The role and responsibilities of the principal should be set out in a Principal’s Manual.
School management frameworks should allow for participation in decision making by all
concerned parties including principal and teachers.
Each school in the public sector should produce an annual school plan to guide its activities
during the year.
Each school should prepare an annual school profile covering its activities in the previous
year and detailing school performance in a number of key areas.
Six years later, the Education Commission (EC) formulated recommendations on enhancing
the quality of the school system in its Report No. 7 (EC, 1997). The major concern of this report
was to facilitate schools in striving for improvement in their performance. The EC suggested that,
in addition to building a quality culture, a quality assurance mechanism should be developed in
the public school sector. This mechanism was to be composed of both internal quality assurance
to be achieved through school self-evaluation and external quality assurance to be conducted by
the Education Department. The EC’s Report No. 7 also recommended that the Hong Kong
Government should devolve its administrative and financial authority to schools and encourage
school-based reforms. All public sector schools were required to put school-based management
into practice by the year 2000. The Advisory Committee on School-based Management, which was
appointed by the Education Department in December 1998, reiterated that schools should be given
greater autonomy in the delivery of education and deployment of resources, and principals should
not act just as custodians of their schools but play a more prominent role as professional leaders
and chief administrators (ACSBM, 2000). In order to work together with teachers and parents, and
be responsible to them for their schools’ performance, principals need to undergo a paradigm shift
in their leadership in the context of school-based management. They have to move from the traditional
concentration on maintenance and hierarchy to change, collegiality, teamwork, improvement
and effectiveness (Task Group on Training and Development of School Heads of ED, 1999).
To help principals change their mindsets in managing their schools, new principal training programmes
were designed to equip them with the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to:
increase understanding of the critical role of a principal in the development and maintenance
of effective schools;
improve skills in strategic planning and implementation processes; and
shape a personal vision for leadership and continuous professional development.
According to the Education Department’s guidelines for principals’ continuing professional
development (CPD) – which aim at empowering principals to become effective and professional
leaders and administrators of schools – principals need to develop values, knowledge, skills and
attributes in six core areas of leadership2 (Education Department, 2002).
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