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The purpose of this paper is to systematically analyze the neoliberal challenges and problems facing public schools in the particular Hong Kong context.

Based on a systematic and critical analysis on the history and socio-political context of Hong Kong’s school policies and practice as well as the official documents and statistics, this paper examines the impacts of neoliberalism in four main aspects of school education in Hong Kong: school governance, accountability, privatization and government expenditure.

Convergence, as well as deviation, on neoliberal globalization occurs in the particular Hong Kong context. School bureaucracy has irresistibly expanded. Policymakers have placed increasing emphasis on instrumentally evaluating schools while decentralizing, diversifying and privatizing education. School leadership has become focused solely on succeeding within those imposed performance management and metrics, pulling ahead of school competitions and prioritizing easily quantifiable and measurable tasks. Teachers have faced a potential threat from the loss of autonomy through the market logic and consumerist metrics. The rise of privatized education has further intensified school practices based on competitiveness and performativity. On the other hand, resource cutbacks and financial constraints – problems that are generally inflicted by neoliberal discourse – have rarely occurred in Hong Kong.

This study is part of concerted efforts in research that adopts the comparative and critical perspectives emerging from different social contexts to consider and flesh out how neoliberalism look across the school systems, how it challenges the systems differently, and how it evokes various responses from within the systems (Apple, 2001). Taken all the efforts together, a finely nuanced understanding of the trails of neoliberalism can help collectively re-discover school education as a social good, and collectively re-imagine and reshape alternatives for the future.

This paper offers an international and comparative perspective and further nuances to an understanding of how neoliberal policies and ideology are recontextualized in countries across the globe given particularities of different local contexts.

The topic of organizational culture has attracted the attention of numerous researchers from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. A review of the literature shows that the quantitative assessment of organizational culture has been dominated by studies adopting the competing values framework developed by Quinn and his colleagues. The use of this model embraces the notion that the 4 cultural types depicted by the framework can be used not only to represent the culture of an organization but also to serve as a basis upon which one organization can be differentiated from others. Various attempts have been reported to support the validity of the framework for describing the culture of an organization; however, the claim that one organization can be differentiated from another on the basis of the 4 cultural types is yet to be empirically supported. The study reported here set out to show that the competing values model can be used to differentiate organizations from one another. Based on a survey administered to all academic staff in 7 out of the 8 government‐funded higher education institutions in Hong Kong, the study successfully confirmed the validity of the competing values model as a tool in differentiating organizations.

The purpose of this article is to report a study of the strategies members of principal selection panels use to select the best candidate for a principal position.

The study draws on both qualitative and quantitative data. The quantitative analysis drawn on data collected from school supervisors and school principals confirmed a four‐factor structure and qualitative interview data was used to supplement findings.

In order of importance the strategies employed by selection panels were: panel professionalism, the interview, making the cut and pre‐interview.

Findings indicate that the selection component of principal recruitment remains at best an uncertain science. Tensions endure between beliefs and perceptions of panel members from different backgrounds. These include beliefs about competence and level of involvement in important activities such as short‐listing. Relational ties, religious affiliation and values congruence are important to members of selection panels, but we are unsure of the influence these have on the quality of successful applications. It seems that at a minimum they may reduce the pool of “real” applicants.

The study provides useful information on the strategies members of principal selection panels use to select the best candidate for a principal position.

Although the importance of shared leadership to school success has been widely recognised in the literature, only scant attention has been paid to the feelings of vice‐principals over undertaking more responsibilities. Maintained by the researchers in this somewhat neglected area is the assertion that vice‐principals who find their jobs more satisfying have stronger desire for principalship whereas those experiencing less job satisfaction were more likely to wish to remain in their present roles. The feelings of vice‐principals towards their jobs thus warrant further investigation given the current shortage of principal applicants, which is predominately comprised of vice‐principals, in many places of the world. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

Taking into consideration that most of the studies on vice‐principalship in the literature have been descriptive and provided little empirical support, this study attempted to empirically verify the job satisfaction and desire for principalship link based on a quantitative survey covering vice‐principals in all Hong Kong secondary schools.

The results suggest that professional commitment, sense of efficacy and sense of synchrony are the three satisfaction factors affecting the desire of vice‐principals for becoming principals; the effect of the first two is positive whereas that of the last one is negative.

The negative relation between sense of synchrony and desire for principalship is worth noting; it suggested vice‐principals in Hong Kong who upheld the Chinese cultural value of workplace harmony had found it hard to strike a balance between maintaining a harmonious working relationship with colleagues and seeking for career advancement and thus chose to remain in their vice‐principal positions. The perceived tension between school performance and work harmony held by vice‐principals in Hong Kong is a crucial issue to be addressed by policy makers.

This paper is the first of its kind to investigate the direct link between job satisfaction and the career aspiration of vice‐principals using a quantitative methodology.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals in discharging their roles and to further explore their engagement in informal mentoring as a coping mechanism in the absence of a structured professional development program.

The qualitative study was conducted in the form of in-depth face-to-face, loosely structured individual interviews with ten informants from a variety of personal and school backgrounds, contributing to a set of data that unveiled the basic themes.

