This paper presents empirical evidence on kindergarten admission preparation services in Hong Kong. Parents increasingly turn to tutoring companies for a range of services, such as social skills training, portfolio editing, mock interviews, and parental consultation. We used qualitative methods to capture the views of parents, teachers, tutors, and early childhood educators ( n  = 78), to contribute to the lack of literature on this topic. Our findings indicate a market-driven ecosystem of education that favours commercial interests, widens educational inequalities, and is perpetuated by factors such as privatisation of the early childhood sector and misalignment between kindergarten and primary school curricula. Parents consider choice of school, future aspirations, and perceived hierarchies among kindergartens as major considerations for seeking admission preparation services. Heightened admission competition is also present in pre-nurseries and playgroups, calling for increased attention to be paid to the level of competition imposed among children. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Japan has a longstanding history of shadow education, which has evolved, transformed, and extended beyond its borders. Japanese shadow education institutions, known as "juku," have expanded worldwide, including in Asia, the US, and Europe, offering offline and online tutoring services mainly for Japanese expatriates. This study examines the role and features of "juku," specifically in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. It identifies 20 different juku, analyzes their types, and explains a different type of "juku," the "Japanese cultural supplementary school," that caters to expatriate parents aiming to nurture Japanese culture and traditions in their children. Although the Japanese "juku" phenomenon has previously attracted the attention of scholars, there is a gap in the literature when it comes to transnational "juku" and its operation outside Japan. This paper contributes to informing scholars, policymakers, and the public on the transnational movement of shadow education as a global phenomenon. Copyright ©2024 Springer.

This study systematically maps the research trends in the domain of “shadow education” over the last 40 years using metadata extracted from the SCOPUS database. The results reveal that the outputs of shadow education research have grown exponentially within the last decade. Bray and his colleagues from the University of Hong Kong, East China Normal University, and the Education University of Hong Kong have been the most prolific and influential research team. They are followed by Park and Byun from the USA, who have mostly worked on East Asian contexts. The USA, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, have been the main sources of contributions and the University of Hong Kong has been the leading university in this field. Educational studies, economics, psychology, linguistics, and sociology have been the main disciplines researched within shadow education. Shadow education studies have revealed how shadow education can be a major instrument for maintaining and exacerbating social inequalities. They have also largely focused on the tangible (quantifiable) benefits related to improving students’ examination results. This study’s results stress the importance of regulating the private tutoring market, suggesting areas for ongoing research. © 2023 Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

This paper explores how parents in Hong Kong perceive the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of academic and non-academic private tutoring (PT) for their children, using a thematic analysis of interviews with 80 parents from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We seek to understand the role of PT in parents' thinking about their children's learning and developmental needs in uncertain times, which foregrounds parents' temporalities in the face of disruption. We find that maintaining pre-pandemic PT levels was the most common attitude for almost half of the sample, followed by roughly similar groups of parents who increased or decreased their use of PT. Parental perceptions of the functions of PT converged on three main uses: mitigating the effects of schooling disruptions, making productive use of newfound free time and providing a sense of normality. Using a timescapes lens, we identify temporal elements in how PT factored into parents' experiences and perceptions of managing 'gained' and 'lost' time, adapting to remote learning, avoiding health risks and reflecting on inequalities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Copyright © 2023 Taylor & Francis.

Private tutoring, or shadow education, has become a widespread phenomenon globally. Its growth can be attributed to the expansion of cram schools offering live and video tutoring. This study critically analyses students' perceptions of video-recorded classes. Specifically, it problematises students' preference for video-recorded classes by exploring their reasons for enrolment and their perspective on the benefits and shortcomings of video tutoring in a Hong Kong cram school. It adopts an exploratory sequential mixed-methods approach. Data were collected through classroom observations, student interviews and questionnaire. The findings reveal that students chose video-recorded classes mainly because of their flexibility of timeslots and locations. A critical discussion of the findings unveils students' contradictory attitude towards the presence of tutors in classrooms, their preference for passive learning and anxiety about tutor–tutee interactions. This study contributes to the growing literature of shadow education and offers implications for potential policy change in the private tutoring context. Copyright © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

