The Faculty of Education and Teacher Training: From a School of Education to the Cradle of Hong Kong's Teachers

Bottom line: The Chinese University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Education began life as the School of Education, founded in 1965, and was elevated to Faculty status in the 1991/92 academic year. It now comprises four departments plus a Physical Education Unit, and is one of Hong Kong's longest-established centres of teacher training.

A "school" that admitted only university graduates and taught just one course spent a quarter of a century on the hillside before finally winning the same standing as the Faculties of Arts, Science and Social Science. The sixty-year story of CUHK's Faculty of Education is, in effect, the story of a question Hong Kong has kept rewriting: who deserves to stand at the front of a classroom? This article will not duplicate the quick-reference table in the faculty overview, nor will it tread on the turf of the full department list. Instead, it follows a single thread — how a university graduate becomes a qualified teacher — to lay out the Faculty's institutional history, its programmes, and its place within Hong Kong's teacher registration regime. Living individuals are referred to by name only in neutral or positive contexts; this article is a factual, institution-focused study.

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# Where did the Faculty of Education come from? A school that taught only graduates

The starting point of the Faculty of Education at CUHK was not a building but a single course. According to the Faculty's own history page, the School of Education was established in 1965, making it the first professional school founded after the University itself in 1963(Faculty of Education — History)^※. It predates the Faculty of Business Administration (1974), the Faculty of Medicine (1981) and the Faculty of Engineering (1991) — yet it was promoted to Faculty status after all of them. That is the first key to understanding this Faculty's character.

By the Faculty's own account, the School's founding remit was strikingly narrow: to run a one-year Diploma in Education that turned people who already held university degrees into professional teachers. In the Faculty's own words, it was "the University's first professional school for training graduate teachers"(original text on the History page)^※. In other words, the School of Education never trained undergraduates — it provided pre-service teaching preparation to graduates of other departments. This division of labour — subject knowledge first, pedagogy second — survives to this day in the PGDE programme.

The real turning point came in two steps. The first: in 1988, the School launched its first part-time degree programme (a part-time bachelor's degree in primary education, according to the Faculty), moving teacher training from "diploma" to "degree" level. The practical significance was that it opened a path for in-service teachers to upgrade their qualifications "while teaching": at the time, many primary school teachers held a certificate of education rather than a degree, and a part-time bachelor's degree allowed them to raise their credentials to degree level without leaving the classroom. The teacher-training institution's role thus expanded from "training newcomers" to "upgrading serving teachers." That same year, sports science and physical education also made its debut as a part-time undergraduate programme (see below) — both lines simultaneously prising open the new entry point of the part-time degree. The second step: in the 1991/92 academic year, the School of Education was formally re-established as the Faculty of Education, which, according to the Faculty, thereby "attained the same status as the Faculties of Arts, Science, Social Science, Business Administration and Medicine"(History page)^※. Twenty-six years after its founding, the teaching unit finally received the formal title of "Faculty."

Late promotion does not mean a shallow history. Because of the 1991 date, many assume CUHK's teacher training only began in the 1990s. The opposite is true: by the Faculty's own account, its teaching history dates from the School of Education in 1965, and the diamond jubilee it celebrated in November 2025 is the age it claims for itself. The late promotion simply reflects that it long operated as a "school" rather than a "faculty" — small in scale, single-minded in focus, yet one of the earliest higher-education units in Hong Kong to run systematic training for university graduates going into teaching.

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# What does it take to legally stand at the front of a Hong Kong classroom?

To grasp the Faculty's weight, you first need to understand the system it serves. In Hong Kong, a degree alone does not entitle you to teach. Under the Education Ordinance, Section 42 stipulates that anyone teaching in a school must be either a Registered Teacher or a Permitted Teacher(EDB teacher registration page)^※. The Education Bureau states it plainly:

"Section 42 of the Education Ordinance stipulates that any person who teaches in a school has to be either a registered teacher or a permitted teacher."

The difference between these two statuses is precisely what teacher training exists to address. According to the same EDB page, a Registered Teacher must hold professional teacher qualifications — for instance, a local teacher's certificate, or a Postgraduate Diploma in Education; someone with academic qualifications but no teacher training can only apply to be a Permitted Teacher. The former is a "qualified teacher"; the latter is "permitted to teach, provisionally." A single piece of teacher-training paper draws the line between "qualified" and "permitted."

This institutional line defines the purpose of the Faculty's two flagship products. One is the Postgraduate Diploma in Education (PGDE), which adds teacher training to an existing non-education degree; the other is the Bachelor of Education (BEd), in which undergraduates complete their teacher training within the degree itself. The former corresponds to "subject first, pedagogy second"; the latter to "subject and pedagogy forged together." Both roads lead to the same destination: Registered Teacher status. Beyond this, teacher registration in Hong Kong also involves the Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers (LPAT) — commonly known as the language benchmark test — which assesses teachers' English, Chinese, or Putonghua proficiency. This is part of the EDB's registration process rather than the decision of any single institution, but it is still a hurdle graduates must clear before stepping into the classroom.

