One of the dilemmas in educational policy is how to reconcile individual rights with social demands and ease of administration. In 1978 the Hong Kong Department of Education introduced a competitive secondary school allocation procedure (SSPA) based on Internal Assessment (IA) in primary schools. It was designed to match pupils to appropriate secondary schools. Every year the girls performed better than the boys. At first the Education Department solved this "problem" by taking marks away from the girls and subsequently by employing separate gender ranking, gender banding, and gender quotas for co-educational schools. In 1995 a Sex Discrimination Ordinance was passed and an Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) set up. Complaints from girls soon came to the EOC and the department's policy was judged by judicial review. Documents presented in court will be used to illustrate the arguments about gender and cognition.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

The fact that the number of sojourn programs organised to overseas and mainland China has grown rapidly in recent years in secondary schools in Hong Kong underlines the interest of schools in embracing the ideal of providing more learning opportunities for students under the growing impact of globalization. In this study, with its definition referring to short-term programs organised by Hong Kong secondary schools for students to reside temporarily in a foreign land for the purpose of learning, these popular programs have been playing a significant role in internationalisation of Hong Kong education through varied student interactions with peoples and cultures. This study particularly attempts to explore the nature of sojourn programs, how different stakeholders think about the importance and their impact on the process of internationalisation of Hong Kong secondary education. The study also explores how secondary schools in Hong Kong maintain a balance between destinations in China and overseas (such as Australia, UK and Canada) in an era of educational reforms.
This is a doctoral work in progress, a primitive research and data collected will be presented to reveal the significance of the study.
[Copyright of Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) at http://www.aare.edu.au]

This article details a large-scale study of vice-principals in Hong Kong secondary schools. The study aimed to examine the core competency areas that pertain to the work of vice-principals and the way in which vice-principals perceive these areas to relate to school success. It also examined the factors that affect their level of job satisfaction, and differentiated these factors according to whether they did or did not aspire to principalship. The findings indicate that competency gaps, if large enough, can affect the level of job satisfaction of vice-principals and that the impact of these gaps varies according to career orientation. The results show that vice-principals who aspire to be a principal are more satisfied in their jobs than their less ambitious colleagues; and that the effect of these gaps on job satisfaction differs between the two groups. The implications of the findings for the future supply of principals and leader development are expounded.
[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/10.1080/09243450701856549]

Using data from Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this study examines the social disparity of family involvement. A total of 4,405 students from 140 Hong Kong secondary schools participated in the first cycle of PISA study identifying four types of family involvement: cultural communication, social communication, homework supervision, and cultural activity. Multi-level analysis was used to examine the major family factors related to these types of family involvement. Consistent with previous research, working-class, immigrant, and single-parent families tend to have lower levels of parental involvement. The effect of these structural factors decreased after family resources, family network, and family norms entered into the multi-level regression model. It can be argued that the social disparity of family involvement is mediated by the deprivation of useful resources, lack of network, and low educational aspiration of the disadvantaged families. The results also suggested that it is not only cooperation between home and school, but also connection between parents and their children's peers that provides the necessary chemistry for success. Educators, parents, and policymakers should be aware that family networking should be extended to include the peers of the teenagers if they want to enhance family involvement in education.
[Copyright of School Community Journal is the property of American Association of School Librarians.
Access via Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.adi.org/journal/]

Although most secondary schools do use management information systems (MISs), these systems tend not to be used to support higher order managerial activities but are currently primarily used for clerical purposes. This situation is unsatisfactory as MISs fully utilised could offer invaluable support to schools, which are increasingly being granted autonomy in the development of school policy. This study investigated whether training school principals thoroughly could improve the utilisation of MISs in schools. The results demonstrate the positive effects of a deliberately designed training course on school principals' knowledge of MISs, attitudes towards MISs, and skills required to effectively use MISs to support decision-making.
[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/10.1080/09243450701712577]

School guidance seeks to promote the whole person growth of students. It is regarded as an integral part of an educational programme. In Hong Kong secondary schools, a team of teachers are responsible for school guidance. This article examines how guidance teachers made sense of their caring work in general and specifically the counselling services they offered to students. With the use of a narrative analysis and personal experience methods, the study explores the experience of guidance teachers in counselling. Twelve in-service teachers who had enrolled in the Postgraduate Diploma in Education programme at the Hong Kong Institute of Education were interviewed. The influence of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism, emerging as a theme from the data, was prominent, as its key principles were incorporated into the teachers' personal systems of counselling. The findings illuminate the influence of Chinese culture in Hong Kong schools. Implications for the promotion of culturally responsive approaches to counselling and culturally competent practices for helping are discussed.
[Copyright of British Journal of Guidance & Counselling is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03069880802088929]