The Catholic Church, the largest school-sponsoring body in Hong Kong, is a major provider of religious schools and educational programmes. In 2006, the Catholic Diocese released its first centralised and comprehensive curricular document concerning religious and moral education (RME) in Catholic schools. Taking this programme as a reflection of the Church's response to the challenges of a changing social milieu, severed church–state relations and shortcomings in Catholic education in post-1997 Hong Kong, this article reviews the framework and principles of the new curriculum. While retaining strong religious elements in its curriculum, the Catholic Church has widened and re-oriented its programme, and re-designed the contents and pedagogical methods. The new programme is characterised by adjustment and differentiation, upholding Christian faith, and selective absorption of Chinese culture. This article also discusses problems in the implementation of the new programme, including organisational compartmentalisation and an underdeveloped political dimension in the content.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2015.1099940]

Similar to other places in Asia, Hong Kong is deeply rooted in a typical hierarchical structure of Chinese society that power distance between the teachers (lower position) and principals (higher position) exists in schools. Practice of teacher leadership seems to be a distant future for beginning teachers. This paper examines the development of beginning teacher leadership through teacher-principal interactions. What effects of the interactions have on beginning teachers’ leadership development? How do principals’ leadership practices infuse beginning teacher leadership in the interactions? The findings are derived from interviews and collected documentary evidence of twelve beginning teachers teaching in primary, secondary and special schools. The teachers provided detailed accounts of their interactions with school principals over the past two years through which the teachers’ leadership development was directed and situated in specific school cultures. Results unveil that different school cultures could affect the teachers’ aspiration for and development of leadership in curriculum and instruction. Influences of principal-teacher interactions on development of teacher leadership are identified in four types of school cultures. The effects of the influences are then contextualized as “higher-power distance”, “policy-driven”, “hierarchical” and “individualistic”. Implications for development of teacher leadership are discussed.

The forms and dynamics of school leadership team remain a “blank spot” in literature. Our study investigated school leadership teams at 14 local schools in Hong Kong and 10 local schools in Shanghai. The interview results suggested that most important decisions at schools at both places go through a stepwise consultation process. School principals at both places tend to present important decisions as a result of collective decision rather than a decision made by the principal alone. The extent to which SLT members participate in initiating agenda and contributing to the discussion at regular SLT meetings is closely related with the extent to which their respective responsibility domain. The mobility of school leadership membership is low in schools at both places, which are perceived by some schools as an important hindrance to school innovation. A notable difference was found that the team composition in terms of size, position, and expertise domain of members is more diverse in Hong Kong than that in Shanghai, we argue that distinct educational administration systems at the two place may be accounted for the divergence.