External School Review Reports (Concluding Chapter)

The Education Bureau (EDB) has introduced the School Development and Accountability (SDA) framework since the 2003/04 school year, with a view to supporting schools to manifest the spirit of school-based management (SBM), thereby promoting their perpetual development and self-improvement and enhancing their accountability and transparency through school self-evaluation (SSE). External School Review (ESR) has then been adopted as an external quality assurance mechanism to validate the effectiveness of the SSE.

All along, the EDB has been conducting ESR in a school-specific and focused manner. The ESR reports reflect the school performance during inspection. Upon receiving the ESR reports, schools should follow up on the suggestions provided by the ESR teams, unceasingly refine their work to increase effectiveness, and promote continuous development through self-improvement. As always, schools are required to issue the contents of the ESR report to key stakeholders; at the same time, to enhance transparency, schools are encouraged to upload the full ESR report to the school website.

To tie in with the announcement of “The Chief Executive’s 2022 Policy Address” to strengthen the SBM, the EDB launched the enhanced SDA framework to bolster the accountability of staff in publicly-funded schools in providing quality school education and enhancing the national education through the adoption of a whole-school approach. The EDB Circular No.15/2022 was issued on 11 November 2022 to inform schools of the implementation details of the enhanced SDA framework, including, amongst others, the measure that the EDB would upload the concluding chapter of the ESR reports to its website for public access starting from the 2023/24 school year to further enhance schools’ transparency and accountability. By scrutinising the concluding chapter of different ESR reports, the public can have a preliminary grasp of the overall quality of education in Hong Kong, including its advantages and strengths, and the areas for improvement.

The concluding chapter of the ESR report refers to “Chapter 4 — Conclusion and Way Forward”. The judgments and suggestions in it are in line with the contents of the full report, including the school context, overall effectiveness of school work and areas for improvement. Depending on the school context and development needs, the length of the concluding chapter and the number of suggestions given vary slightly, and it is not appropriate to make a comparison of different reports.

The period for keeping the concluding chapter of the ESR report on the EDB website is tentatively set at six school years (starting from the school year following the issuance of the report), which is approximately equivalent to two school development cycles.  This allows schools sufficient time to follow up on the suggestions to facilitate self-improvement and enhance continuous development. In order to facilitate the public’s comprehensive understanding of all aspects of school work, links to the school websites are provided in the EDB website for easy access. In addition, for schools which have informed the EDB of the uploading of the full ESR report to the school website, indications are given.