It is my great honour to serve the Hong Kong Educational Research Association as the Chairman of the Executive Committee, especially when the Association is celebrating its 25th Anniversary. Before I take up the current chairmanship, I got a chance to work with colleagues of the Association few years ago before I took up the Founding Chair Professor and Founding Director of the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Bristol, UK from 2005-2007. I am very glad to re-join the Association and have the great opportunity to serve the educational research community in Hong Kong and the region. The Association should grasp the great opportunity offered in the context that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has announced its plans to develop Hong Kong into a regional hub of education and decided to expand education into a new economic drive for Hong Kong’s future development. With the rise of China, particularly when a growing number of students in the mainland would like to have quality education, Hong Kong should grasp this great opportunity to expand our education into ‘educational services’ to cater for the pressing educational needs from China mainland. The Association should set out as a platform to engage scholars from Hong Kong, China mainland and Taiwan and even from the region to critically examine in what way Hong Kong could work with our partners from the neigbouring cities to co-launch quality educational programmes for meeting the needs of people not only from China but also from other parts of the world.

In promoting educational research and international collaboration, the Association has kicked off its first 25th Anniversary Seminar Series with Professor S. Gopinathan as the first speaker to talk about the most recent policy change and educational development in Singapore. The seminar was held on 18 February 2009 at the University of Hong Kong and the seminar was co-organized by the Hong Kong Educational Research Association, Comparative Education Research Centre and Centre of Asian Studies of the University of Hong Kong. With a strong conviction to promote international and regional dialogue, the Association will co-organize an international conference to celebrate its 25th Anniversary in early December 2009 with the Faculty of Social Sciences, Comparative Education Research Centre, The University of Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Institute of Education and the Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The theme of the conference is “Managing Human Capital in World Cities: Education Reform, Nurturing Talent and Student Learning in a Globalizing World’ and speakers from King’s College London, UK, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA and other parts of Asia have agreed to come to join us to debate and discuss issues related to promotion of human capital, nurturing and attracting talents and education reform and student learning.

In celebrating the achievements of the HKERA, we are going to publish special issues with focus on reflecting upon educational development and policy change in Hong Kong in the last two decades. Dr. KC Tang, Vice Chairman of the Association and Dr. Winnie So, Past Chairman of the Association, have been working extremely hard for this publication project. With a strong commitment to engage with dialogue and discussion with different stakeholders related to educational issues, the Association has also planned to organize a Forum on General Education: Dialogue between Schools and Universities in July 2009. Members are also welcome to join the Ideas and Universities Virtual Seminar Series co-organized by the Faculty of Social Sciences, The University of Hong Kong and the Worldwide Universities Network, a network promoting global university research collaboration, on line (details, see http://www.hku.hk/socsc/events/events.htm). Through the virtual seminars, we can engage with leading scholars from the UK, Europe, China, Australia and the USA in debating upon issues related to the theme of the seminar series ‘Universities as Organizations: Looking Inwards, Looking Outwards”. Do come to join us.

Seeing the Association as a platform for promoting educational research, we plan to develop more research activities led by Professor Amy Ha from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Association is also keen to engage in public policy debates and turn out research projects which could inform policy making in Hong Kong. Building upon the success of our past 25 years of experience, the current executive committee is committed to develop the Association from strength to strength. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our President, Past Presidents, Fellows, Founding Members, previous executive committee members, and our current members of the executive committee for your support and contributions to the HKERA. I would count upon your support and advice to take the Association to a new height.