This article examines the significance of global trends in higher education (HE) development in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2012. Two trends, massification and internationalisation, are considered key driving forces that shaped Hong Kong’s HE policy during the period. The former refers to government measures to widen participation in HE. The latter is associated with Hong Kong’s regional education hub strategy. Universities in the city revised their governance structure in these contexts. The article first explains why massification and internationalisation entered the HE policy discourse in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, and how they were materialised by neoliberal practices in the 2000s. Subsequently, it reveals how the two trends influenced university governance by examining the development of the University of Hong Kong Group. Based on this review, this article argues that the HE development can be perceived as an extension of structural transformation of the Hong Kong economy.
[Copyright © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.]

More and more governments use educational reforms as a tool to raise the competitiveness of their societies, and one shared feature of some of these reforms is privatization of public education. Countries in the Eastern and Western Europe alike, for instance, have implemented various educational reforms that allowed for, or promoted, privatization of education (Ball & Youdell, 2008; Patrinos, Barrera-Osorio, & Guàqueta, 2009). While privatization of education has received much academic attention, the new education privatization, in which the government financially supports the private sector’s participation in public education, has remained unexplored in many contexts (Burch, 2009), in particular in the East Asian context including South Korea and Hong Kong. Governments of South Korea and Hong Kong have circulated policy discourses which reconceptualise the private sector as a partner in public education for more than a decade. However, there has been little documentation of the actual practice of outsourcing of education delivery. This paper, drawing on three consecutive research projects funded by a tertiary institute in Hong Kong, aims to contribute to understanding this largely “hidden” phenomenon of educational privatization (Ball, Thrupp, & Forsey, 2010) focusing on government-funded outsourcing of core curriculum delivery. Understanding the focal phenomenon is necessary considering the public accountability in using public fund. It may concern, however, far more important issues of quality and equity of public education. Previous research on the quality of outsourced education is controversial (Green, 2005); some programmes have found to reproduce or even aggravate the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of access to quality education (Burch, 2009). By mapping out the policy and practice at the government and school levels in South Korea and Hong Kong, this paper aims to explore the degree to which privatization of education is happening in the

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’.

近年，香港教育當局落實了校本管理的政策和推行著多項教育的變革，在學校大大增加了中層人員的工作量和他們在領導方面的需求。最近的研究指出，有很多學校的中層人員在領導方面遇著很大的困難，它們主要來自四方面：對自己領導的信心不足、同工的不合作、與校長不合拍、及環境的影響等，以致大大影響中層人員領導方面的信心與效能。其中「與校長不合拍」可能有很多原因，如雙方是否願意充分合作、溝通是否足夠、彼此是否遷就對方的處事方式等等。有研究亦指出，聰明且有幹勁的管理人員，常會忽略調理與上司的關係，最終傷害了自己及危及组織。要成為高效能的中層領導，他不僅需要努力建立團隊的關係，還要與上司有良好的關係及得到他的支持。本文以小學中層人員及校長為研究對象，透過面談，瞭解中層人員與校長之間相處的困難及協作方式，並且作出分析及建議。

Purpose–The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between staff size and perceived organizational support (POS) in early childhood education (ECE) organizations. Design/methodology/approach–A territory-wide questionnaire survey was designed to investigate the perceptions of preschool teachers in Hong Kong on four dimensions of organizational support, namely, teacher participation in decision making, school management support, school performance in organizational support, and organizational negativity in organizational support. In total, 2,066 teachers from 189 schools were sampled with stratified random sampling. Confirmatory factor analysis and latent mean analysis were employed. Findings–There was a significant relationship between staff size and POS. Specifically, teachers working at small schools in terms of staff size reported significantly higher POS than their counterparts in medium and large schools in aspects including teacher participation in decision making, school management support, and school performance in POS. Conversely, both medium and large schools had higher scores on organizational negativity. Research limitations/implications–There may exist other factors (e.g. principal leadership), which are not investigated in this study, that influence POS. Future studies are needed to capture a fuller structural relationship among an array of factors that influence POS. Originality/value–Research on staff size and POS has been conducted separately, without one element informing the other. The findings of the present study will stimulate more research on POS and staff size. The study will stimulate thinking about whether larger preschools are more efficient than smaller preschools in terms of scale of economies in a marker driven, ECE context. Building upon the foundation laid by the study, future studies may explore the interaction between staff size and POS on intended student outcomes in ECE.
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