The success of a school depends to a very great degree on the understanding of their roles by the school teachers as it is through them that school policies become actual practice. The move of an educational system from an elitist to a more general and compulsory one in the 1970s and wider socio-economic and socio-political changes in the last two decades have shaped the overall administrative pattern of primary schools in Hong Kong. It also denotes a demand for changing roles of teachers. As a result, a study on role identification of teachers is useful in both school administration and teacher education. Utilizing the models of Taylor and others, as well as using a sample of experienced primary school teachers attending the teachers refresher course offered by the HKIED, the symposium attempts to provide an initiate finding of a survey for the discussion of the following: 1. What administrative role-functions are the experienced teachers performing? 2. What tasks do these teachers perceive as the most important in the successful and efficient running of their subject departments/committees? 3. Are there any discrepancies between the performed roles and the perceived roles of teachers? 4. What tasks are being perceived as the most difficult to be handled? 5. Why are they difficult to handle? 6. What administratrative skills and knowledge are perceived by experienced teachers as most important to be included in an in-service training program for teachers ? Implications and recommendations for school administration and teacher education will also be discussed.

The Native English speaking Teacher Scheme is often wrongly termed an innovation, whereas in fact the involvement of expatriate teachers in the system is one aspect of Hong Kong Education “Then” as well as “Now” and “Tomorrow”. The broadening of the Scheme to the primary sector from 2002 is also nothing new, but it does pose some interesting challenges for the majority of primary schools where expatriate teachers have not played a role before. The Monitoring and Evaluating of the Native English speaking Teacher Scheme, the official evaluation of the mainly secondary scheme introduced in 1998, also explored the joys and frustrations of NETs employed in twenty local primary schools from 1998 to 2000. Since then what might be more properly termed innovations in the deployment of NETs have been introduced in the Tsuen Wan district and in the Government PSED Scheme. This paper draws on the results of the official NET evaluation and the successes of these other initiatives to identify possible pitfalls and issue pointers for potentially very exciting successes associated with the wider deployment of expatriates in the local primary schools.

The In-service Courses of Training for Teachers (ICTT) in Hong Kong played a key hole in meeting the minimum training needs of thousands of unqualified non-graduate teachers during the expansion of mass education from the 1950s to 1970s. Though these remedial courses have all along been perceived by the community as of dubious quality, they have lasted for five decades, as untrained teachers continued to join the teaching force, in the absence of a government policy requiring new teachers to be pre-service trained. It is not until recently that their phasing out has become a possibility. This paper provides a critical review of education policies which have allowed the prolongation of these courses for half a century. It illustrates the long and difficult process by which Hong Kong has been moving towards an “all trained” teaching profession.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been changes in the rationale and practice of Hong Kong’s teacher education. Apart from the expansion of the initial teacher education, there is also an increase in the provision of refresher teacher training programmes. Many of these training programmes are offered by the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Some of them have become credit-bearing since 1998. To ensure these programmes are effective in meeting the needs of schools, evaluation studies are necessary. Based on a longitudinal investigation with interviews and questionnaires, and with a sample of around 120 course participants, this study attempts to evaluate a primary refresher training programme called “The School as an Organization (SAO)”. The research methodology and preliminary findings from the pilot group are discussed.
[Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education]