Hong Kong has publicly declared its intention, via its cultural policy, of becoming an international cultural metropolis. This has been matched, on the part of its educational reforms, by a commitment aimed at ensuring that students are fully prepared to meet the multifarious work and life challenges of the future. Forming a potential bridge between the two sectors is arts education, formally recognised as fostering the necessary skills of appreciation, creativity and expression and of enriching the cultural literacy of individuals and society, thereby providing the soil, nutrition and impetus for cultural development. This study adopted the analogy of cultural policy and arts education policy as the two wings of the same bird which, when working in unison, have the power to yield rewards at both a sectoral and at a stakeholder level through the occurrence of mutually-beneficial synergies, in order to investigate the degree to which this was presently taking place. Via an ecological research perspective characterised by a focus on the layers of interconnectedness and interrelatedness among the various stakeholders within and across Hong Kong’s cultural and arts education sectors, the methodology drew on the salient features of both the “ecological worldview” and the “interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary” types to more fully understand perceptions as they related to the policies’ fundamental elements of “conceptualisation”, “communication” and “operationalisation”. As a means of answering the three research questions guiding the study, the data gathering and analysis stage was concerned with the collection of the relevant policy documentation, an online cultural and arts education policy questionnaire, and a series of semi-structured, in-depth interviews. The findings revealed that while evidence exists of a variety of intra- and inter-sectoral partnerships, this is not being matched by a strategic vision at a policymaking level that clearly demonstrates how such collaborations

This paper evaluates the exceptionally forceful "mother-tongue" (MT) education policy in force in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2010, where instruction, print materials and assessments were required to be done in students' first language, Chinese. Apart from relevant literature, a number of sources are searched, including the quantitative data obtained from the Hong Kong Examination and Assessment Authority (HKEAA), qualitative data of surveys, and the official documents commissioned by the Education Bureau (EDB) within the period. While MT education has arguably minimized mixed-code teaching in content subjects, there is clear evidence that it failed to raise L2 standard through specialized teaching as promised. Much more students off the top tier being denied for admission to university, the principle of equality of educational participation is violated. A postmortem analysis, drawing on the more recent findings from the field of applied linguistics, shows that the adoption of bifurcation medium of instruction model and the ineffective L2 exposure are the culprits. All this, together with the lack of monitoring of the policy in its initial stage, are speculated as the major causes of its failure.

Few studies have investigated the causal spillover effects of compulsory education on children's siblings. Using a regression discontinuity method, I find that Hong Kong's 1971 free compulsory primary education policy reduced the dropout probability for the eldest siblings of full policy beneficiaries, especially for children in low-income families. Having younger brothers who were full policy beneficiaries did not affect the elder child's educational attainment. Having younger sisters who were full policy beneficiaries increased the eldest child's educational attainment, especially for the eldest sister. The results shed light on how sibling sex composition might affect intra-household resource allocation of human capital investment among children.

An introduction is presented which discusses various articles within the issue on topics including countries participating in large-scale assessments in education on education policy, Programme for International Student Assessment in Hong Kong, and development of regulatory interventions.

Since the mid-1980s,a number of East Asian societies have consistently performed well in international tests, and these 'high performing' education systems have emerged as models of 'best practice'. Policy makers in England (as well as some other Western systems) have been keen to reference Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and South Korea when developing and promoting their own reform agendas. Although Hong Kong has been extensively cited and praised by politicians and their advisers in England local dissatisfaction with the education system has prompted a series of major education reforms. This mismatch between the two policy communities in their perceptions of the strong features of Hong Kong education is explored in this paper using documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other key stakeholders. We analyse the ways in which features of Hong Kong's education system are reconstructed, used, and manipulated in policymaking in England. We argues that the referencing of Hong Kong is an act of political theatre, reminiscent of a pantomime, a traditional performance built around stereotyped villains and heroes, narratives of good conquering evil, and comical set-pieces that sometimes verge on the farcical.

This article examines the significance of global trends in higher education (HE) development in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2012. Two trends, massification and internationalisation, are considered key driving forces that shaped Hong Kong’s HE policy during the period. The former refers to government measures to widen participation in HE. The latter is associated with Hong Kong’s regional education hub strategy. Universities in the city revised their governance structure in these contexts. The article first explains why massification and internationalisation entered the HE policy discourse in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, and how they were materialised by neoliberal practices in the 2000s. Subsequently, it reveals how the two trends influenced university governance by examining the development of the University of Hong Kong Group. Based on this review, this article argues that the HE development can be perceived as an extension of structural transformation of the Hong Kong economy.
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More and more governments use educational reforms as a tool to raise the competitiveness of their societies, and one shared feature of some of these reforms is privatization of public education. Countries in the Eastern and Western Europe alike, for instance, have implemented various educational reforms that allowed for, or promoted, privatization of education (Ball & Youdell, 2008; Patrinos, Barrera-Osorio, & Guàqueta, 2009). While privatization of education has received much academic attention, the new education privatization, in which the government financially supports the private sector’s participation in public education, has remained unexplored in many contexts (Burch, 2009), in particular in the East Asian context including South Korea and Hong Kong. Governments of South Korea and Hong Kong have circulated policy discourses which reconceptualise the private sector as a partner in public education for more than a decade. However, there has been little documentation of the actual practice of outsourcing of education delivery. This paper, drawing on three consecutive research projects funded by a tertiary institute in Hong Kong, aims to contribute to understanding this largely “hidden” phenomenon of educational privatization (Ball, Thrupp, & Forsey, 2010) focusing on government-funded outsourcing of core curriculum delivery. Understanding the focal phenomenon is necessary considering the public accountability in using public fund. It may concern, however, far more important issues of quality and equity of public education. Previous research on the quality of outsourced education is controversial (Green, 2005); some programmes have found to reproduce or even aggravate the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of access to quality education (Burch, 2009). By mapping out the policy and practice at the government and school levels in South Korea and Hong Kong, this paper aims to explore the degree to which privatization of education is happening in the