An introduction is presented which discusses various articles within the issue on topics including countries participating in large-scale assessments in education on education policy, Programme for International Student Assessment in Hong Kong, and development of regulatory interventions.

Since the mid-1980s,a number of East Asian societies have consistently performed well in international tests, and these 'high performing' education systems have emerged as models of 'best practice'. Policy makers in England (as well as some other Western systems) have been keen to reference Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai and South Korea when developing and promoting their own reform agendas. Although Hong Kong has been extensively cited and praised by politicians and their advisers in England local dissatisfaction with the education system has prompted a series of major education reforms. This mismatch between the two policy communities in their perceptions of the strong features of Hong Kong education is explored in this paper using documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other key stakeholders. We analyse the ways in which features of Hong Kong's education system are reconstructed, used, and manipulated in policymaking in England. We argues that the referencing of Hong Kong is an act of political theatre, reminiscent of a pantomime, a traditional performance built around stereotyped villains and heroes, narratives of good conquering evil, and comical set-pieces that sometimes verge on the farcical.

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

This paper aims to the analysis of civic education policy of the two governments of Hong Kong, the British Colony before 1997 and the Chinese Special Administrative Region after 1997. Hong Kong people own questionable identities, neither British citizens nor Chinese subjects. Basically, the decolonization showed that the policy of domestication was implemented during the transition period of Hong Kong where the government patronized and empowered the Hong Kong people through enhancing human rights and developing political democratization. After handing over of sovereignty, the education policy made the contents of civic education more patriotic, cultural hegemonic and national ideological. The intentions were quite obviously presented in policy documents and responded in the historical contexts. The historical comparison intends to get the expandable interpretation of the scenario of education policy in this period of Hong Kong.
[Coryright © 2014 David Publishing Company.]