In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau (EDB) regularly assesses the quality of services provided by publicly subsidized kindergartens to children aged 3 to 6. Quality Review (QR) reports are written by government officials and published on the EDB's website. This study analyzes the feedback pertaining to Arts and Creativity to better understand the role this learning area plays in Hong Kong kindergartens. Lexical and content analyses were applied on 164 QR reports published between 2017 and 2020. Findings showed that: (1) the role of Arts and Creativity in the QR reports is relatively minor, which suggests that this learning area is somewhat secondary in Hong Kong kindergartens; (2) presence of the various art forms differs significantly, with Music and Visual Arts being more frequent than Drama and especially Dance; and (3) classroom activities seem to be teacher-centered, product-oriented, and reproductive. Findings suggest that the Arts and Creativity pedagogies enacted in Hong Kong kindergartens are not fully consistent with the official kindergarten Curriculum Guide, which draws on a Western conceptualization of creativity in the arts. We argue that this curriculum/practice gap reveals the need for local stakeholders to embrace a "glocalization" paradigm. Limitations, future research, and implications are discussed. Copyright © 2022 Jerry Yeung et al.

This article describes the current teacher professional development (PD) infrastructure of Hong Kong, one of the world’s top performers in education. Drawing on contemporary policy frameworks, institutional websites, and research literature, we outline how teachers from primary and secondary local schools are supported to enhance their professional capacity. After introducing the structure of the Hong Kong education system, we describe pre-service teacher education and the Professional Ladder framework, designed by the Education Bureau (EDB) to regulate in-service PD. We then describe the work done by the leading PD providers and the PD-related obstacles, difficulties, and constraints reported in the literature. The article shows that Hong Kong has developed a solid PD infrastructure with hybrid characteristics. While the system is based on compliance and external accountability mechanisms, teachers are encouraged to design their PD journeys based on their interests, needs, and career aspirations. Every three years, teachers are required to complete 90 to 150 hours of PD (depending on seniority), including core and elective training (approximately 1/3 and 2/3 of the PD allotment, respectively). Structured, on-the-job, project-based, whole-school, and individual PD activities are available. The article also describes the strategies recently adopted to tackle the challenges of COVID-19. We conclude that Hong Kong has made great efforts to design a high-quality PD infrastructure within a hierarchical educational system, in which quantity of provision and content coverage have been prioritized over teacher agency and autonomy. More research is required to investigate the actual impact of PD on teachers’ practices and students’ learning.تصف هذه المقالة البنية التحتية الحالية للتطوير المهني للمعلمين في هونج كونج، أحد أفضل الدول أداء في العالم من الناحية التعليمية. استناداً على أطر عمل السياسة المعاصرة، المواقع المؤسسية والأدبيات البحثية، وتوضح كيفية دعم المعلمين من المدارس

Today's teacher operates in a globalised space where people everywhere are inextricably connected, and whose lives no longer exist in an isolated vacuum, but intersect and collide as part of a dynamic vortex. Teachers must now think, and teach beyond local boundaries, such that definitions of teacher professionalism will be reshaped by forces of globalisation. But have they, and in what ways? This article examines the intersection of globalisation and teacher professionalism. It begins with working definitions of globalisation and professionalism. These definitions will conceptually frame an analysis of policy documents about teacher professionalism, specifically standards for teachers in Hong Kong, the United States, and Australia. As a benchmark for teacher professionalism, an analysis of teacher standards across this international sample affords a broad portrait of what teachers are expected to know and do, juxtaposed against a rapidly evolving and globalising world. Copyright © 2021 Routledge.

This paper compares conceptions of teacher quality in two education systems – Singapore and Hong Kong – that consistently perform well in international assessments of student achievement. Both systems constantly refresh their expectations of teacher competencies, with recent iterations, which offer a just-in-time opportunity to learn from how they now conceptualise quality teaching. This paper will provide the context surrounding each jurisdiction's education system, how each views teacher quality, and how each has rethought the concepts of teacher quality according to their unique contextual circumstance. The paper then compares these concepts articulated and enacted by each country, linking these to the wider international literature and scholarship in order to glean insights into what teacher quality is or how it might be reconceptualised to meet future needs. Copyright © 2021 Routledge.

Inclusive education has been promoted in primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong since the 1990s, and it has now spread to pre-primary education. Without qualified teachers and sufficient resources, however, it is difficult to implement inclusion in early childhood settings. This case study investigated how inclusive education was practised in an ordinary kindergarten in Hong Kong with a focus on its benefits and challenges. Two children with special educational needs, their teachers and parents, the learning support team members, and the school principal were involved in the study, which included the triangulation of observations, interviews, and documentation analysis. The results indicated that (1) the chosen kindergarten demonstrated a variety of inclusive practices and (2) although there were some problems and difficulties, all of the participants interviewed showed positive attitudes towards the inclusive programme. The implications and challenges of implementing inclusion in Hong Kong early childhood settings are discussed.
[Copyright of Early Child Development and Care is the property of Routledge.]

