The outsourcing of education services has been widely adopted across international contexts as a ‘tested solution’ or panacea to meet various educational problems including school management, curriculum design, teaching and student discipline. Contracting third-party providers, it is argued, enhances organisational goals such as efficiency, quality and school improvement. However, the outsourcing of education services has also impacted on established notions concerning the boundaries around teachers’ work. This paper deploys the framework of discursive institutionalism to offer insight into how the idea of outsourcing has been activated and circulated by discursive communities in three diverse international settings. Despite its problem-solution logic, the institutionalisation of outsourcing creates its own problems, not least the undermining of teacher professionalism, the ‘businessification’ of schools and a diminishing of their educational mission. Copyright © 2019 British Association for International and Comparative Education.

This study aims at elaborating the reform policy effects on school leadership practices for quality educational development in the evolving hybrid of Western and Confucian cultures in Hong Kong. Why were education reforms and changes intensified in Hong Kong's education system in the post-1997 decades? How were these reform policies effectively implemented to bring about the changes in the school community? What insights into educational development can be drawn from the policy effects of school-based improvement on school leadership in the changing cultural context? The findings derived from the content analysis of the meanings of the articles selected by a systematic review approach show an urgent need for success in the political and cultural shift in alignment with the international trend of neoliberal-driven educational outcomes in the post-1997 period. School leadership was turned into collaborative whole-school participation in policy indigenising for improvement in a highly accountable context. These insights inspired us to conceptualise a framework of quality education development in policy borrowing/indigenising in school-based improvement. Copyright © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The education quality assurance policy and the high speed of knowledge expansion knowledge have impacted on and created challenges for school management. The nature of school management becomes more challenging, complex, analytic and data driven. Developing an innovative management approach to support schools to leverage knowledge from the existing organisational information and data resources to plan for improvement will provide practical help to school leaders and also contribute to the existing school management theories. This study aims to examine the effect of Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) four modes of knowledge conversion including socialisation, externalisation, combination and internalisation on enhancing strategic planning capacity of schools in Hong Kong, and to identify the critical success factors for institutionalizing the SECI knowledge creation mechanism in the Hong Kong school context. This study examines whether institutionalising the SECI mechanism in schools could enhance their strategic planning capacities. Experimental research design were adopted as the research strategy. A quantitative questionnaire survey were conducted to collect data from secondary schools in Hong Kong. Multilevel structural equation modelling were applied to examine the predictive effects of the mechanism on strategic planning capacity and to identify the school level and teacher level contextual factors for institutionalising the SECI mechanism. Results show that the externalization and combination processes support the planning, implementation and evaluation processes, and collaborative culture is identified as the critical success factor to facilitate the externalization and combination processes for creating knowledge for implementing the strategic plan. Nurturing a culture of systems thinking in the schools are critical to managing effective strategic planning processes. The identification of collaborative culture for institutionalizing the SECI mechanism in schools is

21世紀初，香港展開教育改革，教育統籌局為保證各中小學的教學水準，定期到校進行校外評核的工作。工作完成後，教育統籌局把這些校外評核報告上載互聯網，供市民瀏覽。本研究是從2003至2005兩個年度，教育統籌局在網上公佈的校外評核報告中，各隨機抽取10所小學的報告，針對這些報告中老師在有關教與學和評估不足的評語，提出教學有明確的目標，訓練學生的語文能力，有質素的提問，照顧學生的學習差異，全體學生的參與，師生互動，設計一份優質的評估，善用評估得來的數據以改善教學等解決問題的建議和策略，並提供具體的操作方法，以落實課改的理念，提高教學的成效。 At the beginning of the 21st century, education reforms were launched in Hong Kong. The Education and Manpower Bureau regularly went to schools for off-campus assessments to ensure the teaching level of all primary and secondary schools. After the work is completed, the Education and Manpower Bureau uploads these external assessment reports to the Internet for public viewing. This study randomly selected 10 elementary schools reports published by the Education and Manpower Bureau from2003 to 2005. Targeting the comments on teaching, learning and assessment, this study proposes some suggestion and strategies such as a clear goal in the teaching, training of students’ language skills, high-quality questions, attention paid to students’ learning differences, participation of all students, teacher-student interaction, a high-quality assessment design, and making good use of assessed data to improve teaching so at to implement the concept of curriculum reform and improve the effectiveness of teaching. Copyright © 2018 合肥師範學院.

To respond to the growing concerns about the need for university students to learn generic skills to complement their disciplinary expertise, many universities have included General Education (GE) in their curriculum. A new general education framework entitled "General University Requirements" (GUR) was implemented at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) in the 2012/13 academic year. A fiveyear longitudinal project using multiple evaluation strategies was conducted to evaluate the GUR, including objective outcome evaluation (online survey), Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+), subjective outcome evaluation (Student Feedback Questionnaire), and qualitative evaluation (focus groups, longitudinal case studies and document analyses). With reference to the second year of program implementation, results from different evaluation strategies consistently demonstrated that the GUR subjects were effective in promoting the five desired graduate attributes as defined by PolyU (i.e., problem solving, critical thinking ability, effective communication, ethical leadership and lifelong learning). Both students and teachers perceived the subject contents, teaching and learning methods, and teaching staff in GUR subjects favorably though several challenges were also noted. Copyright © 2015 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.

This study used interviews with three important groups of stakeholders in kindergartens, namely principals, teachers, and parents, to explore their perspectives on, and practices of, home-school partnership in early childhood education. The participants were six kindergarten principals, 12 teachers, and 12 parents, from six Hong Kong kindergartens. The study reveals that principals, teachers and parents have consistent perceptions of the importance of home-school partnership. They also show a wide range of home-school partnership activities have been implemented, even though the establishment of a parent-teacher association (PTA) is not common. Participants saw time limitations and the parents' lack of knowledge relevant to home-school partnership as the main barriers to its implementation. While strategies have been suggested to tackle time barriers, no strategies were discussed to overcome educators' and parents' worries over parents' lack of competency. The findings suggest that more teacher training should be provided to focus on skills that enable educators to better communicate and work with parents from diverse backgrounds to overcome barriers related to parents' lack of competency perceived by principals and teachers. Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.