In Hong Kong, the move towards quality education has stirred up waves of changes in the education setting in the late 90s. Drastic changes have been implemented in terms of curriculum, methodology and forms of school management. Borrowed heavily from the Western democracies, the contemporary educational policy and practice in Hong Kong are increasingly directed by the market model of educational provision valuing consumer choice; accountability; quality assurance; devolution of authority and participative management process. In the face of these changes, three issues are pertinent to school leadership - Firstly, the approaches towards School-based Management stress the importance of school heads to work closely with the various stakeholders who may have different and often conflicting role expectations on their school heads. Role incumbents may find themselves confused when determining framework of defined outcomes and accountability. Secondly, the injection of consumer control into school operation and the marketisation of educational provision denote the need of school heads to have a deeper understanding of the needs, expectations and aspirations of the various stakeholders directly or indirectly involved in school management. Thirdly, increasing demands for school heads to seek professional development opportunities that will broaden their existing knowledge and increase their array of management skills to cope with the current changes. While research literature is enormous on the studies of role expectations and job aspirations of school heads especially from the perspective of teachers, parents and even heads themselves, however, there is a lack of robust research locally and abroad on the perspective of the neglected and yet the most directly involved stakeholder - the students. The present study attempts to develop understanding of the role expectations of primary school heads as viewed from the students' perspective and to identify the effects of such expectations

Recently, the professional development and training of principals has become a hot issue in Hong Kong. The idea of enhancing the professional quality of principals is officially raised by the Education Commission in its Report no. 7, followed by a government consultation paper on a proposed principals training programme. It is mentioned in the consultation paper that the draft programme is proposed after some visits to Australia, the USA, the UK and Singapore and a study of their prinicpals development programmes. The impact of the introduction of a principals training programme is great. It affects more than 1,200 primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong and twice or thrice the number in terms of serving and potential principals, not to mention the other stakeholders namely teachers, parents and students. There are also related controversial issues ranging from educational theory to practice. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it is to introduce in greater details the various principals training programmes of the countries mentioned in the consultation paper. On top of them, training programmes in China and some other countries are also included to give an overall picture of representative principal training programmes. It is hope that this will widen our scope in the philosophy and practice behind a principals' training programme. Secondly, the paper also reports the findings of a survey conducted after the publication of the consultation paper. The survey was conducted in terms of questionnaires and the subjects of the survey were more than 750 serving and aspiring principals in over 230 local primary and secondary schools. Results of the survey will be discussed and recommendations will be made.