In today's evolving educational landscape, the ‘broker teacher’ plays a pivotal role. These educators manage cross-sector partnerships involving government, business and non-profit sectors to introduce innovative practices in schools. This study seeks to explore broker teachers' nuanced roles and the perceptions, which have not yet been extensively studied. Applying the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique, our research focuses on broker teachers in Hong Kong, investigating how they enact their roles and influence innovative practices through these partnerships. By focusing on the perspective of broker teachers, this study diverges from previous research that often concentrated on schools' external partners. As such, the study highlights the unique challenges and opportunities that broker teachers face as agents of change. In three case studies, we show how broker teachers align their roles with the stakeholders' expectations during school initiatives. The findings unearth the dynamic nature of broker teachers' roles, highlighting the need for explicit role definitions and robust support structures. These elements are fundamental for broker teachers to effectively navigate the complexities of cross-sector partnerships and to drive sustainable educational reforms. Context and implications Rationale for this Study: Schools' cross-sector partnerships are rapidly developing to drive educational innovation. Research understood these partnerships as brokering activities. However, educational brokering is under-studied from the perspective of the broker teacher, who is in charge of the partnership from within the school. Why the New Findings Matter: This study investigated the nuanced roles of broker teachers, highlighting their more specific roles. For practitioners, this study underscores the importance of clear role definitions and robust support structures for broker teachers to effectively manage cross-sector collaborations. Implication for Policy and Practitioner: Policy

Education reform efforts stemming from the Programme in International Student Achievement have strengthened in recent years, particularly in response to the growth of global references societies -- high achieving educational jurisdictions such as Finland, Hong Kong-China, and more recently Estonia and Singapore. Despite political rhetoric, evidence-based policy development associated with this international benchmark measure is rarely, if ever, a neutral enterprise that is guided by the best available evidence. Indeed, political discourse and policy framing surrounding PISA often results in the selective use of results to justify contested policy reforms. Brief cases from Japan, Sweden, and Canada illustrate how national policies have been adopted that are not grounded, and may even run counter, to research findings. The discussion examines the politicization of PISA and its symbolic role in adding legitimacy to education reform agendas. Collectively, the analysis offers an alternative perspective to the popular notion that PISA guides evidence-based decision-making. Copyright ©2024 SAGE Publications.

Hong Kong went through a complete reform in its higher education curriculum, incorporating opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and holistic competency development. Almost eight years have passed since the reform, yet little is known about the current state of students' holistic competency development across different disciplines. Students' self-evaluation of their capacities in holistic competencies can provide us indirect evidence of student development of these competencies for quality assurance. This study does not only aim to explore how undergraduates in Hong Kong self-assessed their holistic competencies, but also to identify whether there were disciplinary differences. To do so, 2192 undergraduate students from six universities in Hong Kong were surveyed using the validated Students' Perception of Holistic Competencies Questionnaire. Analysis of the quantitative data revealed that students generally rated themselves strongest in Moral Values but weakest in Interpersonal and Leadership Competencies. However, no substantial mean difference across the different disciplines was evident in all six holistic competencies investigated. The overall results indicated that undergraduates in Hong Kong generally believe that they have a moderately high level of capability in holistic competencies. Copyright © 2022 Elsevier.

Background: The current study investigates school contextual effects on students' academic self-concept and achievement, that is, peer socioeconomic effect and big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE), in four Nordic education systems (i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden) and selected Chinese education systems (Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang). The two school contextual effects are studied simultaneously to negate the confounding effects of student and school socioeconomic status (SES), academic self-concept and academic achievement. The study focuses on the following research questions: (1) Are there differences in the between-school variation in school SES composition, academic self-concept and reading literacy across the Nordic and selected Chinese education systems? (2) What are the sizes of peer SES and BFLPE in the Nordic and Chinese education systems? and (3) Are there any differences that can be observed between the 2000 and 2018 data for the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in the first two questions for Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden and Hong Kong? Methods: Using PISA 2000 and 2018 data from Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Hong Kong and Beijing-Shanghai-Jiangsu-Zhejiang (in 2018 only), a multiple-group two-level structural equation modelling was applied to estimate the school contextual effect. Results: The current study indicated that school academic and socioeconomic segregation intensified over the two decades in most of the studied countries. This finding lays the groundwork for understanding the two schools' contextual effects. School SES compositions positively affected students' academic achievement, while average school achievement negatively affected students' academic self-concept. Given that students' academic and socioeconomic composition has become more homogeneous within schools, the contextual effects were more pronounced. However, variations across diverse education systems were also notable. Conclusions

As with the rest of the world, schools in Hong Kong have undergone a series of educational reforms to raise accountability and quality assurance of education. Schools need to enhance their capability of problem-solving and decision-making for meeting this standard for sustainable development. Intellectual Capital (IC), as an intangible knowledge asset of school organisations, has excellent potential to promote sustainable school improvement. School leaders, teachers, and other staff members ought to realise the value of their knowledge and manage these intangible resources for effective production and application of IC since knowledge management (KM) is the critical strategy for schools to create knowledge assets for the development of IC. This chapter reports a case study of two Hong Kong secondary schools to reveal how school principals can practice KM to generate and apply IC to improve educational performance. Copyright © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Eric C. K. Cheng; individual chapters, the contributors.