Under the prevailing ideology of neoliberalism, delegation of in-house functions to third-party for-profit organizations and personnel has gradually expanded its presence in numerous sectors including schooling. In the past decades, polities worldwide have started to allocate government funds to finance schools to purchase educational services on top of traditionally outsourced ancillary functions, the phenomenon of which was termed the “new education privatization” by Patricia Burch. In the US and the UK, this practice has found to raise and perpetuate quality and equity issues in education, particularly concerning service evaluation mechanisms and class-related discrepancy in educational attainment. This presentation explores the degree to which the new privatization of education has been promoted in the Hong Kong context with discussion of relevant quality control and educational equality issues. Based on a document research on a yearly fund provided by the Education Bureau specifically for hiring educational services, the types of purchased services and quality control schemes used by schools in 2 affluent and 2 underprivileged districts have been analyzed and compared. It was found that the phenomenon has had a considerable presence in Hong Kong and may raise accountability and equity issues due to design of evaluation methods and choice of services.

Hong Kong’s high ranking in the OECD’s PISA study and other international assessments has caught the interest of policy-makers internationally who are searching for policy models and classroom practices to learn from. This paper will investigate the nature and validity of the comparative international references made about education in Hong Kong and lessons that might be usefully learned from its experience. It will do this by exploring the outcomes of research that gathered views of stakeholders in Hong Kong, including policy-makers past and present, teachers, principals, academic experts, and parent and employer groups, along with the views of policy-makers, researchers and Chinese community leaders in UK. These perspectives shed light on the reasons – within and beyond the classroom - behind Hong Kong’s success, as well as on the strengths and limitations of schooling that may be misunderstood internationally, in particular in its perceived success in achieving the holy grail of quality and equity in education. Listening to local voices raises questions as to whether strengths in one system as identified by international agencies can be used by policy-makers elsewhere to guide or justify reforms when they are not familiar with the local context and its nuances. The paper draws on work for the research project ‘Hong Kong as a Source for Education Policy in England: Rhetoric and Reality’, funded by The UK Economic and Social Research Council/Research Grants Council, Hong Kong, Joint Research Scheme.

In Hong Kong, aspiring and newly appointed principals are required to have a good mastery of leadership capacities for the new paradigm of education development in the 21st century. This paper aims to examine the perceptions of 188 aspiring principals on the applicability of the leadership capacities they are equipped with in the principalship training programme to their leadership positions in their schools. A questionnaire consisting of 24 questions in six core areas of leadership was constructed and mailed to the sample two years after they were awarded the Certificate for Principalship. The findings demonstrated that most of the participants perceived the leadership capacities of 'strategic direction and policy environment' and 'quality assurance and accountability' to be more applicable to their leadership positions in school than those of 'teacher professional growth and development', 'external communication and connection to the outside world', 'learning, teaching and curriculum' and 'staff and resources management'.
[Copyright © 2014 International Studies in Educational Administration (Commonwealth Council for Educational Administration & Management (CCEAM)).]

This paper attempts to describe recent development of home-school relations in Hong Kong. It is stressed in the Education Commission Report No. 7 that school authority should be in partners with parents to manage the schools. However, findings of the Study on Home-School Cooperation (ED, 1994) demonstrate that there are a lot of barriers in promoting parental involvement in schools. Thus, this paper also serves to introduce a school-based strategy for promoting home-school cooperation. Through examining and analysing the degree of parental involvement at each level in a school, suitable strategies will be developed to strengthen means of facilitating teachers to involve parents in the schooling process of the students.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.]

In the recent education reform, teachers are encouraged to take a more active guidance role in teaching, learning and solving student disciplinary problems under the comprehensive school guidance system promoted in public documents in Hong Kong. The whole school approach to student guidance has been evolved for more than a decade in schools, but to what extent is the comprehensive guidance system approach an advance in education leadership, or just another empty slogan? This paper investigates how teachers coping with change in five primary schools perceived their changing guidance roles under the system approach model: from understanding the aims of education and guidance; strategies used for teacher-student interaction and solving student problems, participation in guidance activities in schools; to the design and implementation of the personal growth and guidance curriculum since the education reform in 2002. Qualitative research methods include the use of survey questionnaires; in-depth interviews, classroom observation and school visits. Results showed that teachers appreciated the education and guidance rationale for whole person development for the majority of students with educational, developmental and preventative approaches whilst specialists would be provided for remedial service. Most participant teachers considered that teaching was their primary role and sitting for the competence language tests was their immediate concern for job survival in the current education reform. Although teachers were more prepared to take a broader perspective to respond to the needs of students implicitly, to participate more in the guidance activities and involve more in the design and implementation of the guidance curriculum, they found it difficult to achieve an effective guidance role owing to the lack of time and resources. Unless more resources and support are provided for teacher development, the comprehensive guidance system approach for a child’s whole person development