This edited book is uniquely set in the context of Chinese societies. It deals with the issues of inclusive education in a Chinese context and examines inclusion from the experience of Hong Kong schools.Like other countries, in Hong Kong, inclusive education has been promoted through Integrated Education (IE) and the Whole-School Approach (WSA). Recently, the government has introduced the induction of Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) in each Hong Kong school to help diverse students, especially students with special educational needs (SEN) and to develop inclusive teaching and learning practices. This book is one of the first to examine the influence of contextual and Chinese cultural factors in the field of inclusive education, in regard to how schools support students with diverse learning needs and SEN. It also offers an account of context-specific measures towards promoting inclusive education.This book will help scholars and school practitioners in Asia in particular and in the West, in general, develop a comprehensive understanding of context-specific inclusive practices in education for students with diverse learning needs. Copyright © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Ming-Tak Hue and Shahid Karim; individual chapters, the contributors.

This article describes the evolution of inclusive education in Hong Kong, moving from segregation via integration to inclusion. The outside influence of education policies and trends from Britain, Australia, and the United States are identified, and the current situation is described. In particular, obstacles that are encountered on the route to inclusion are compared with those found in other countries. These obstacles include large class size, teachers’ often negative attitudes, parents’ expectations, teachers’ lack of expertise for adapting the curriculum and for providing differentiated teaching, and ongoing conflicts between the notion of ‘inclusive schooling for all’ and the ‘academic standards agenda’. Copyright © 2021 Cambridge University Press.

The Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO) is a teacher responsible for the implementation of policies relating to the inclusion of students with special educational needs (SEN) at various levels of schooling in the mainstream setting. The UK has taken the leading role in SEN coordination since the early 1990s (DFE, 1994). Before 1994, there was no formal requirement for schools to appoint such a teacher. However, the 1994 Code (DFE, 1994) placed a statutory obligation on all schools to identify a specialist teacher to coordinate provision for pupils with SEN, and it described the roles and responsibilities of the SENCO. In the UK, a dominant theme in SENCO research in the past decade has been the extent to which the role is concerned with aspects of leadership and management (e.g., Cole, 2005; Layton, 2005; Rosen-Webb, 2011; Tissot, 2013). The role of SENCOs have been debated in the literature (Norwich, 2010; Oldham & Radford, 2011), specifically concerning whether it should be a specialist role or a more generic management role. An individual's interpretation and enactment of the role of SENCO – as specialist or management, or somewhere in between – depends on the individual (Kearns, 2005) and school-level factors (Blandford, 2013). While the UK schools are exploring effective ways for assuring the effective functioning of SENCOs, Hong Kong followed the footstep of the UK by introducing a similar position in 2015. Through a pilot scheme in 2015, a total of 124 schools, including 65 secondary schools and 59 primary schools, were included. The final evaluation report of the pilot scheme concluded that although there was variation in the roles of SENCOs in different schools, it was clear that they were engaging in more strategic activity as the new role develops (Education Bureau, 2018). In addition, two studies (Poon-McBrayer & Wong, 2013; Poon-McBrayer, 2017) investigating the roles of principal leadership on HK schools' inclusive education reforms found that