Transcripts of interviews with UK policy advisors on Hong Kong education policy. Recently England has engaged heavily in external policy referencing to drive its educational reforms. Hong Kong has been a major source of such referencing by virtue of its strong performance on international tests of pupil achievement. Using Hong Kong as a case study; the project will analyse external policy referencing, with England as the ‘borrower’ and Hong Kong the ‘lender’. The aim is to cast a light on the role of external policy referencing in the policy making process, and how policy referencing is operationalised in the England context. The study provides an insight into the contemporary patterns of external policy referencing, and its manifestation in the West and East Asia, and examines the evidence used to inform the process. The study will undertake a literature review and interviews with stakeholders in both contexts to address the following research questions: (1) What have been the critical features of the patterns of external policy referencing in England since the 1990s? (2) How have policy makers in England interpreted the sources of success of Hong Kong’s education system, and how does this compare with the views of key stakeholders in Hong Kong?In 2007 the Principal Investigator returned to London after working for 31 years in Faculties / Institutes of Education in Hong Kong and specialising in East Asian education systems. As political parties in England competed to promote their vision of schooling, he was constantly bemused as to the extent to which their plans for reform were based on the claim that what they were proposing was a feature of one or all of the high performing East Asian societies that do well on international tests of pupil achievement e.g. the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The 2010 Schools White Paper in England and the ongoing review of the National Curriculum extensively cite practices in Hong Kong to support their policies. Also, agencies now bidding to get contracts to examine the New Baccalaureate have to demonstrate that they will follow the best practices of high performing nations. Some of these claims seem far removed from the reality that the Principal Investigator had experienced both as an academic, and as someone heavily engaged in policy making in Hong Kong. What is more worrying is that these claims are largely unchallenged in England. The claims are accepted partly because people generally have limited knowledge of foreign education systems, and comparative educators have tended to avoid engagement in the public debates relating to ongoing policy making about how schools should be reformed. The purpose of this study is to help address that situation. We plan to focus on how policy makers in England portray features of Hong Kong's education system to promote domestic reforms. We examine the nature of these features in Hong Kong by finding out what the relevant laws or rules are, and by interviewing people who are directly involved with these education features. This will allow us to find out the extent to which the claims made in England are valid and accurate. It will also allow us to contribute to the ongoing debates in comparative education as to the influence of global and local factors on education reform.

The UK and Hong Kong team carried out a single-case study of England and Hong Kong because the two societies provide a powerful exemplar of the emerging patterns of policy transfer. For the first part of the project, we examined external policy referencing in England historically and currently, and located this within the broader literature on external policy referencing. In the second part of the project, we reviewed the academic literature on external policy referencing with specific reference to England. We carried out analysis of policy and related documents in England (e.g. key government announcements, speeches, and publications), between 1990 and the present, including authoritative sources and references made within policy documents or by policy makers (e.g. the McKinsey Report 2007, 2010). In the third part of the project, we provided an in-depth understanding of the policy making process. This was the part where the main empirical data collection took place. We undertook semi-structured, in-depth interviews with key policy makers involved in developing and implementing education reforms in England (N=10) and Hong Kong (N=15).