PGDE and BEd are two entrances, one finish line. According to the Faculty's PGDE website, the programme aims "to train and nurture professional early childhood, primary and secondary school teachers," with separate streams for early childhood, primary and secondary education(PGDE website)^※. BEd students, by contrast, complete the equivalent of the PGDE's teacher-training content within their five-year undergraduate degree and meet the requirements for teacher registration upon graduation. Tuition fees, intake quotas and the full list of courses are set out in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and Section 5 of the faculty overview; this article does not repeat them.

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# What exactly does the PGDE teach? One year to re-forge a graduate into a teacher

The Postgraduate Diploma in Education is CUHK's most representative teacher-training product and the clearest window onto what "teacher training" actually means. It serves an unusual group of students: people who already hold a university degree in some discipline but have never received any training in teaching. In one year (full-time) or two (part-time), the task is to take someone who "knows Chinese / knows mathematics / knows physics" and re-forge them into someone who "can teach Chinese / can teach mathematics / can teach physics."

According to the Faculty's PGDE course page, the diploma is assembled from several core components(PGDE course list and descriptions)^※. First, Subject Curriculum and Teaching (SCT), which trains students in how to teach their specific major/minor subject and includes micro-teaching — a systematic technique that breaks the act of teaching into small components for repeated drill in small groups. Second, general and professional development courses covering educational ethics, curriculum design, education policy, educational psychology and counselling. Third, and most crucially, the Teaching Practicum, which the course page describes as an "integral part" of the diploma, putting classroom theory into real practice.

The practicum arrangements reveal the programme's "teaching-driven" orientation. According to the PGDE course page, full-time students (except English majors) typically complete two teaching practica of about five weeks each, one in each semester; English majors complete a single continuous ten-week practicum in the second semester. Among part-time students, those already employed as full-time teachers complete their practicum in their own schools; those not currently teaching must complete two practica of four to five continuous weeks each within two years. There is also a cap on the pace of study — no more than five courses per academic year, per the course page. This structure of "subject pedagogy + micro-teaching rehearsal + school-based practicum" is precisely the concrete process by which "having a degree" becomes "being qualified."

Teacher training is not "another degree"; it is an extra process. The logic of the PGDE carries the 1965 School of Education's founding principle — "only graduates, only teaching method" — into the present day. It does not re-teach your subject knowledge; it teaches you how to convey the knowledge you already have. A Chinese-literature graduate who finishes the PGDE has not learned more Chinese literature; they have learned "how to get a class of Secondary 3 students through a piece of classical Chinese prose." This also explains why Hong Kong uses "whether you have teacher training" as the dividing line between Registered and Permitted Teachers — training supplies exactly the teaching process that a degree cannot.

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# How is the BEd different? The five-year "concurrent" route into teaching

If the PGDE is a consecutive model — degree first, training second — the Bachelor of Education follows a different path: concurrent training, in which subject knowledge and teaching methodology are studied side by side within a single five-year undergraduate programme, so that graduates get everything in one go. The two models serve two kinds of people: the PGDE takes those who have already graduated or are already working and decide, part-way through, to become teachers; the BEd takes those who, straight out of secondary school, are certain they want a career in education.

Under the EDB's registration rules, the reason BEd graduates can become a Registered Teacher directly is precisely that those five years already include the teacher-training and practicum content equivalent to the PGDE — degree and teaching qualification fused into one, with no post-graduation "re-forging" needed(EDB teacher registration page)^※. Two representative BEd exits from CUHK are the "BEd in Physical Education, Exercise Science and Health" run by the Department of Sports Science and Physical Education, and the double degree "BA (English Studies) and BEd (English Language Education)" run jointly with the Faculty of Arts; the latter's graduates hold both a BA and a BEd, with the BEd recognised as equivalent to a post-graduate diploma in education. The JUPAS codes, quotas and credit requirements for these programmes are listed in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and the faculty overview; here we are concerned only with the logic of the training.

The "concurrent" model has both real benefits and real costs. The benefit: from Year 1, trainee teachers treat "the subject" and "how to teach the subject" as a single thing, so teaching awareness develops earlier and more continuously. The cost: at seventeen or eighteen you must commit to "becoming a teacher" as a career direction, with less flexibility than someone who does a pure subject degree first and decides later whether to take the PGDE. By keeping both routes, CUHK offers two answering points to the life question "when do you decide to teach?" — at undergraduate entry, or after graduation.

