Since the early 1990s, the pace of educational reform in Hong Kong has accelerated and broadened to incorporate almost all areas of schooling. The reforms introduced during this period can be subsumed under what has generally been labelled the quality movement. In this paper, we review and comment on a number of policy reform initiatives in the four areas of "Quality Education," English Language Benchmarking, Initial Teacher Training and the Integration of Pupils with Special Needs into Ordinary Classrooms. Following a brief description of each policy initiative, the reforms are discussed in terms of their consistency, coherence and cultural fit.
[Copyright © 2000 The Education Policy Analysis Archives.]

This study tests mediated principal leadership effects on teacher professional learning through collegial trust, communication, and collaboration in Hong Kong primary schools. It is based on a series of single mediator studies, and uses the same convenience sample of 970 teachers from 32 local primary schools. It also adopts Hayes’ (2013) regression-based macros, integrated with bootstrapping method, to examine and compare sizes and proportions of potential mediating effects of the three human relational variables. The findings affirm the role and nature trust, communication, and collaboration play in the mediated relationship. In contrast, the mediating power of collaboration is non-significantly stronger than that of communication, and is more than doubled that of trust. The conclusion is that, a school environment featuring mutual trust, effective communication, and genuine collaboration is a core condition for teacher learning and change. Provided that the forces that bind people together in schools are multiple, principals are recommended to create school culture and conditions strategically for teacher learning to thrive.

This paper aims to explore substantive findings from Hong Kong research studies of educational leadership published in core international journals between 1995 and 2014. It employs a systematic research review approach to analysis across a total of 160 published research papers. The review focuses on identifying and key research issue from a clearly delimited body of the relevant papers comprised of empirical, non-empirical and review/synthesis types of studies. The findings of the published papers are then explored and synthesized for any emergent theme as the research issue that might characterize the development of Hong Kong educational leadership in the past two decades. Analysis of the emergent themes is a two-stage process: (1) a comparative mapping of the themes cross the published paper; and (2) and in-depth coding of the themes for unlocking the meanings of the key research issues. The review results illustrate a methodological pattern, a set of key research issues and a research agenda grounded in the substantial findings of the published papers. The discussion highlights the issues of Hong Kong educational leadership the scholars were concerned with, affecting the frontline of kindergartens, primary and secondary schools.

This article aims to explain the role principals play in the variation in academic achievement between secondary schools in Hong Kong. The article draws on survey data from 179 key staff and 2,037 students from 42 schools. The study uses 2 analytical approaches. First, it employs classification and regression tree analysis (CART). This was used to sort out the most significant leadership practices associated with student achievement. Second, based on first-stage analysis, the study further explores the effects of leadership practices on academic achievement using hierarchical linear modelling (HLM). Results indicate that transparent and efficient communication structures as managed by principals explained approximately 12% of between-schools variation in academic achievement. Leadership practices related to quality assurance and accountability and resource management also contributed to explaining between-schools variation in academic achievement, yet they had negative effects on student achievement. Implications for research and practice are discussed.
[Copyright of School Effectiveness and School Improvement is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09243453.2013.875044]