This paper presents the findings of 47 Hong Kong secondary schools in a study examining leadership practices, school conditions and student perceptions within an environment of increasing accountability. While an accountability framework might be intended to promote effective school improvement, the approaches adopted by the policy makers often carried different unwarranted assumptions and resulted in conflicting and unintended consequences. The impacts of Hong Kong’s school accountability framework introduced since 2003 were evaluated in three aspects: whether more schools in the study have shown improvements in value-added performance between 2006 and 2008; whether these schools with most significant improvement and most significant declines as measured by the value-added changes differed much; and whether these schools became more accountable in their practices and showed more support for students.
