917 5176.