Building Alliances: School-Community Partnership Advocacy in Hong Kong and Singapore

Abstract

Government advocacy of school-community partnerships is becoming a global phenomenon. The striking similarities between partnership advocacy in Asia and the discourse in the West partly reflects the work of supranational agencies, which have been at the forefront of macro level partnership advocacy, as a global homogenising force. While a widening sense of social justice may underpin these movements, policy motivations are, however, diverse and even contradictory. This paper explores the evolution of parental and community partnership in education in two Asian states - Hong Kong and Singapore - and the local and global forces that shaped them. It focuses on the work of two advisory bodies to the education ministry tasked to spearhead partnership advocacy at the state level: the Committee on Home-School Co-operation (CHSC) in Hong Kong, and the Community and Parents in Support of Schools (COMPASS) in Singapore. The study examines what forms of partnership they advocate, why and how they advocate, and how foreign practices of partnership have influenced the local movements. Seventeen key policy actors, six local academics and two foreign consultants were interviewed to gain insiders’ perspectives on the ‘micro-politics’ of educational partnership.