The adoption features of government initiatives for the Curriculum Reform in Hong Kong schools

Abstract

This article is one of a series of papers generated from the Curriculum Reform study in Hong Kong with the purpose of understanding the impact of government’s role in the change process of the reform. This paper specifically examines the 17 government initiatives in the Curriculum Reform in terms of their adoption percentages of schools from before 2000 to 2006–7. These initiatives can be regarded as ‘soft’ measures of the Government, supplementing the hard policies on the Curriculum Reform. The adoption of these initiatives in schools reflects the extent of implementation of reform items and therefore should be crucial to the success of the Curriculum Reform. The study illustrates the impact of the government on the phase of adoption in the change process. The findings suggested that whereas the government initially played an important role in adoption of these initiatives it was not able to raise the adoption percentages further towards the end of the study. Other features of adoption and their impacts on policy and change are also discussed.