This article interrogates the purpose of the International Baccalaureate (IB), which is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of education systems worldwide. It specifically explores the enduring tensions between claims of a distinctively well-rounded education aimed at the whole person and the more instrumental function of enabling students to get ahead academically. Addressing “what the IB is for”, the article employs Gert Biesta’s writings on the need to reconnect with educational purpose across three domains: qualification, socialisation, and subjectification. To do so, it reports on a mixed-methods study of the Personal Project within the Middle Years Programme. First, quantitative data from over 40,000 students worldwide revealed that those with higher Personal Project scores also achieved higher scores in the Diploma Programme, indicating a synergy between the two in terms of qualification for high academic attainment. Second, qualitative data from 107 interviews conducted at schools in Hong Kong, Peru, Qatar, South Korea, the United States, and Zambia highlighted the Personal Project’s potential to serve broader educational purposes, including socialisation and subjectification. However, these prospects may be overshadowed by schools prioritising high academic scores. The discussion reflects on the possibility of fulfilling multiple educational purposes, the threat of educational purpose being skewed towards qualification, and the worthwhile risk involved in pursuing more comprehensive objectives. The article concludes by calling for the IB to reaffirm its commitment to a well-rounded education that counters a measurement culture permeating schools. Copyright © 2025 Educational Review.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) has attracted criticism for its Eurocentricity and Western-centricity (Bunnell et al., 2017; Walker, 2010). This article explores international mindedness, questioning whether the IB perpetuates culturally hegemonic, colonial, and Westernised ideas. The paper draws on research data collected in two International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP) international schools in the Hong Kong SAR. We observed IBDP lessons and interviewed teachers about their uses of local and global culture and content in their teaching, considering whether the adaptation of curriculum based on cultural significance and perspectives functions to shift the Western-centric discourses for which the IB is commonly criticised. Our analysis suggests that attempts to decentre the West in the curriculum are challenging, resulting from factors including a lack of critical understanding among teachers, demands and expectations regarding assessment, the aspirations of students and their parents, and a lack of time and space within the timetable and curriculum. Drawing on literature and teacher practices, we propose considerations to move beyond recognitive politics to a more critical set of practices unsettling hierarchies of knowledge and power. The task of de-centering the IBDP's Western epistemology requires further consideration and research. In this paper, we contribute to this ongoing inquiry through providing an analysis of a particular set of circumstances in Hong Kong and providing a framework to enable critical reflection of curriculum and teaching practices that could be considered across IB programmes. Copyright © 2025 Routledge.

Students as partners (SaP) has become an impactful practice in higher education as it enables students to take ownership of their learning and exercise agency. However, the implementation of SaP, particularly in Asia, has encountered many challenges, including concerns about a large power distance between students and teachers. Despite the emerging interests in exploring SaP in several Asian regions, there have been few studies about students’ experiences of partnership throughout a project life cycle. This study explores students’ experiences of SaP in three projects spanning two research-intensive universities in Hong Kong based on the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and positioning theory. Data were collected from exit interviews with student partners, their reflective writings, and their responses to open-ended questions in a post-project survey. Our main contribution is the discovery of multiple contradictions between the project designs and students’ enactment of partnership. Specifically, students’ hesitation in assuming a partner’s role was related to their disciplinary identity, the inquiry methods of the projects, and the pre-determined project specifications. In contrast, the cultural factors, which are largely framed as barriers in the literature, only affected the partnership development at the beginning of the project. Our study implies that future SaP projects need to ensure the alignment between project designs and a partner’s role to facilitate equal and sustainable contributions from students and staff members. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Within the context of the multipolar higher education landscape, China in the past decade has emerged as an important destination for Hong Kong students, especially in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). However, little is known about their experiences in Mainland universities. The extant literature on international students moving from the rest to the West, considers individuals’ language barriers and cultural differences as main inhibitors for their academic and social engagement in the destination institution. Little research examined the role of the institutional context, especially for international students who do not head to the West to study. Building on the theory of campus climate for diversity, this study interviewed ten Hong Kong students in the early years of their undergraduate programmes in one Mainland China university, located in the GBA, and interrogated the impacts of inclusive campus climate initiatives, perceived and experienced by these cross-border Hong Kong students. Two salient initiatives, namely mixed residential living arrangements with their Mainland peers and a Hong Kong/Macao student organisation, were identified by participants who indicated that when the initiatives aimed to better integrate Hong Kong students into the host institution/society, they separated them from the domestic counterparts while strengthening their in-group trust and safety nets for navigating the university. This study’s findings have implications for the development and evaluation of institutional strategies for the purpose of embracing Hong Kong and other international/non-local students upon their arrival and supporting their well-being and academic progression in Mainland universities. Copyright © 2024 Educational Review.