Three dilemmas facing Hong Kong vice-principals were identified: juggling administrative work with teaching, standing by management or siding with peer teachers, and forced innovation vs omnipresent conservatism. The findings also suggested that the informants tended toward external resources intentionally with a view to gaining emotional support as well as professional stimulation. They also engaged in informal mentoring, which took the form of observing principals’ behaviors, joining support groups organized by school governing bodies, and enrolling in academic programs offered by universities and/or professional bodies, as a way to resolve the dilemmas.

Informal mentoring has been identified as an effective approach for Hong Kong vice-principals to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to overcome workplace challenges and the feelings of loneliness experienced upon changing their role. The findings point to the importance of formalizing mentoring in vice-principal development programs.

This study is the first of its kind to explore the impact of informal mentoring on vice-principals in Hong Kong where both dual-career track systems and a structured mentoring programs are missing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine first the job responsibilities undertaken by vice‐principals and second to investigate the respective contribution of each job responsibility in preparing them for the principalship. Because new principals are drawn predominantly from the ranks of vice‐principals in Hong Kong, it is important to examine whether their current experience adequately prepares vice‐principals to take up this senior position.

All vice‐principals in Hong Kong secondary schools were sent a questionnaire that asked for the extent of their involvement in various activities and their adequacy of preparation for the principalship. A sequential regression analysis was used to examine the effect of various job dimensions on the vice‐principals' perceived preparedness, over and above the effect of their demographic variables.

Seven job responsibility dimensions pertaining to the role of vice‐principals were identified. It was found that respondents spend most of their time on staff management and the least on resource management. Among the seven job dimensions, only strategic direction and policy environment were found to have an effect on their perceived preparation for the principalship.

The findings reflect that vice‐principals take their staff management and resource management responsibilities lightly as they do not perceive their extensive experience gained in staff management as an asset or their inadequate experience in resource management as a deficiency in preparing them for the principalship. As these two dimensions are the core elements of school‐based management, they deserve the attention of policy‐makers. In addition, policy‐makers should address the development of vice‐principals in the dimension of strategic direction and policy environment.

The paper, using a quantitative methodology, is the first to investigate the link between job responsibility dimensions and preparation for the principalship as perceived by vice‐principals.

There is growing concern in college management about the quality of education in tertiary institutions. For related studies, people normally encounter the problems of developing measurement indicators and identifying components of quality education. Some people use SERVQUAL, a technique making use of the gap between customers’ expectations and perceived experience as indicators of service quality, to measure quality of services offered by professionals such as physicians. Hampton applied the technique to identify and measure the significance of different components of quality education, by using the questionnaire designed by Betz, Klingensmith and Menne. Hampton’s findings sound reasonable but seem to be too simplified and confined to the characteristics of students in the USA. The expectations and perceptions of the students are often shaped and influenced by their cultural orientation and environments. Hong Kong students who are more pragmatic and instrumental may value less the significance of campus life on quality education but put more stress on assessment. This study is designed to apply the modified SERVQUAL skill to examine Hampton’s findings with reference to the students in a different social and cultural context. It is hoped that a list of quality indicators can be identified against which the performance of the higher educational institutes can be measured.

Points out that recent discussion has centred on the application of total quality management (TQM) in education. Most writers appear inclined to suggest that TQM is a unique solution for effective school management. Nonetheless, TQM was initiated in the manufacturing sector and its successful application in the educational setting should only be justified with ample theoretical support and concrete evidence. Attempts to trace the literature that discusses the application of TQM in education. Also addresses the differences between industry and education. Aims to explore the relevance of employing TQM in education.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce readers to the special issue on “middle space” education leaders (those individuals who are second-in-command in schools). The special issue contains papers pertaining to mentoring those preparing for and aspiring to the assistant school leader role, as well as papers on programs that support new assistant principals/vice-principals through mentoring and coaching. The authors provide background on middle space leadership and mentoring from existing research literature, introduce the international papers selected for the issue, and identify unifying themes across the papers.

The authors provide highlights of relevant research literature on the importance of mentoring for school leaders in general, but also specifically address the need for mentoring for middle space leaders from the scant literature that exists on the topic. After reviewing the relevant literature, the authors provide an overview of the seven papers that were chosen for the issue through a rigorous peer-review process.

The co-editors of this special issue identify common themes that emerged from the papers chosen for the issue. In general, authors note that middle space leaders have unique mentoring and coaching needs, and there are few formal programs that address their needs. However, there is a growing awareness of the need to support assistant principals through structured mentoring programs, as well as preparing and mentoring those who aspire to the position.

The seven papers chosen for the special issue represent a variety of research methodologies. A limitation is that the majority of the studies are qualitative, with small sample populations. However, even with small sample sizes, commonalities can be seen across the studies and across international contexts.

This review summarizes the issues facing middle space leaders in education and how they can be effectively addressed. The global audience that can benefit from engaging with the papers in this special issue includes educational leadership faculty, educational governing bodies, policymakers, school district central office personnel, senior principals, and assistant principals themselves.

This paper and the seven that follow extend the scant research literature in the realm of middle space leaders in education. They provide unique insights – from different international contexts including the USA, Canada, Hong Kong, and New Zealand – into the need for and potential benefits of mentoring and coaching aspiring and new middle space leaders.