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Hong Kong’s Education Bureau (EDB) has apologised for mistakenly sending the Primary One allocation results via SMS one day early, urging parents to ignore the message.
The EDB said on Tuesday that an “operational error” in setting up a system-controlled text-messaging function led to the sending of the Primary One results via SMS on Tuesday morning, instead of Wednesday morning.
It said it had sent a clarification SMS to parents, telling them to ignore the previous message and await the formal results, which will be released at 7.30am on Wednesday.
The SMS text messages sent on Tuesday morning appeared to contain erroneous information. Some parents told local media that they received messages showing the wrong year and, in some cases, incorrect school choices.
An EDB spokesperson said the prematurely sent message would not affect the results of the Primary One central allocation.
“After a full-scale review by the technical teams, it is confirmed that the system has not been subject to any cyberattack or hacking, and the core database remains integral and complete,” the spokesperson said in a Chinese-language statement.
“This incident is totally unrelated to information security and cybersecurity,” the spokesperson added.
Two hotlines – 2832 7700 and 2832 7740 – have been set up for answering parents’ enquiries, the bureau said, urging parents not to contact the schools based on Tuesday’s SMS.
The EDB said it had formed a crisis response team to review the incident, including whether the system or any personnel were at fault.
This year’s Primary One central allocation has a high satisfaction rate of 93.6 per cent, the bureau said last week.
A total of 16,345 children took part this year, with a little more than 14,000 allocated to schools within their first three choices, according to the EDB.
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Hans Tse is a reporter at Hong Kong Free Press with an interest in local politics, academia, and media transformation. He was previously a social science researcher, with writing published in the Social Movement Studies and Social Transformation of Chinese Societies journals. He holds an M.Phil in communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Before joining HKFP, he also worked as a freelance reporter for Initium between 2019 and 2021, where he covered the height – and aftermath – of the 2019 protests, as well as the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.
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