Empirical studies on university choice and access among under-represented racial/ethnic minorities have utilised the concept of school-based social capital (SBSC)–defined by Stanton-Salazar as key resources and support provided by institutional agents (i.e. teachers, counsellors and other staff). They primarily relied upon minority students’ perceptions. Few of them canvassed both staff and student understandings and experiences of SBSC and thus have not yet captured the nature of SBSC and its influence from both the supply and demand sides. This study interviewed 18 secondary school teachers and nine minority students of South/Southeast Asian ethnicity enrolled in a publicly-funded school of Hong Kong. Its findings shed light on the highly-valued school-based support and resources staff and students viewed as helpful in the university choice process. The findings also disclosed the challenges minority students expressed about being exposed to SBSC while living in the school community, characterised by an ethos of “treating everybody the same”. This in turn rationalised staff understanding of diversity and equity-based support as a transitional approach to mainstreaming/assimilating minority students. As a result, some staff members either withheld critical information on university admission requirements or were less responsive towards the needs of the most disadvantaged minority students, despite a presumable promise to envision university for all. This study calls for structural and institutional transformation so that both individual and collective efforts can empower the least advantaged and promote their university choice and access. Copyright © 2023 Educational Review.

This article reports the findings of a multi-site qualitative study of 31 Chinese homeschooling families in Taipei and Hong Kong. Homeschooling, a significant source of inspiration for school innovation, has been growing around the globe in recent years, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighting the challenges facing mainstream schools. The findings reveal that the families under study chose to homeschool their children mainly because they were dissatisfied with mainstream schools in the Chinese context, which, as they described, were not sufficiently child-centric. Notably, their homeschooling practices were highly diversified and hybridised, including a variety of organisational methods, actors, and materials. Based on lessons learned from homeschooling, the findings indicate the need for mainstream schools to reimagine their relations with families and the outside world in terms of pedagogic time, space, relations, and resources to better respond to every student’s unique needs as well as the challenges ahead in the post-pandemic world. Copyright © 2023 Educational Review.

This comparative analysis aims to capture the complex roles and positionings of the International Baccalaureate (IB) in conjunction with local education systems in Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. Our analysis focused on how the IB’s institutional legitimacy is presented in the three societies. We conducted a documentary analysis of texts on the introduction and implementation of IB programmes into local school systems. Our findings suggest that there are commonalities and variations in how the IB is interpreted by key local agents and is positioned into local education systems. Specifically, across the three societies, the IB has expanded continuously. At the same time, its institutionalisation process varies by each society’s socio-historical context and needs: substantive legitimacy as the international curriculum of choice in Hong Kong, a quiet supplement to elite education in Singapore, and instrumental curriculum borrowing for fixing the education system in Korea. We also find that the institutionalisation of the IB is limited at a symbolic level and controlled by the Singaporean government, while the IB is saliently promoted by local education authorities in the context of education reform in Korea. The institutionalisation process of the IB in Hong Kong is primarily swayed by market principles under the existing school choice system. Copyright © 2021 Educational Review.

Studies on parental views and experiences of the integrated programme implemented in mainstream early childhood settings for children with disabilities are dominated by the perspectives of mothers and teaching personnel. Additionally, most of these studies are largely from Western countries. This hermeneutic phenomenological study attempts to document the personal views and experiences of Hong Kong Chinese fathers who are raising children with disabilities. A total of 24 fathers of children with disabilities currently studying in 12 mainstream child care centres (CCCs) with an integrated programme were interviewed twice. Results indicate that the fathers appreciated the rationales of the integrated education of their children's integrated CCCs, which is the ideal programme for allowing the involvement of their children in the real world. Nevertheless, the fathers also experienced difficulties, frustrations and dissatisfaction after their children were admitted into the integrated CCCs. Policy and practice implications are also discussed. Copyright © 2018 Educational Review.

The integration of children with disabilities in mainstream early childhood settings is a common practice in many developed and developing countries world-wide. A number of key points have been raised concerning such integration, including the increased attention to civil education about the rights of persons with disabilities, training for teachers, and close communication between the government and the mainstream schools. This paper presents a qualitative study of these critical issues in the context of integrated early childhood centres in Hong Kong. These centres operate under an integration policy inherited from the British colonial period. This policy lies within the larger philosophical context of Confucianism with its commitment to excellence, which makes for an intensely competitive schooling environment. Thus, the story presented in this paper is a collection of multiple perspectives of parents with and without children with disabilities, teachers, and school principals on the topic of integration. Looking at the bigger picture, we argue that rather than simply inheriting a policy that is prone to bureaucratic machinations, the policy must be adopted and owned within the local settings if it is to work properly. The implications of this study resonate with integrated education in settings that may be very different from the ones described herein.
[Copyright of Educational Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2013.780007]

The impact of parental involvement on school management has been recognized by many education professionals and policy-makers. Thus parental involvement in school education becomes one of the prime focuses in the current education reform movement in Hong Kong. Particularly, specific guidelines and policies for involving parents at various levels of children's education have been spelled out in many governmental policy documents. This article reports on an interpretive study that explores the micro-politics of parental involvement in school education in two primary schools in Hong Kong. By analyzing the interviews with 14 parents, eight teachers and two principals, together with the field-notes of participant observations in two case study schools, three propositions of power relations between parents and teaching professionals emerge. The findings indicate that in the process of encouraging parents' participation in school education, teaching professionals demonstrated ethnocentric attitudes towards parents; the notion of "parents as resources" were for pragmatic purposes; and the conception of "parents-as-school-governors" was of policy rhetoric in the process of implementation of home-school cooperation.
[Copyright of Educational Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2013.868786]