A prominent school issue is health and safety in kindergartens. However, there has been no concerted effort to develop health and safety training as part of the school management of the kindergarten workforce in Hong Kong. A pilot study was designed to assess early childhood teachers' knowledge of and attitudes towards health and safety in kindergartens using a self-reported questionnaire. The participants were 54 early childhood teachers, which included 10 principals, or senior teachers, and 44 frontline teachers of four kindergartens. The results indicated that the teachers' level of knowledge regarding common childhood injuries was high, but their knowledge of health and safety measures was very low. There was a significant difference in the overall knowledge level of the senior teachers and the junior teachers. The principals or senior teachers were more positive towards the need to have a health and safety policy and to develop a health and safety strategy plan and recording system for their kindergartens than the front-line teachers. Furthermore, the teachers with more teaching experience were more concerned about assigning an appropriate staff member to be responsible for different aspects of health and safety than the teachers with less teaching experience. The teachers with a Bachelor degree or above were more likely to indicate the importance of providing professional development training for staff than the teachers with a Diploma degree or below. There is a need for an in-service professional training program for early childhood teachers to increase their health and safety knowledge and attitudes.
[Copyright © 2015 CGPublisher.]

With the rapid economic growth and development of the Asian economies in recent decades, there has been a continued rise of students in Asian countries studying outside their home country. The importance of the Asian market has been acknowledged by countries keen on exporting educational services. Hong Kong is aspiring to be an education hub. If this is to be achieved, strategic analysis in relation to how the territory can export its education service to the Asian region is much needed. This study attempts to highlight the major strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Hong Kong’s higher education in relation to its potential of being a regional education hub in Asia. It follows the study visits which the researchers conducted in such Asian countries as India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, which are important sources of international students in the region. To ensure that the latest trend of development can be accurately reflected, further literature review and documentary studies subsequent to the visits were conducted. The paper concludes by examining the implications for the Hong Kong government and the higher education sector when they seek to capture these increasingly growing Asian markets.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

The main purpose of the present study was to explore effective strategies and policies for exporting Hong Kong’s higher education to Asian markets. It examined and compared the current strategies and policies that are currently employed by Australia, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. The data for this project was obtained primarily from documents and in-depth interviews. Documents included the latest government reports, policy addresses, and official statistics. The in-depth interviews were conducted in Hong Kong as well as in the four studied cities—Mumbai, New Delhi, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. Interviewees included government officials, academics, higher education institutions’ representatives, consulate generals, and officials from policy bodies. It is clear from the findings of this present study that a set of favorable policies and strategies at the national level was behind the success of these competitors. Such policies are not confined to educational policies but extend to population and employment policies.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

In recent years, the Government of the Hong Kong SAR has allocated considerably more attention and resources to pre-primary education. This chapter considers how these changes at the policy and pedagogy levels are shaping the learning experiences of young children in Hong Kong. It will focus on the impact of the following four broad policy changes initiated in the last decade: the implementation of the Guide to the Pre-primary curriculum; the adoption of the biliterate and trilingual language policy; the enactment of a new quality assurance process; and the introduction of the Pre-primary Education Voucher Scheme (PEVS). It was assumed that the implementation of these policies would enhance the preschool and home learning experiences of young children. However, after one decade of implementation of these measures, studies have shown that: (1) preschool teachers still encounter difficulties in implementing child-centred teaching approaches and are likely to continue to adopt teacher-directed instruction or product-oriented pedagogy; (2) there are problems associated with the implementation of the trilingual language policy; (3) there are still wide variations in preschool quality despite the new quality assurance processes; and (4) the PEVS has resulted in some middle-families using the extra disposable income to enrol their children in additional academic classes rather than more play-based extra-curricular activities. Against the background of these research findings, this chapter argues that the changing role of the State, teacher characteristics and traditional Chinese beliefs should be adequately considered for an understanding of the early learning experiences of young Chinese learners in Hong Kong. Preschool education in Hong Kong has not necessarily become more child-centred as teachers have difficulties implementing developmentally appropriate teaching. On the other hand, the government has allocated more resources in enhancing the quality of early childhood

Given the strong worldwide trend of internationalisation of higher education, what implications can be drawn from the ongoing progress for research development, policy improvement and practical innovation in higher education? Based on international literature, this chapter will review and discuss the complicated nature of higher education internationalisation and propose a conceptualization matrix to capture its major characteristics. A typology of higher education development will also be proposed to illustrate how internationalisation is related to the future directions and scenarios of higher education development in Hong Kong and beyond. It is hoped that both the development typology and conceptualization matrix can help policy makers, educators, researchers, social leaders and change agents to understand the related issues of internationalisation of higher education in a wider context. Taking Hong Kong as a case in the fast-developing Asia-Pacific region, this chapter will also introduce the key features of the book composed of three parts with ten chapters which provide comprehensive studies with quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence and diverse perspectives to analyse and review the key issues and challenges in different aspects of the internationalisation of higher education. It aims to draw implications and recommendations for future developments in both Hong Kong and international communities.
[Copyright © 2016 Springer Science+Business Media Singapore.]

This study aimed at identifying the effective leadership roles for quality programmes in a market-driven, Chinese preschool context. It adopted a qualitative research strategy with in-depth case studies of two preschools in Hong Kong. Effective leadership was investigated from the multiple perspectives of various school stakeholders. The findings indicated that principals of the two schools tended to take up three major roles: role model, school manager, and mentor for curriculum and pedagogy. With reference to the contemporary leadership models proposed by Leithwood and Duke (1999), the characteristics of effective leadership perceived by various school stakeholders were similar to those of moral, managerial and instructional leadership but were different from the Western notion of distributed leadership documented in the literature.

In a highly interdependent globalize world, internationalization of higher education becomes increasingly important in preparing future leaders and citizens to address global issues and challenges like shaping sustainable development, international solidarity and global peace. In recent times, commercial and financial interests have become the over-riding concern in the internationalization process in universities in different parts of the world (Knight, 2006) and the commitment to the development of human flourishing in terms of just and caring societies have gradually been displaced. This paper presents a study of internationalization strategies in higher education institutions in Hong Kong’s aspiring development into a regional education hub. The study examines how to attract students from three overseas markets, namely India, Indonesia and Malaysia, to pursue higher education in Hong Kong. The study found that the strategies of internationalization at both system and institutional levels attempted to address problems generated from the barriers of exporting higher education and build on the attractions of studying in Hong Kong’s higher education. While these strategies helps serve the end of attracting overseas students, the authors caution the importance of going beyond recruiting overseas students and put forward a more “humanized” way of looking at internationalization to counteract the overriding economic-driven globalization.