Quality improvement: Managing effective school guidance and counselling service

In the past twenty years, there were many changes in Hong Kong and its education system. One was the introduction of the nine years compulsory education in 1978 which was considered a landmark of achieving the quantitative requirement of fundamental education in junior level. After that the quality of education needs to be raised in order to deal with the problems associated with compulsory education. One way to improve was the emphasise of school guidance and counseling service in schools. In the Education Commission Report No. 4, the concepts of Whole School Approach were introduced in 1990 to strengthen the service. Many schools tried to follow in this direction and with the help of Education Department organized different workshops in this aspect. Even though there were some improvements, many schools didnot get their expected result. The reasons are many and some of the main reasons will be discussed in this paper. According to Cheng (1993), to enhancing education quality, school-based approach is an effective approach. This is a new approach following the current school management reform emphasizing flexibility and the school's own initiative, self-development, self evaluation for better education quality. The emphasis on self- evaluation for internal development and improvement is a big step towards quality improvement. However, it is difficult to find a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of school guidance and counseling service, and so the need for this framework is very strong. In America, many researches have been done on the effectiveness of the school guidance and counseling programs. Principles and criteria leading to success of the programs have been distillated from the numerous empirical research findings. All these findings can be used to shade lights to the goals setting and criteria of assessing the performance of the school guidance and counseling program. Using these findings, together with local and foreign experts' view on effectiveness of the implementation of Whole School Approach, a framework is developed for the evaluation of the school guidance and counseling service. The framework will include: Core principles of school guidance and counseling program,program resources,program interventions, and other important elements. Two typical schools guidance and counseling programs will be introduced and their effectiveness will be compared with reference to the newly developed framework.