New Horizons in Education

Abstract

Hong Kong adopted the principles of School-based Management (SBM) as a basis for initiating its project of “School Management Initiative” (SMI) in 1991, and imposed the SBM scheme in all primary and secondary schools in 2000. An essential feature of the scheme is the requirement of all schools to produce an Annual School Plan to guide its activities during the year so as to ensure more systematic planning and evaluation of programs of activities in schools and to report their performance. The author has been invited to provide related consultancy services in many primary and secondary schools since 1998. A postal survey was carried out in late 2001/2002 to identify a number of issues related to the implementation of annual school plans in Hong Kong primary and secondary schools. A total of 1,251 questionnaires filled in by teachers were collected from 36 primary and 27 secondary schools. This paper presents some of the difficulties encountered by school teachers in their writing up and implementation of annual school plans as identified through the author’s consultancy work and the written responses in the questionnaires, and describes some useful techniques introduced to schools that were being practised and found to be useful. It was found that it usually takes one planning cycle (one year) of experience together with proper staff training and guidance before school teachers really get the confidence of implementing school planning.

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