本文從一名內部人士的視角來說明在香港參與補習的生活經歷，分別以學生、補習導師和研究人員的角色，對影子教育普遍存在的幾個問題給予分析並獲得啟示。本文採用自傳式敘事研究方法，數據來源於作者的事件回憶錄，受啟發於自身作為學員和導師時使用的教材、自己的視頻錄課，以及研究項目的反思日記。基於作者在補習行業扮演不同角色的敘述，本文討論了幾個主要問題，包括(1)影子教育對主流教育積極和消極影響的反思，(2)缺乏對補習教師和廣告質量的嚴格規範，(3)影子教育如何加劇教育不平等以及一些補習機構和非營利組織如何解決這一問題。就作者所知，本文是唯一一篇從作者自身作為學生、導師和研究人員的個人經歷來討論影子教育問題的文章，它從內部人士視角闡述了香港補習行業的實踐和政策發展。 This article aims to illustrate the lived experiences of engaging in private tutoring in Hong Kong as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher and draw implications on several issues arising from the prevalence of shadow education. This article adopted an autobiographical narrative approach. Data were collected through the author’s memoir of events, stimulated by the tutorial materials he used when he was a tutee and a tutor, his video-recorded lessons of tutoring, and reflective journals from his research projects. Various issues are discussed based on the narrative of the author playing different roles in the tutoring industry, including the positive and negative washback on mainstream education; the lack of strict regulation of the quality of tutors and advertisements; how shadow education may exacerbate education inequality; and how some tutorial companies and nonprofit organizations are addressing the issue. This article, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the only one that discusses the problems of shadow education from an author’s own personal experiences as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher. It illustrates how practices and policies of the private tutoring industry are evolving in Hong Kong from an insider perspective. Copyright © 2020 華東師範大學.

Private tutoring is one of the unintended outcomes of high-stakes testing and has become a widespread global phenomenon. It is called shadow education because it mimics the mainstream curriculum. From the critical perspective, this study investigated the role of private tutoring in a context of high-stakes testing through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. It explored 18 Secondary Six (Grade 12) students’ reflections on their learning experiences in private tutoring in Hong Kong for one year. Conceptualized with Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed, the findings reveal that while students are being oppressed in the washback of high-stakes testing under neoliberalism, shadow education further oppresses the students by (1) intensifying the “banking” concept of education, (2) teaching as the “authority”, (3) emphasizing performativity and (4) offering “false generosity”. The findings provide implications for potential educational change in contexts where education systems increasingly rely on accountability and selection through high-stakes testing. By problematizing the role of private tutoring through the conceptual lens of oppression, the study calls for research to take a closer look at the impact of shadow education on learners’ experiences in the current neoliberal era. Copyright © 2020 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Purpose: This article aims to illustrate from the author's insider perspective the lived experiences of engaging in private tutoring in Hong Kong as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher and draw implications on several issues arising from the prevalence of shadow education.Design/Approach/Methods: This article adopted an autobiographical narrative approach. Data were collected through the author's memoir of events, stimulated by the tutorial materials he used when he was a tutee and a tutor, his own video-recorded lessons of tutoring, and reflective journals from his research projects.Findings: Various issues are discussed based on the narrative of the author playing different roles in the tutoring industry, including (1) the positive and negative washback on mainstream education, (2) the lack of strict regulation of the quality of tutors and advertisements, and (3) how shadow education may exacerbate education inequality and how some tutorial companies and nonprofit organizations are addressing the issue.Originality/Value: This article, to the best of the author's knowledge, is the only one that discusses the issues of shadow education from an author's own personal experiences as a tutee, a tutor, and a researcher. It illustrates how practices and policies of the private tutoring industry are evolving in Hong Kong from an insider perspective. Copyright © 2019 The Author(s).

Based on Dörnyei's L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS), this study explored senior secondary students' multiple L2 selves when they enrolled in English private tutoring (EPT) courses. Through narrative inquiry, this paper analysed 18 Hong Kong Secondary Six (Grade 12) students' English learning experiences and their motivation for learning English and subscribing to EPT. Each participant completed a questionnaire, wrote three pieces of reflective writing and responded to six individual interviews throughout the year of study. The findings indicated that language learning converged from diverse activities to examination drilling at senior secondary school years. The learners possessed insecure actual L2 selves, revealing a discrepancy with their future L2 selves consisting of dominant ought-to L2 selves and suppressed ideal L2 selves. This study contributes to research in language learning by unveiling EPT learners' formation of L2 selves in a context of high-stakes testing. The findings contribute to the development of the L2MSS by operationalising the actual L2 self, its discrepancy with possible L2 selves, and the interrelationship between ideal and ought-to L2 selves. The study calls for further research to bridge the fields of shadow education and language learning given the significant role EPT plays in shaping learners' out-of-school L2 learning experiences. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Private tutoring has become a widespread phenomenon worldwide, partly due to the global trend of marketisation and commodification of education. Informed by a discursive view of identity and through multimodal discourse analysis, this study aims to unveil part of the shadow education discourse by investigating the identities of 41 English language tutors portrayed in their biographies on the websites of six leading tutorial schools in Hong Kong. The findings suggest that the tutors project identities as (1) an authoritative exam expert, (2) a popular star, and (3) a well-qualified English language teacher. These multiple identities overlap and collectively create an 'exam expert-star-teacher' hybrid identity. The study sheds light on how implicit values and beliefs about shadow education are created and manifested in educational and social discourses, particularly when biography in tutorial advertisements is a prevailing commercial genre with promotional purposes. Copyright © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.