There is a growing literature including popular media articles reporting many issues about the current education provision for the ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. The Equal Opportunity Commission has also formally noticed Education Bureau of its concerns about the education of ethnic minority students. It especially recognized an issue with reference to the disproportionately low participation rates of ethnic minority children in upper secondary and post-secondary education compared to the majority ethnic Chinese children. This paper uses two important frameworks to focus on the extent of ‘out of school’ ethnic minority children in Hong Kong i.e. ‘Five Dimensions of Exclusion’ by UNICEF and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics and ‘Seven Zones of Exclusion’ by Consortium for Research on Educational Access, Transitions and Equity (CREATE). An analysis of 2006 census data confirms that a good number of ethnic minority children are not within the school; this includes the pre-primary, lower secondary, upper secondary and post-secondary age-group children. This paper concludes with suggestions concerning a research and policy agenda in the area of ethnic minority education in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2013 Comparative Education Society of Hong Kong (CESHK).

In 2013 the newly elected Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People’s Republic of China delivered his first Policy Address. Among other things, it highlighted the issues of education for ethnic minority students in Hong Kong focusing on Chinese language difficulties. This paper reviews the Chinese language issues for ethnic minority students as well as other issues and challenges that have been raised. It draws on education reform documents, available policy documents from the Education Bureau (EDB) and other departments regarding the educational provision for ethnic minorities, the Race Discrimination Ordinance (RDO), census and statistics reports including the recent ‘2011 Population Census, Thematic Report: Ethnic Minorities’, existing literature and newspaper articles. While the focus of the discussion is on the challenges that ethnic minority students are facing inside the school, the issue of the ‘out of school’ or ‘dropout’ phenomenon for such students is also highlighted. The paper concludes by suggesting that an exclusive concern with Chinese language education misses other significant issues that impact on the education of ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Copyright © 2014 by the CESHK.

In this study, a modified version of the Curriculum Orientation Inventory for Early Childhood Education (COI-ECE) is developed and validated with a sample of 717 in-service teachers from fifty Hong Kong pre-primary schools. Results of confirmatory factor analysis show that the curriculum beliefs of pre-primary school teachers can be conceptualised into four dimensions: humanistic, cognitive process/academic, technological, and social reconstruction orientations. Results also reveal that pre-primary school teachers hold strong humanistic orientation beliefs while cognitive process/academic orientation beliefs are held less strongly. Further analyses by one-way ANOVA tests find that differences in curricular orientation beliefs are related to teachers’ educational level and teaching position. This study reaffirms the importance of implementing an integrated developmentally appropriate curriculum in promoting whole-child development in children’s early years. The implications for supporting and sustaining teachers’ curriculum-based planning and subsequent teaching practices will be discussed. Copyright © 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.

Cantonese Jyutping romanization is indispensable for effective teaching of Chinese as a second language in Hong Kong, a predominantly Cantonese-speaking city. Jyutping functions both as an auxiliary system that allows non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) students to read and write Cantonese words without knowing the characters, and a convenient way to input Chinese characters on digital devices. This chapter outlines the course structure of a 13-week intervention program that aims at teaching Jyutping typing to NCS students in Hong Kong. The intervention program was run three times, and the design was modified after each test-run to work around different pedagogical and linguistic issues. After the first intervention, hands-on typing sessions were added to every meeting, and the teaching order of Jyutping elements and teaching plans were also adjusted. These changes improved the overall effectiveness of the intervention. Two error analyses from post-tests of the second and third interventions show that the onsets z- and c- are the most problematic elements to NCS students. Our experience demonstrates how Jyutping can be integrated successfully into the broader Chinese curriculum. Copyright © 2019 selection and editorial matter, John C. Wakefield; individual chapters, the contributors.

Students attending universities or colleges come from diverse groups, including racial, ethnic, ability status, sexual orientation, gender and intersex identities. Institutions of higher education may encounter challenges in acknowledging the needs of diverse groups of students. Particularly, these institutions could possibility have difficulties in understanding transgender students’ needs. In the education literature, transgender students often face intolerant/negative attitudes, prejudice and discrimination against them in society (Beemyn, 2016; Wernick et al., 2014). Transgender or, to use a more inclusive term, ‘trans’ students in this chapter are defined as those students who ‘do not identify with or normatively enact the gender assigned to them at birth’ (Wernick et al., 2014, p. 927). Scholars in the field of trans prejudice often adopt the concept of genderism to conceptualize prejudice, discriminatory and intolerant attitudes against trans people. For instance, Hill and Willoughby (2005) perceived genderism as ‘an ideology that reinforces the negative evaluation of gender non-conformity or an incongruence between sex and gender’ (p. 534). Copyright © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Neil Harrison and Graeme Atherton; individual chapters, the contributors.