In accordance with the Education Commission's consultation paper "Learning for Life", life-long learning is the hinge of HKSAR's educational development in the new millenium. In the ever-changing world life-long learning is essential to keeping oneself competitive and employable. Teachers need to exemplify and cultivate the ethos of life-long learning among the students. Continuous teacher education is important as it helps reorientate Hong Kong's teachers to embrace a life-long learning attitude. In schools, adjustments and arrangements need to be worked out for continuous teacher education to be fruitful.

With a view to achieving quality school education (QES) with all its concomitant benefits, the Education Commission published a Consultation Document on the subject in November 1996. Public views were sought thereafter for two months and the final report is expected to come out in the near future. Generally speaking, the public found the recommendations contained in the Document positive and forward-looking. We strongly back the Commission's brave initiative in attempting to improving school education in Hong Kong. Of the various areas in which recommendations for improvement were made, we would like to focus our discussion on three of them, namely, the relationship between SMI and the development of quality school education, the requirements for schools to be economically efficient and quality assurance inspections. Through studying these three areas in greater detail, we hope that we will be in a better position to suggest some of the prerequisites for quality school education and ways to make schools more accountable to the general public.

In response to public concerns over the declining language (English) and (Chinese) standards of students and teachers, and the demands to raise the quality of language teaching, the Education Commission, in 1995, published its sixth report (ECR6) in which it proposed, among other things, a system in which all teachers in Hong Kong would need to acquire benchmark qualifications in order to enter or continue in the profession. The proposal received very mixed feelings from different sections of the community. This paper will look into the socio-political context in which the policy was proposed, alongside the factors which are linked to general policy analysis concepts like human capital theory, social reproduction theory and equality opportunity theory. The paper will end on a discussion on how this policy proposal can achieve what it set out for itself.