This article reports the findings of a multi-site qualitative study of 31 Chinese homeschooling families in Taipei and Hong Kong. Homeschooling, a significant source of inspiration for school innovation, has been growing around the globe in recent years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting the challenges facing mainstream schools. The findings reveal that the families under study chose to homeschool their children mainly because they were dissatisfied with mainstream schools in the Chinese context, which, as they described, were not sufficiently child-centric. Notably, their homeschooling practices were highly diversified and hybridised, including a variety of organisational methods, actors, and materials. Based on lessons learned from homeschooling, the findings indicate the need for mainstream schools to reimagine their relations with families and the outside world in terms of pedagogic time, space, relations, and resources to better respond to every student’s unique needs as well as the challenges ahead in the post-pandemic world. Copyright © 2023 Educational Review.

Despite the increasing number of studies on educational leadership during COVID-19, little attention has been paid to the intersections of different educational experiences and perspectives of school leaders, students, and their families that occur both inside and outside of schools. Drawing on eight case studies of public primary schools in Hong Kong, this article explores the challenges and strategies of online learning with a focus on effective leadership practices for supporting economically disadvantaged students during COVID-19. To incorporate the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, a series of questionnaires were distributed to principals (n = 8), teachers (n = 150), parents (n = 775), lower primary students (n = 855), and upper primary students (n = 850) and interviews were conducted with principals (n = 8), teachers (n = 37), parents (n = 32), and students (n = 62). Findings indicated that school leaders and teacher teams demonstrated strategic leadership practices prioritising and responding to the needs and constraints of economically disadvantaged students and their families. The present study draws attention to leadership encouraging collaboration among schools, families, and the wider community, which has become necessary during the shift to online learning during COVID-19. Copyright © 2022 The Author(s).

Despite its continuing rise, homeschooling in Hong Kong and many other Chinese cities is under-studied in academic research, underrepresented in society, invisible in public policy, and even marginalized within parent communities. Unlike many cases in Western societies, homeschooling in Hong Kong appears to be largely a ‘middle-class phenomenon’—better-off Chinese parents in Hong Kong can draw on their resources and navigate opportunities in the existing legal framework so that homeschooling is a viable option for their children’s education. Putting this phenomenon into a wider context of stratification and inequality, alternative middle-class choice and practice that ‘opt out’ of a traditional school system to homeschool their children problematizes our common sense understanding of middle-class trajectories. For instance, would these middle-class parents fear any loss of educational privilege that they would otherwise have in a traditional school system? Or, conversely, would these parents think that homeschooling is ideally suited for their children, who, in turn, may gain even more ‘home advantage’ over their schooled peers? Or would these parents pursue alternative forms of aspiration and privilege for their children? With these questions in mind, this study explores how Chinese homeschooling parents perceive and make sense of their homeschooling choice, with emphasis on the relation to social class. Data were drawn from in-depth interviews with 15 homeschooling families in Hong Kong. We will discuss the preliminary findings of this study and the theoretical implications for how Chinese homeschooling phenomenon constitutes the analytical leverage for theorizing a relatively unexplored area of middle-class reproduction processes. Copyright © 2022 British Sociological Association.

This chapter aims to examine the unique challenging policy environment confronting Hong Kong schools from the perspective of neoliberal discourse and to reveal the reactive, as well as strategic responses of school leaders and teachers in coping with these challenges. As we argue, driven by the global trend of striving for international competitiveness in education and economy, Hong Kong's schooling is no exception to other systems that manifest signs of neoliberal normalization. Based on a systematic and critical analysis of the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong's public schools, this chapter discusses the major challenges faced by these schools which are inflicted by neoliberal discourses of reform, namely school governance, privatization, budget cuts, and performativity. The results of our analysis show that Hong Kong has not followed suit the western trajectory of neoliberal development but has developed its own path in response to its unique historical, cultural, and economic context. Copyright © 2021 Taylor & Francis.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context.Design/methodology/approach: Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong's school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure.Findings: Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong.Research limitations/implications: This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good