Career and Life Development (CLD) (or ‘Career Development and Life Planning’) refers to a big spectrum of educational practices that aims to help young people embraces a holistic and comprehensive process to plan one’s life and actively implements the goals determined in own social context (Leung, 2005). It usually comprises of three aspects of education: (1) self-understanding, (2) knowing the dynamic world of work, and (3) nurturing reflective habits of mind about own future career pathways or personal planning. The aim of this study is to analyze school-based CLD effectiveness in Hong Kong by adopting a school improvement instrument, ‘the Hong Kong Benchmarks for Career and Life Development’ (HKBM) which is initiated by CLAP@JC, with close reference to the world-recognized framework in the United Kingdom, the Gatsby’s Benchmarks for Career Guidance (Holman, 2014; Holman & Yip, 2020). Using HKBM, whole school self-evaluation was conducted by CLD leaders in each school under support from teams of ‘critical friends’ (Swaffield & Macbeath, 2005). After examining the HKBM dataset collected from 44 secondary schools, key findings are: (a) effective CLD provision requires a visible and stable policy with strong school leaders’ backing; (b) schools are offering insufficient opportunities of career-related experiences and one-to-one personal guidance on CLD, despite the backing from government policy since 2014. There are implications to policies in terms of School-Business Partnerships, and to strategic planning and implementation of school-based CLD. Copyright © 2021 HKERA-APERA International Conference.

This chapter aims to introduce the development of and issues related to parent and community engagement in life education in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The development of life education in Taiwan has highly involved parent groups since the early stage. Parents, different community organisations, and school teachers have collaborated closely with each other, enabling a large number of children to have the opportunity to learn about life education. Compared with traditional teaching approaches, alternative ways of conducting life education through parent and community engagement have shown their effectiveness. Utilising various forms of school curriculum such as the Morning Light, Integrated Activity class, and other courses and services, parents join classes and accompany children through activities such as story-telling, drama acting, music, and dancing, bringing a lively atmosphere to life education as well as companionship to their children. Taking the experience of the Rainbow Family Life Education Association as an example, this chapter also discusses parent and community engagement with existing relevant research. Compared with life education in Taiwan, parental involvement in the promotion of life education in Hong Kong tends to be less systematic and there is much room for future enhancement. Copyright © 2021 selection and editorial matter, John Chi-Kin Lee, Stephen Yam-Wing Yip and Raymond Ho-Man Kong; individual chapters, the contributors.

Student-driven approaches have generated positive results in student development. This study reports a Students as Learning Experience Designers (Student-LED) Project as one example of employing student-driven approaches to develop learning abilities, leadership skills and reflective habits, in the context of the new senior secondary curriculum reform in Hong Kong. In such reform, schools are encouraged to offer other learning experiences (OLE) to facilitate students’ all-round development. This Student-LED project can be seen as pioneering in its cultural context and for the target participants. Students in Hong Kong were traditionally described as lacking independence, which seemed to contradict the premise of student-driven approaches. The present study as a pilot shows that Hong Kong secondary school students could potentially benefit from a student-driven approach. Sense of autonomy and positional leadership opportunities were found to be important factors to student learning. The concerns of students and teachers during the process were also identified through reflective statements. This study provided some insights into the use of student-driven approaches with Hong Kong learners. Copyright © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

The New Senior Secondary (NSS) curriculum was launched among Hong Kong schools in 2009-10 school year. Under the NSS Curriculum framework, Other Learning Experiences (OLE), which requires students to participate in five areas of OLE, namely Moral and Civic Education, Community Service, Career-related Experiences, Aesthetic Development and Physical Development, is one of the three major components that complement the study of the four core subjects and 2-3 elective subjects for the whole person development of students. The study, mainly employing surveys together with mixed methods, aims to explore the impact of OLE, as a key curriculum component in the NSS curriculum, on students' approaches to learning. In 2010-11, two case study schools, with different features of OLE and with differing background characteristics were selected for a survey on students' approaches to learning over two school years. The survey, namely ‘Studying at School Inventory' (SASI) of 352 S4 students provides evidence of the impact of OLE with regard to learning approaches such as enhancing deep learning and effort. Although the results could not of themselves provide a warrant for a generalizable positive impact of OLE on students' approaches to learning and learning habits, it is reasonable to conclude that OLE has had a positive influence as indicated in policy documents, at the two case schools and in certain school contexts (e.g. year group, school culture, OLE leadership) and with regard to specific OLE component contexts (e.g. activity type, student motivation, pedagogy). The study illuminates the further study of OLE.