Numerous educational change and school reforms have been conducted to pursue educational effectiveness and educational quality in different parts of the world. Unfortunately, most of the past educational reforms with focus on fragmentary improvement and remedial treatment are not sufficient to bring holistic school development and long term effectiveness, and inevitably many of them have experienced serious frustration if not failure. This paper aims to propose a new direction including ten important tendencies for ongoing and future educational reform and school reengineering in Hong Kong and international contexts. The tendencies are: (1) Towards multiple school functions from simplistic purposes; (2) Towards school autonomy and self-initiative through school-based management; (3) Towards school healthy functioning through a knowledge-based profile; (4) Towards school continuous learning and development through strategic management; (5) Towards human initiative through multi-level self management in school; (6) Towards school multiple effectiveness through a dynamic process; (7) Towards holistic education in school through layer management; (8) Towards synergy and effectiveness through congruence in school; (9) Towards total home-school collaboration and community support for resources, ideas, and legitimacy; (10) Towards school driving force through transformational leadership. The educational reforms in this new direction can support schools to facilitate continuous development of students and staff, increase support of parents and community, improve technology in education and management, and pursue multiple functions more effectively at different levels of our society. Hopefully, all those concerned particularly our students and teachers can benefit from the coming educational reforms.

There is a strong need to understand, monitor, and enhance educational quality. This paper reports on a project that developed a framework of indicators for monitoring educational quality in Hong Kong primary schools. The framework was developed through various case studies and 2 large surveys of over 200 Hong Kong primary schools (involving over 650 classes, 3,800 teachers, and 20,000 students) during 1991-95. A preliminary framework, based on the research literature, included indicators at the student individual level, the classroom level, the teacher individual level, the teacher group level, and the organizational level. The framework was tested and developed through the 2 surveys (the first conducted in 1992 and the second in 1993-94) and a total of 12 case studies. Survey data was used to map the education profiles of Hong Kong primary schools by means on indicators; by percentage of schools in high, satisfactory, and low performance; by distribution of schools on each indicator; and by profiles of characteristics of effective and ineffective schools. Six tables and seven figures are included.

This paper will present why and what transformational leadership is needed to pursue school effectiveness and development in the rapidly changing education environment and in the coming new century. First, the challenges to school leadership and the need for new leadership will be discussed in the light of the pursuit of multiple school effectiveness and the worldwide educational reform trends. Based on the recent research on principals' leadership in Hong Kong schools, some important insights will be drawn for leadership development and school development particularly in both local context and international contexts. Then the paper will illustrate the shifts of leadership concepts and explain why transformational leadership is do critical to meeting educational challenges in the changing environment. The conception of transformational leadership and its relationship to school-based management, strategic management, and school effectiveness will be illustrated and explained. Finally, a number of implications will be proposed for school principals to practice transformational leadership and achieve long-term and multiple school effectiveness. Establishing a principal centre for leadership learning and development will be a major direction.

This inquiry aimed to examine the benefits of having international field experience for a group of Hong Kong postgraduate student teachers who joined a six-week immersion program in New Zealand. Through participants' reflections, interviews and program evaluations, the present investigation found that the overseas field experience not only enriched their cultural understanding, pedagogical knowledge and skills, but also enhanced their language awareness, classroom language and recognition of different English varieties.
[Copyright of Australian Journal of Teacher Education is the property of School of Education, Edith Cowan University. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.14221/ajte.2011v36n10.4]