After the handover, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government implemented drastic and enormous curriculum reforms, including project learning as one of the four key tasks. Over 80% of Hong Kong primary and secondary schools have adopted project learning as a curriculum task, which signifies the importance of teacher’s role and attitude in curriculum implementation. Yet the pressures on teachers and schools to achieve this result should not be underestimated. In this paper, the concept of “soft” and “hard” policy will be introduced as a means of analyzing the issues facing teachers in implementing the education reforms. “Soft” policy is characterized by persuasion, benchmarking and best practice exemplars. “Hard” policy on the other hand is explicitly embedded in legislation and budgetary allocations. This article will analyse the characteristics of project learning as a “soft” curriculum policy. It possesses features such as being practical, adaptable to context, emphasizing teaching processes, capable of being led from the classroom and is characterized by flexibility. Great emphasis is placed on conferences, seminars, sharing exemplars to promote and encourage teachers to work on this reform. On the other hand, however, the government uses “hard” means to monitor school compliance with the reforms. Thus, school self evaluation and external school evaluation are used to assess the extent to which schools are implementing curriculum innovations such as project learning. There are thus twin pressures on teachers and schools caused by the use of both “hard” and “soft” policy instruments.

In the implementation of a 10-year educational reform since the turn of the century in Hong Kong, assessment has been one of the key areas of change. The importance of changing assessment practices in the process of teaching and learning has been discussed in various government documents since 1990. In the past, assessment practices were inclined to be mainly "assessment of learning" which was more summative in nature. In the reform, schools were encouraged to put more emphasis on "assessment for learning" which was considered more of a formative nature. On approaching the mid point of such reform, significant difference in its degree and scope of development can be seen in schools. In this particular paper, the focus is assessment reform in the primary school sector. The two concepts in assessment are explored by a detailed documentary analysis of assessment policies written on basic education over the last decade. Together with reviewing the current developments on assessment change in primary schools, implications for more effective use of assessment for enhancing teaching and learning are made.

The control of curriculum content has been a sensitive issue in the Hong Kong school curriculum. During the colonial period, the Hong Kong Government controlled the curriculum content in various subjects, for example, by excluding knowledge concerning modern China or prohibiting overtly political material from being part of the curriculum. By law, the use of text, instructional materials and any forms of classroom instructions were prohibited except in accordance with a syllabus approved by the authority. The use of legal structures to force compliance has been termed “hard policy” since there are legal implications for non-compliance. After 1997, however, the government has given teachers a much more direct role in curriculum reform and renewal through the selection of school-based teaching materials in various key learning areas. This role has been given to teachers through a series of what might be called “soft” policy innovations where the innovations do not have the force of law but their success depend on teachers’ professional decisions more than on persuasion. With such an approach, the role of teachers has experienced vital shift, i.e., instead of being technicians teaching the prescribed texts, teachers are expected to be autonomous professionals in carrying out classroom instructions. The shift is dramatic, as teachers are used to the prescribed textbooks in their classroom teaching. The paper aims to analyze such a shift through the perspectives of government policy and its expected role of teachers. It also argues that political considerations, rather than the instructional needs of the classroom, have significant influence on the Hong Kong curriculum traditionally, resulting in neglect of teachers’ professional development and their autonomy in making instructional decisions. The move from the “hard” to the “soft” policy requires further clarification and communication between the government and the front line teachers.

Curriculum implementation as both an educational practice and a policy conundrum has been the focus of academic research since the 1970s. A new perspective is taken in this article by borrowing from the literature on policy implementation in multilevel systems of government. The concepts of 'hard' and 'soft' policy are used to show that policy-makers choose from a range of strategies and it is these choices rather than teacher attitudes that may account for the level of implementation of a policy. A case study of curriculum implementation in Hong Kong is used to show how 'hard' and 'soft' policy can be identified in practice.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14748460.2011.550433]