In Hong Kong higher education, students' learning outcomes are increasingly treated as evidence to inform course and teaching improvement. Therefore, outcome-based teaching and learning (OBTL) has been encouraged by the University Grants Committee (UGC) since 2007. OBTL has gradually been implemented by Hong Kong higher education institutions (HEIs) to enhance student learning outcomes. Relating OBTL to the social cohesion/regulation matrix, this chapter aims at analyzing how OBTL is being implemented by the HEIs in Hong Kong. Given the high institutional autonomy and academic freedom afforded to individual HEIs, each university has established its own systematic framework for integrating outcome-based approaches into its teaching, learning, and assessment. Unlike other higher education systems in Asia with strong government supervision, the government in Hong Kong acts as an enabler and facilitator, leaving the UGC to invite international experts as an independent audit body to assure the quality of student learning. As a result, this chapter chooses the eight UGC-funded universities to investigate how they engage their faculty members in OBTL, and what the enabling and hindering factors are. Based upon the social cohesion/regulation matrix, the Hong Kong higher education system is featured by the individualist way of promoting OBTL. Nonetheless, while universities are empowered with institutional autonomy to decide upon teaching, and student learning matters, their strong orientation with OBTL means they cannot simply do whatever they like. Adopting a robust quality assurance mechanism in evaluating university performance through University Accountability Agreements, the institutional autonomy that universities enjoy rests heavily upon their performance in teaching and student learning, which is assessed through rigorous international benchmarking via the Quality Assurance Audit conducted by the UGC and research performance through the Research Assessment Exercise.

Numerous educational change and school reforms have been conducted to pursue educational effectiveness and educational quality in different parts of the world. Unfortunately, most of the past educational reforms with focus on fragmentary improvement and remedial treatment are not sufficient to bring holistic school development and long term effectiveness, and inevitably many of them have experienced serious frustration if not failure. This paper aims to propose a new direction including ten important tendencies for ongoing and future educational reform and school reengineering in Hong Kong and international contexts. The tendencies are: (1) Towards multiple school functions from simplistic purposes; (2) Towards school autonomy and self-initiative through school-based management; (3) Towards school healthy functioning through a knowledge-based profile; (4) Towards school continuous learning and development through strategic management; (5) Towards human initiative through multi-level self management in school; (6) Towards school multiple effectiveness through a dynamic process; (7) Towards holistic education in school through layer management; (8) Towards synergy and effectiveness through congruence in school; (9) Towards total home-school collaboration and community support for resources, ideas, and legitimacy; (10) Towards school driving force through transformational leadership. The educational reforms in this new direction can support schools to facilitate continuous development of students and staff, increase support of parents and community, improve technology in education and management, and pursue multiple functions more effectively at different levels of our society. Hopefully, all those concerned particularly our students and teachers can benefit from the coming educational reforms.

In 2007, a Judicial Commission of Inquiry was established by the Government of Hong Kong to investigate allegations that senior officials had interfered with the academic freedom and institutional autonomy of the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd). It concluded that a former minister had requested the President of that institution to curb the criticisms of Government policies by two of his colleagues. The report had significant ramifications including the resignation of the former minister. This article initially describes the background to the Inquiry and subsequently analyses why the situation escalated and resulted in the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry. The explanation focuses on the inherent weaknesses of the system of Governance, the political ecology of Hong Kong and recent changes to the political system.
[Copyright of Journal of Education Policy is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02680931003671962]

At the turn of the millennium, the term 'spiritual' began to gain more prominence in the educational discourse in Hong Kong, both in official policy documents and in religious schools' descriptions of their own mission. Addressing each of these two cases in turn, a description of the context in which the increased use of the term has occurred leads on to the question of the extent to which this increased rhetorical emphasis on the spiritual is matched by the actual substance of education policy and the reality of religious education. It is found that the match is much less than perfect, and the reasons for this are explored.
[Copyright of International Journal of Children's Spirituality is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13644360500347359]

Globalisation and the evolution of the knowledge-based economy have caused dramatic changes in the character and functions of higher education in most countries around the world. However, the impacts of globalisation on universities are not uniform even though similar business-like practices have been adopted to cope with competition in the global marketplace. The pressure for restructuring and reforming higher education is mainly derived from growing expectations and demands of different stakeholders in society. In the last decade, government bureaucracy, public service institutions and higher education institutions and universities have been significantly affected by the tidal wave of the public sector reform around the world. Apart from improving the efficiency and effectiveness of public services, universities are confronted with a situation in which the principles of financial accountability and responsiveness to stakeholders prevail amidst the massification stage under the condition of global economic retrenchment. In response to such pressing demands for change, policies and strategies of decentralisation, privatisation and marketisation are becoming increasingly popular measures in university governance. Reform strategies and measures like quality assurance, performance evaluation, financial audit, corporate management and market competition are adopted to reform and improve the performance of the higher education sector. This article examines the most recent higher education reforms and restructuring in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China, with particular reference to the issues related to globalisation of decentralisation and marketisation in higher education.
[Copyright of Higher Education Research & Development is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0729436032000083580]