This chapter outlines the background, purpose, strategies, and initial outcomes of one centre’s research agenda into school leadership and change in the East and South-East Asian region. The Centre is the Asia Pacific Centre for Leadership and Change (APCLC) at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). The first section outlines research on the state of indigenous knowledge in the region. This provides the context and justification for our research agenda. The second section presents our purpose statements, the broad research agenda, and the projects under this agenda. The third section describes progress to date. The fourth section summarises some of the key contributions of the Centre – the intention here is to illustrate our outcomes. The final section summarises what we see as the major contributions of the Centre to date.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland]

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between staff size and perceived organizational support (POS) in early childhood education (ECE) organizations. Design/methodology/approach–A territory-wide questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the perceptions of preschool teachers in Hong Kong on four dimensions of organizational support, namely, teacher participation in decision making, school management support, school performance in organizational support, and organizational negativity in organizational support. In total, 2,066 teachers from 189 schools were sampled with stratified random sampling. Confirmatory factor analysis and latent mean analysis were employed. Findings–There was a significant relationship between staff size and POS. Specifically, teachers working at small schools in terms of staff size reported significantly higher POS than their counterparts in medium and large schools in aspects including teacher participation in decision making, school management support, and school performance in POS. Conversely, both medium and large schools had higher scores on organizational negativity. Research limitations/implications–There may exist other factors (e.g. principal leadership), which are not investigated in this study, that influence POS. Future studies are needed to capture a fuller structural relationship among an array of factors that influence POS. Originality/value–Research on staff size and POS has been conducted separately, without one element informing the other. The findings of the present study will stimulate more research on POS and staff size. The study will stimulate thinking about whether larger preschools are more efficient than smaller preschools in terms of scale of economies in a marker driven, ECE context. Building upon the foundation laid by the study, future studies may explore the interaction between staff size and POS on intended student outcomes in ECE.
[Copyright © 2016 Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Although the essential role of school leaders in school improvement processes has been confirmed in the literature, the link between school leadership and student outcomes has only been recently addressed. Research suggests that the effect of school leaders on student outcomes is mediated through the creation of certain school conditions. Our study aimed to verify the mediating effect of some school conditions on the school leadership and student outcomes link. Based on empirical data collected from the principals and key staff in 49 secondary schools in Hong Kong, our results showed that staff collaboration was a mediating factor influencing the link and it was more commonly found in schools whose leaders were more attentive to the professional development of teachers.