Following the international trend in education towards democracy and decentralization, the Hong Kong government introduced a school-based management (SBM) system about two decades ago. It is widely recognized in the literature that decentralization, empowering school level management and marginalizing the influence of the intermediate level of governance, can result in better deployment of school resources and better meet the demands of various stakeholders. However, in the unique historical and cultural context of Hong Kong, the advantages of decentralization claimed in the literature have yet to be fully realized. This paper discusses the contextual factors affecting the implementation of SBM in Hong Kong, and examines their impact on four major stakeholders, namely the government, the principals, the teachers, and the parents in the wake of reform.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2015.1056592]

香港是一個東西文化交融的國際都會，社會價值既矛盾又多元，加上崇尚自由和傳媒發達等因素，要有效地推行校本價值教育並不容易。為了支援小學以校本形式推行價值教育，香港初等教育研究學會向優質教育基金申請「支援小學推行校本價值教育」計劃，並於2014年3月至2015年8月進行。此分享會將由不同學校介紹其推行價值教育的經驗。

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.

Most official literature would trace the lineage of China’s contemporary era of reforms to the Third Plenum of the 13th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held in December 1978, which marked the final ascendency of Deng Xiaoping and his policy of ‘opening up and reform’ which reversed the Maoist path of communism. Within three decades, China has been transformed from a centrally planned economy to a thriving market economy under the so-called ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Private enterprises thrive alongside state-owned enterprises which now account for only some 30% of the nation’s industrial product. The central state was restructured through devolution and decentralization. New administrative systems in personnel, financial and assets management were installed. In a gist, the past thirty years of reforms - though implemented in a gradualist manner described by Deng as “crossing the river by touching the stones”, with tensions between reformist and conservative forces, periodic ups and downs, and setbacks and reversals, have nonetheless managed to break up the previous omnipresent party-state built upon the state’s extraction and monopoly of all resources (manpower, finance, properties and natural resources), operated through a party-controlled centralized cadre system, and state-owned production units and enterprises run by central ‘industrial’ ministries. At the gateway to mainland China stands Hong Kong, a British-ruled enclave until 1 July 1997 when this international city was reunified with the motherland. Unlike the mainland, Hong Kong has always enjoyed a British, and hence Western, style of administration. During colonial rule, Hong Kong had a long tradition of pursuing administrative and management reforms as a substitute for more fundamental constitutional reforms, in order to cope with the government’s legitimacy deficit and to be more responsive to public demands. The 1990s marked the heydays of public sector reform, when

In the era of educational change, the performance of middle-managers for schools development is critical. Much recent literature revealed that middle managers play an important role in school reforms (Blandford, 1997; Bennett, 1995; Fleming & Aamesbury, 2001). In Hong Kong, the EdB has specific job specifications for the middle managers, e.g., deputy headship, and coordination role in school curriculum, counseling and guidance, extra-curricular activities, etc. Usually each middle manager has to lead a group of teachers to achieve their goals assigned by the principal or the school management committee. The workload of middle managers in the Hong Kong primary schools has escalated dramatically with the implementation of a wide range of reform initiatives. In order to support the professional development of middle managers in primary schools, the Department of Educational Policy and Management of the Hong Kong Institute of Education started to offer a middle manager leadership programme in 2005. In addition to the systematic lectures and workshops, participants had to go through action learning which included role-play and action learning sharing. This paper aims to review the effectiveness of the programme, with special interest on action learning. Based on the empirical evidence from the semi-structured interview, participants reflected that they learned better in experiential in-service training.It seems that this kind of training is better for the professional development of middlemanagers in enhancing their ability on leading teams and management of school development.

“Soft” policy has newly emerged as a policy implementation concept in relation to governance. Carried with a character of non-binding, it is designed for multilevel systems of governance where there is relative autonomy at different levels of collective decision-making. Originally “soft” policy was used in the field of international law or international relations and has recently been used in relation to European Union Policy. In the field of education, “soft” policy has gained attention since the adoption of different scales of education reforms in various countries that involved the governance and coordination among multilevel systems during the past decade. In real practice, “soft” methods or measures were used to assist implementation at various levels, particularly in the real contexts. According to Ahonen’s typology of soft policy-making methods (2001), the present study will explore how “soft” policy has been realized in the recent large-scale curriculum reform in Hong Kong. In particular, the study will explore how school teachers perceive these “soft” methods or measures in their school contexts. Implications will be drawn from these real cases of “soft” policy implementation as well.

This paper explores the predictive relationship between knowledge management and school capacity. A cross-sectional quantitative survey was designed to collect data from 427 teachers at 15 secondary schools in Hong Kong. A structural equation model was applied to explore the factor structure of the latent variables and their relationships. The results showed that knowledge accessibility, application and sharing were identified as the predictive factors for teacher learning capacity and organizational learning capacity.
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