Comparative Education Bulletin - Faculty of Education - The ...

good collaboration and high quality decision-making.
A study on the politics of the Local School Council (similar to IMC
in Hong Kong) in the Chicago School Reform (Crump, 1999) reveals
that strong democratically oriented schools with collaboration among
Principal, teachers and parents in promoting school improvement only
comprise 23 to 32 percentage of the total reformed SBM schools. Others
types include those where Principal still keep close control of schools,
those where there are conflicts over control and power and those where
members are satisfied with the status quo.
Therefore, collaboration work for school improvement is not
automatic with the establishment of IMC. It will be a great challenge
for the various stakeholders in the IMC could collaborate and make
valuable contributions to the improvement of the schools.
Another challenge to the SBM is the delegation of authority.
During the past decade since the inception of SMI, government has
delegated quite a lot of administrative and personnel powers to the
schools. These include promotion of teachers, flexibility to transfer
and spend money from different schools’ accounts. However, there
are a few important financial and personnel matters which are still
centrally-control. The first one is the salary of the teachers. Although
the school is allocated a large sum of recurrent expenditure, most of
the expenditure (85%) is teachers’ salary. Therefore, the flexibility given
to IMC is only to manage the remaining 15% of annual expenditure.
The other two are the establishment (i.e. number of posts) of the
teachers which is calculated by the government under a rigid formulae
and the laying-off of the teachers in which a prudent procedure need
to be followed and the government officers need to be notified at each
stages.
The above rules are stipulated in the Code of Aid which is a
document to control schools’ financial and personnel matters. It is
obviously these approaches are not in line with the modern concept
of management where financial and personnel matters should be
delegated to the decentralized unit.
The government has mentioned the idea of merging of salary
and non-salary grants and flexible funding models 21 . This means that
the school can determine the number of teachers that they employ
and their salaries. However, as stated by Leung (2003), “in view of
opposition from the education sector, it is unlikely that the government
would push any radical reform to alter the existing funding
arrangement.” Nevertheless, Leung (2003) considers that “flexible
funding” is still on the government agenda as a management reform.
The objective of SBM is to allow greater autonomy of school and
2 See P.40, Recommendation 5 of The School Management Initiative issued by
Education and Manpower Branch and Education Department in March 99 .
72