Career and life development in Hong Kong: A school improvement and benchmarking perspective

Career and Life Development (CLD) (or ‘Career Development and Life Planning’) refers to a big spectrum of educational practices that aims to help young people embraces a holistic and comprehensive process to plan one’s life and actively implements the goals determined in own social context (Leung, 2005). It usually comprises of three aspects of education: (1) self-understanding, (2) knowing the dynamic world of work, and (3) nurturing reflective habits of mind about own future career pathways or personal planning. The aim of this study is to analyze school-based CLD effectiveness in Hong Kong by adopting a school improvement instrument, ‘the Hong Kong Benchmarks for Career and Life Development’ (HKBM) which is initiated by CLAP@JC, with close reference to the world-recognized framework in the United Kingdom, the Gatsby’s Benchmarks for Career Guidance (Holman, 2014; Holman & Yip, 2020). Using HKBM, whole school self-evaluation was conducted by CLD leaders in each school under support from teams of ‘critical friends’ (Swaffield & Macbeath, 2005). After examining the HKBM dataset collected from 44 secondary schools, key findings are: (a) effective CLD provision requires a visible and stable policy with strong school leaders’ backing; (b) schools are offering insufficient opportunities of career-related experiences and one-to-one personal guidance on CLD, despite the backing from government policy since 2014. There are implications to policies in terms of School-Business Partnerships, and to strategic planning and implementation of school-based CLD. Copyright © 2021 HKERA-APERA International Conference.