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The paper explores teachers' endorsement of pastoral care, based on their socially and historically developed and interactively shaped understandings of teacher care, and how it surfaces in their practices. Participants are 25 academics in a self-financing teaching-oriented college in Hong Kong, in which teachers are also academic advisors for an assigned number of students and professional counselling is provided as another form of student support. The study identified three groups of teachers regarding their endorsement and enactment of pastoral care, namely, the supporters who are the overwhelming majority, the opponents and the bystanders. The author suggests that the relatively high level of endorsement and enactment of pastoral care found among the participants can be explained by its institutional, societal and cultural contexts. Implications of encouraging and facilitating teachers taking pastoral care as shared responsibility with professional counsellors in higher education are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a co-director’s and co-author’s review of and commentary on research carried out with Maurice Galton over the past decade. Its principal focus is the burden that recent education policies and ascent of a deleterious culture of performativity have inflicted on teachers’ professional and domestic lives. It reports on four studies conducted for the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and two books: Teachers under pressure and Re-inventing schools, reforming teaching. The latter offers alarming, if not surprising, insights into the process of national policy-making. It goes on to relate mutual experiences of recent work in Hong Kong and draws attention to Maurice Galton’s contributions to education internationally. The keys to this paper, however, are the persistence, perspicacity and Maurice’s personal concern for teachers and children, that have enabled the insights and injustices uncovered in these studies to be published. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to report how school leadership is challenged by the three waves of education reform and development in Hong Kong. Since the 1970s, school leaders in the first wave were mainly concerned with achievement of the planned goals through improvement of teaching and learning. In the 1990s, school leaders of the second wave often focused on interface improvement through various types of quality inspection and assurance. In facing the challenges in the new century, the third wave of changes in Hong Kong is moving towards the pursuit of future effectiveness. The school leaders need to be concerned with enhancing educational relevance and creating new goals. This paper will discuss how the leadership conceptions and concerns of the third wave in Hong Kong are completely different from the traditional thinking. Implications are drawn for educators, policy-makers, and scholars in different parts of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper firstly identifies the major legacies inherited by the post-colonial government in Hong Kong, with reference to the key features of access, control and curriculum. Subsequently we examine the state's attempts to reconcile the tension between its quest for legitimacy and for stability. Two dimensions of education, namely the process of educational policy making and the nature of citizenship promoted through the school curriculum, are analysed in terms of the conceptions of civic participation and identity promoted and implemented by the state. In conclusion we point to the shift in the policy making process and the strengthening of policy actions designed to promote the state's conception of civic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]