The teaching profession, similar to other human service occupations, requires recruits to have a strong sense of social responsibility, as their commitment is to help their students to become better citizens. Success in recruiting qualified and committed teachers, nevertheless, depends on whether the teaching career is attractive to quality and motivated young people. This paper reports a quantitative and qualitative study of the perceptions of teaching as a career by graduates from twenty secondary schools with different backgrounds in Hong Kong. It analyzed the relationship of the characteristics of these students with their interest in teaching, and examined the factors which may have influenced their choice of teaching as a career. It is hoped that the findings of the study could increase our understanding of young people's perceptions of a teaching career in different societies, and help policy makers adopt more effective measures to increase the attractiveness of teaching to qualified school leavers.

The Native English speaking Teacher Scheme is often wrongly termed an innovation, whereas in fact the involvement of expatriate teachers in the system is one aspect of Hong Kong Education “Then” as well as “Now” and “Tomorrow”. The broadening of the Scheme to the primary sector from 2002 is also nothing new, but it does pose some interesting challenges for the majority of primary schools where expatriate teachers have not played a role before. The Monitoring and Evaluating of the Native English speaking Teacher Scheme, the official evaluation of the mainly secondary scheme introduced in 1998, also explored the joys and frustrations of NETs employed in twenty local primary schools from 1998 to 2000. Since then what might be more properly termed innovations in the deployment of NETs have been introduced in the Tsuen Wan district and in the Government PSED Scheme. This paper draws on the results of the official NET evaluation and the successes of these other initiatives to identify possible pitfalls and issue pointers for potentially very exciting successes associated with the wider deployment of expatriates in the local primary schools.

The In-service Courses of Training for Teachers (ICTT) in Hong Kong played a key hole in meeting the minimum training needs of thousands of unqualified non-graduate teachers during the expansion of mass education from the 1950s to 1970s. Though these remedial courses have all along been perceived by the community as of dubious quality, they have lasted for five decades, as untrained teachers continued to join the teaching force, in the absence of a government policy requiring new teachers to be pre-service trained. It is not until recently that their phasing out has become a possibility. This paper provides a critical review of education policies which have allowed the prolongation of these courses for half a century. It illustrates the long and difficult process by which Hong Kong has been moving towards an “all trained” teaching profession.

Non-traditional pathways or alternative routes for initial teacher education have proliferated in the United States and the United Kingdom (Berliner, 2006; Furlong, 2005), and are being advocated in Australia and a number of European countries (Buckingham, 2005; Eurydice, 2004). The impetus for this development has been largely contributed by government efforts to alleviate critical teacher shortages in high need subjects and geographical districts. However, the development has been accompanied by politicized attacks on the traditional requirements of university- or college-based initial teacher education which were perceived as deterring talented prospective teachers from entering the profession. Furthermore, a more fundamental change has been the criticism of the quality of university-based teacher education, and the shift of teacher education to school-based and employment-based routes (Abell Foundation, 2001; US Department of Education, 2002). This paper first provides a comparative analysis of the policy context and the development of alternative routes to teacher education in various countries, and reviews the research literature on the arguments for and against traditional and alternative routes of teacher education. It then traces the development of teacher education policy since the establishment of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in 1997. It argues that there is substantial evidence to support the claim that government policy has been influenced by the developments of alternative routes of teacher preparation elsewhere, which has partly contributed to its wavering over whether to implement the "all graduate, all trained" policy objective announced by the Chief Executive in 1997. This policy shift has illustrated the long and difficult process of teacher professionalization in Hong Kong and may provide useful insights for other parts of the world.