Currently, the challenges deriving from the complex and dynamic socio-political context in Hong Kong influence principals’ and teachers’ relationships and interactions. Academic autonomy in Hong Kong secondary schools is not simply granted by the principals, it is influenced by the society, school conditions and key stakeholders. This study employed qualitative methods to examine how principals negotiate the political context surrounding citizenship education and how these practices influence the civic learning in schools. The results revealed that in school citizenship education, when principals lacked a clear vision of citizenship education, most teachers were compliant and avoided discussing controversial political topics with their students. Such teachers had less autonomy and consequently less self-efficacy. When principals mediated the diverse needs of students and balanced the different expectations of school stakeholders, there were both compliant and critical teachers. Teacher autonomy and self-efficacy were also affected by the current socio-political context in Hong Kong. When principals had a clear school civic mission, the results differed across schools. These findings suggest that principals have to reflect on their own understanding of the purposes and perspectives of citizenship education significantly to meet the multiple demands of a complicated and turbulent socio-political environment. Copyright © 2020 The Author(s).

Despite decades of research, little is known about the dynamics of sustaining change in school reform and how the process of change unfolds. By tracing the nine-year reform journeys of four primary schools in Hong Kong (using multiyear interview, observational, and archival data), this study uncovers the micro-processes the schools experienced during their reform. New practices first took root in a group of pilot teachers before gradually disseminating to other teachers and eventually transforming the entire school. Challenges differed across the reform journey. Synergy between school leadership, external support, and organization redesign was critical for initial success. Continued progress depended on whether school leaders and external partners could adapt their roles and redesign the organization to address the school's changing capacity and needs. The study reveals the long-term process of school reform and has crucial implications for policy, research, and practice.
[Copyright of American Educational Research Journal is the property of American Educational Research Association]

Education Bureaus in various regions have developed professional development programs to provide aspiring school leaders with the support they need to be successful. In Hong Kong, newly appointed principals and aspiring principals are required to have a good mastery of leadership capacities for the new paradigm of education development in the century. This paper aims to examine 188 senior teachers’ perception on how useful and applicable their learnt leadership skills in their leadership positions in schools. A questionnaire consisting of 24 questions in six core areas of leadership was constructed and mailed to the samples two years after they were awarded the Certificate for Principalship. Findings demonstrated that most of the aspirants found that leadership capacities of ‘strategic direction and policy environment', and ‘quality assurance and accountability' were more useful and applicable to their leadership positions in school than those in the leadership areas of ‘teacher professional growth and development', ‘external communication and connection to the outside world', ‘learning, teaching and curriculum', and ‘staff and resources management’.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on an exploratory study regarding the present situation of middle managers in schools; their professional development needs; and requirements of middle leaders for quality school management so that contents of existing professional development programmes could be improved to meet the needs of middle leaders of primary school education. Design/methodology/approach: Employing both quantitative and qualitative methods, this paper reports on a study of the training needs of middle leaders in primary schools in which their present situation, their needs for professional development and requirements for quality school management and leadership are explored. The study adopted survey questionnaires as the main method of data collection. To supplement quantitative data with regard to the professional development needs, six middle managers were purposefully selected for semi-structured interviews. Findings: The findings suggest that there are insufficient training opportunities for middle leaders in primary schools and that there is a strong demand for including the notions of interpersonal skills, crisis management, resources management and understanding of education ordinances in the professional development curriculum for middle leaders. The study recommends that training programmes should exert focus on meeting the specific needs of middle leaders and the content and approach be multi-dimensional. Originality/value: In spite of the small scale of the survey study, the data collected from individual in-depth interviews can provide the investigators with supplementary information on their professional development needs which also serves the purpose of triangulation. The finding can also be a very constructive reference for course providers who wish to re-engineer and improve the quality of professional development programmes for middle leaders. This may help arouse their interests and enhance their learning motivation.
[Copyright

In Hong Kong, there is an acute need to provide newly appointed principals with opportunities for continuous professional development so that they could face the impact of reforms and globalization on school development. The Education Bureau has commissioned the tertiary institutions to provide structured professional development courses to cater for the needs of aspiring, newly appointed and serving principals for leadership development. This paper aims to report on an exploratory qualitative study regarding the perception of 32 newly appointed principals from secondary schools on (a) their role as a new principal and (b) their needs and expectations on the school leadership development programme so that contents of existing development programmes could be improved to meet their needs. Findings demonstrated that the newly appointed principals expected to be equipped with the administrative skills of human resources management such as empowering middle leaders and handing underperforming staff; the practical technique of financial management; the skills of dealing with legal matters regarding school management and the capacities of curriculum and instructional leadership. In addition, they attributed networking with peers and working with mentors as invaluable experience and support for their early years’ principalship.
[Copyright © 2015 The Author(s).]

Vice-principals' role and their relationship with principals are of paramount importance in shaping the effectiveness of school management, particularly after the implementation of school-based management (SBM) worldwide. This paper reports primarily on prior studies on the vice-principalship and suggests a framework to help explain the different working relationships between principals and vice-principals. The framework is a matrix based on three dimensions, namely status, roles and management tasks. The framework was then examined through an illustrative case study. What emerged was that the framework provides a powerful means to explain the different combinations of relationship between principals and vice-principals.
[Copyright of School Leadership & Management is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13632430902775558]

Teacher culture is widely regarded as a factor affecting the success of school improvement efforts. Descriptions of teacher cultures in the literature are often rooted in particular historical, geographical and socio-political contexts, which may limit the wider applicability of these models. This paper goes beyond a simplistic comparison of schools against pre-defined models of culture. It provides a rare insight into one of Hong Kong's international primary schools and describes the centrality of collegial support in teachers' day-to-day lives. The evidence confirms that transformational forms of leadership are central to building a supportive school culture, but high expectations of teachers and strong collegial support do not create rigorous development of practice and may in fact work against it. This paper contributes to our knowledge of teacher cultures in a way which can help stimulate discussion of Hong Kong’s diversity of school types in more than simple structural terms.
老師文化被廣泛認為是影響學校成功改善的因素之一。文獻中描述的教師文化模式，多植根於歷史、地理及社會政治因素，因而限制了更廣泛地應用這些模式。這篇文章超越了簡單地把學校與既定文化模式作對比，對一所香港的國際小學提出精闢的見解，同時描繪老師日常生活互相支持的核心要素。研究數據證實，要建立學校支援文化，最重要的是轉化型的領導才能；此外，老師過高的期望和強有力的同儕支持，卻不能在實踐上產生精確的發展，甚至會造成反效果。這篇文章加深我們對教師文化模式的認識，從而激發我們對香港不同類型學校作深入探討，而不僅是依據簡化的系統作研究。
[Copyright of New Horizons: The Journal of Education, Hong Kong Teachers' Associationl is the property of Hong Kong Teachers' Association at http://www.hkta1934.org.hk/]