Parents in dysfunctional family situations and those in intact well-functioning families have distinct requirements for parental learning and parent education. For intact well-functioning families, a developmental-educational paradigm for parent education is more appropriate. Although school-based parent education is ideal for well-functioning families, most policy makers and school leaders have overlooked the utility of this approach. Recent studies, however, have provided further support for in-school parent education. This paper presents some of the results from new research on parental learning and offers findings in support of in-school parent education.
[Copyright of Learning: Research and Practice is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23735082.2015.1028714]

This article seeks to spark a dialectic discussion on the establishment of a set of professional competencies for quality assurance practitioners who serve in external quality assurance agencies in higher education. Such a need is identified due to the shortage of relevant and sufficient coverage in the quality assurance literature. To substantiate the need, the concepts of professionalism and profession, and how these concepts are linked to the quality assurance in higher education sector, are carefully examined through a desk-top research study. References are drawn from the experiences in several other occupations. The result reveals that the development of the essential competencies for external quality assurance practitioners in higher education is valuable and essential and it will be useful for the practitioners to transform themselves into a profession in the long run.
[Copyright of Quality in Higher Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13538322.2015.1051795]

In the last few decades, higher education expansion is becoming increasingly a growing trend in the Asia and Pacific region. With strong conviction to produce more people better equipped with knowledge and skills for coping with the challenges of the globalizing economy, many governments in the Asia and Pacific region have increased higher education enrolments. The massification of higher education has generated significant pressure for graduate employment and eventually affected upward social mobility, with imbalanced supply and demand in terms of higher education graduates. This article sets out against the context highlighted above to critically examine the influence on Asian societies when these higher education enrolments are expanded, as well as its consequences to graduate employment and the impact on social mobility.
[Copyright of Journal of Education and Work is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1049023]

This article attempts to investigate the relationship between the massification of higher education, labour market and social mobility in contemporary China. Though only a short period of time has elapsed from elite to mass education, China's higher education has been characterised as a wide, pervasive massification process. Similar to other East Asian countries/economies like South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the expansion of higher education in China has also generated a great impact on labour markets and social mobility. The massification of higher education has increased college access and in general enhanced the extent of equity and equality in society. Nonetheless, the situation has become far more complex as returns of education have flattened out recently and social mobility has slowed down in general. University students have started to doubt the ability of higher education to improve their competitiveness in the job market. This, in turn, has led to a wide dissatisfaction with higher education development in China, particularly when higher education has experienced highly intensified competition in the context of world-class university movement. Realising that students from different family backgrounds may encounter diverse experiences in graduate employment and opportunity for upward social mobility, this article critically reflects upon how variations in social capital and cultural capital have impacted on graduate employment and social mobility as higher education has massively expanded in China.
[Copyright of Journal of Education and Work is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13639080.2015.1049028]

Play is the characteristic behaviour of children aged between two to six. It is one useful way in which children can acquire developmental skills. According to theorists such as Sylva, Bruner and Genova (1976) and Gravey (1977), play had intellectual benefits. They believed that play experience was the optimal way of enhancing children's creativity and imagination. The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC, 1988) states that a high quality early childhood programme provides a safe and nurturing environment that promotes the physical, social, emotional and cognitive development of young children and 'play' is no doubt an essential component of the developmentally appropriate practice. Following the world's trend, 'Learning through play' was first introduced to the pri-primary education of Hong Kong through the Visiting panel of Llewellyn in 1982. Then the Government endorsed their view by adopting the suggested pedagogy as the recommended method of teaching and learning in the local kindergarten in ECR2 (1986). The Government believed that by including the theory of 'learning through play' in the teaching education programme, the curriculum as well as the undesirable pedagogical strategies which had been identified (ECR2 1986) would then change amongst local kindergarten teachers. Has the problem released in ECR2(1986) been diminished after a decade? Is there any instructional paradigm shift witnessed in the early childhood education? A multi-case study was designed to collect qualitative data on the lived experience of the practices of the practitioners in 1996. A group of six in-service kindergarten teachers who were having their one- year Teacher Education Course (95-96) for kindergarten teachers of the Hong Kong Institute of Education were involved in the study. The three levels of reflection proposed by Schon (1987); namely, reflection-for-action, reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action were used as means to collect holistic data of

Private tertiary education is undermined in Hong Kong. While other Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea provide the largest supply of graduates from private higher education since the post World War II era. They are even ahead of the United States. In United Kingdom, a new private university, University of Buckingham was established in the 90s. This is certainly a one big step forward in providing an alternative choice to the students and the public. In China, the Ministry of Education recently approved the establishment of a private higher education institution, Kingold College in Guangdong. This is also the first case in China; not to mention that private higher education institutions in Taiwan also play an important part in the development of higher education. It's truly difficult to conclude whether private institutions are better than public institutions, or vice versa, in terms of quality. The case of Harvard University in the United States versus Cambridge University in United Kingdom is a good example. However, in an open society like Hong Kong, should the invisible hand be given more room for manoeuvre? Believing in the principle of freedom of choice and lifelong learning, should Hong Kong give equal recognition to both social and private investment into tertiary education? Should Hong Kong develop more private tertiary education institutions other than the Open University of Hong Kong? Indeed, should SAR government and entrepreneurs in Hong Kong be so concerned with the future competitiveness of our economy, this is about time to re-examine this issue in a positive and reflective manner. As such, this paper attempts to study the feasibility of developing private tertiary education in Hong Kong in the 21 st century.