The Education policy "Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers of English" had been controversial since its establishment in 2000, in the sense that various stakeholders including parents, students, school administrators, teachers and the general public. This essay critically analyses this education policy in the HK context by scrutinizing the prerequisite. Subsequently, how LPATE was built on policy texts and how it was construed as a solution of gradual decline of English as well as the reciprocal politics interacting with the policy were analyzed. Additionally, the institutions and actors involved in the policy process are discussed followed by the revelation of the outcomes of LPATE in both the expected and the unanticipated dimensions. Copyright © 2014 the author(s), with first publication rights granted to the journal.

Hong Kong and Macau are two cities which share many common features. For example, both are located in south coast in China, colonies of European countries for more than a century, Special Administrative Regions (SARs) in China, small in area, etc. The main differences are obvious: Hong Kong is considerably larger in terms of population and land area, a key role in financial field, whereas Macau is a gambling-based economic and known as the "Las Vegas" in the East. It has been about two decades since the reunification of both Hong Kong and Macau to China. The political, social and economic environments have been significantly changed. One main change is that China now becomes the world's second-largest economy and more influential in the policy making of two SARs. This paper attempts to explain the differences and similarities of educational policy changes of primary and secondary schooling in Hong Kong and Macau in recent years. Since the educational policies play an essential role in many social issues such as shaping national identity, social justice, etc, it is important to investigate how are they changed in recent year and understand the implications of such changes. Copyright © 2018 IEEE.

This article unpacks how neoliberal discourse functions as a dominant but problematic system of reasoning that changes and shifts the ways in which we come to think about early childhood education and care. A post-structuralist lens is deployed to understand the production of fears and hopes under the looming shadows of contemporary education reforms and social policies. Highlighting Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea as three cases from East Asian cultures, this article seeks to elucidate how a similar neoliberal economic and political imaginary is at work to (re)construct East Asian children as human capital for the alchemy of productive citizens in the 21st century.
[Copyright of Policy Futures in Education is the property of Symposium Journals.]

Social diversity is now commonplace in many communities in today's globalised world. This diversity can be seen in any classroom of learners, and international studies have shown the complex ways in which disabilities, race, ethnicity, gender and social class can determine a child's opportunity to succeed or fail in the education system. In Hong Kong, like in many educational contexts around the world, teachers are grappling with increasing diversity amongst their students, including teaching students with special educational needs (SEN) and non-Chinese speaking students (NCS) living in Hong Kong. This paper examines how three primary TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) teachers are constructing identities as inclusive practitioners as they grapple with enacting the inclusive education policy recently introduced into Hong Kong schools. The data are drawn from a small-scale collaborative reflective inquiry for teacher professional development. Drawing upon a sociocultural and critical framing of identity theory, we trace the three teachers' identity construction as EFL teachers and inclusive education practitioners. We view the role of discourse, self-positioning and social context as key processes in teacher identity formation. Implications for furthering the development of inclusive education in EFL classrooms are offered.

In recent years, the Government of the Hong Kong SAR has allocated considerably more attention and resources to pre-primary education. This chapter considers how these changes at the policy and pedagogy levels are shaping the learning experiences of young children in Hong Kong. It will focus on the impact of the following four broad policy changes initiated in the last decade: the implementation of the Guide to the Pre-primary curriculum; the adoption of the biliterate and trilingual language policy; the enactment of a new quality assurance process; and the introduction of the Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS). It was assumed that the implementation of these policies would enhance the preschool and home learning experiences of young children. However, after one decade of implementation of these measures, studies have shown that: (1) preschool teachers still encounter difficulties in implementing child-centred teaching approaches and are likely to continue to adopt teacher-directed instruction or product-oriented pedagogy; (2) there are problems associated with the implementation of the trilingual language policy; (3) there are still wide variations in preschool quality despite the new quality assurance processes; and (4) the PEVS has resulted in some middle-families using the extra disposable income to enrol their children in additional academic classes rather than more play-based extra-curricular activities. Against the background of these research findings, this chapter argues that the changing role of the State, teacher characteristics and traditional Chinese beliefs should be adequately considered for an understanding of the early learning experiences of young Chinese learners in Hong Kong. Preschool education in Hong Kong has not necessarily become more child-centred as teachers have difficulties implementing developmentally appropriate teaching. On the other hand, the government has allocated more resources in enhancing the quality of early childhood