Outsourcing of the curriculum delivery to educational service providers (ed-outsourcing) has been widely practiced around the globe. Hong Kong is not an exception, but the phenomenon remains rather hidden and under-researched. Drawing on a survey with teachers from 62 schools in Hong Kong (N=215), this study investigates the current practice of ed-outsourcing across subjects, teachers’ and school leaders’ perceptions of it, and its implications on the issues of quality and equity of education. Some interesting and even controversial findings from the study show that there are efforts to ensure the quality and equity of outsourced education, but more is needed. Copyright © 2018 CESHK.

This paper aims to contribute to the theorisation of effective teacher development (TD) provision in a reform context. Based on a literature review, the paper identifies key reform features, i.e., ambiguity and conflict generation, that shape teachers' engagement with pedagogic reforms and suggests a framework for designing TD programmes that address reform-specific needs. It then explores the utility of this heuristic framework through an in-depth case study of implementation of, and perceptions about, eight reforms in two schools in Hong Kong. The case study confirmed that customising the TD provision to perceived reform characteristics could contribute to teachers' positive perceptions of and experience with reforms. Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

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.