Two roads, one institutional exit. Whether through the BEd's five-year path or the PGDE's one-year re-forging, graduates meet the same gate — the "Registered Teacher" line in Hong Kong's teacher registration system. CUHK's undergraduate and postgraduate teacher-training programmes are, in essence, two entry-point options prepared for the same institutional exit. This is why you cannot judge CUHK's teacher training by any single diploma: the Faculty holds both keys, "concurrent undergraduate" and "consecutive postgraduate."

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# What do the four departments and the Physical Education Unit each do?

Today's Faculty of Education at CUHK is institutionally composed of 4 departments plus 1 Physical Education Unit(CUHK Faculty page)^※. These five units are not parallel "subject divisions" so much as different workstations along the teacher-training chain — from "what to teach and how," to "how to run a school," to "how students learn."

The Department of Curriculum and Instruction is the largest of the four. According to the Faculty website, it has over 20 academic staff and carries a large share of the Faculty's teacher-training courses(C&I research page)^※. It is the home of pedagogy: its mathematics education research group studies how students learn mathematics and how teaching, learning and assessment interact; its STEM education research group tackles the challenges of new curriculum development and of raising students' performance in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Most of the "Subject Curriculum and Teaching" a PGDE student encounters comes from this department.

The Department of Educational Administration and Policy deals with how "the machine of the school" runs. According to Faculty materials, its members' expertise spans the sociology of education, economics of education, comparative education, policy studies, and educational leadership and administration; its research topics include school leadership, educational change, organisational theory, education reform, education policy and the economics of education. Its audience is not just novice teachers but principals, vice-principals and educational administrators — scaling the question "how do you teach a lesson" up to "how do you run a school, and a system."

The Department of Educational Psychology supplies the "learner" link in the chain: the psychology of learning, special educational needs, counselling and assessment are its home turf. The Department of Sports Science and Physical Education is a category of its own, treated in the next section. The fifth unit is the Physical Education Unit, which does not train PE teachers but provides physical education classes and fitness services to students across the University — a clear division of labour from the department's teaching-and-research role.

"Four departments and one unit" is not four parallel specialisms. Read side by side, they might look like "education" simply chopped into four pieces; follow the growth of a trainee teacher, and the inner logic emerges — what to teach (Curriculum and Instruction), in what kind of school (Administration and Policy), with which kinds of learners (Educational Psychology), plus a dedicated exit for PE teachers (Sports Science and Physical Education). The full list of departments and research centres appears in Section 4 of the complete departments/faculties/schools overview.

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# The Department of Sports Science and Physical Education: a part-time course that predated its own department

Among the Faculty's five units, the Department of Sports Science and Physical Education has an unusual history in which the course came before the institution. According to the Department's website, CUHK was the first university in Hong Kong to offer a part-time undergraduate programme in sports science and physical education, in 1988(SSPE at a Glance)^※; the department itself was formally established only in the 1991/92 academic year under the Faculty of Education. In other words, the course ran for three or four years before the institutional structure caught up — a mirror image of the Faculty's own "teach first, upgrade later" temperament.

Today the Department's programme portfolio spans every level: according to its website, it offers full-time undergraduate degrees, taught postgraduate programmes in both full-time and part-time modes, research postgraduate degrees, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Education(SSPE at a Glance)^※. Its undergraduate flagship is the "BEd in Physical Education, Exercise Science and Health" (JS4329), whose graduates hold both PE teacher qualifications and exercise-science training — "how to run a PE lesson" and "how the human body moves" in a single diploma. Above the undergraduate level it runs taught master's programmes in sports science and physical education, giving in-service PE teachers an interface for further study and professional development; and because it also offers a PGDE and research postgraduate degrees, the entire chain from "training PE teachers" to "cultivating researchers of physical education" sits within one department.

The Department is housed in the Kwok Sports Building on CUHK's Sha Tin campus. For international visibility, CUHK's sports-related subjects were ranked 31st in the world in the 2026 edition of the QS World University Rankings by Subject(SSPE at a Glance)^※. Note that this is a single-subject ranking covering sports-related fields and cannot be compared directly with overall university rankings; the methodology notes for the Faculty's broader education rankings (THE, U.S. News, etc.) are in Section 5 of the faculty overview.

How a part-time course grew into a department. The part-time undergraduate programme of 1988 answered a real need — a shortage of PE teachers in Hong Kong and serving teachers who needed to upgrade. Three or four years later it crystallised into a department. In that sense, the Department of Sports Science and Physical Education was not "a department first, then courses"; it was "a need first, then a course, and only then a department." This is teacher training's most characteristic mode of growth: the curriculum follows the chalkface, and the institution follows the curriculum.

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# The "cradle of Hong Kong's teachers" — how does that claim sit in the wider teacher-training landscape?

Calling CUHK's Faculty of Education a "cradle of teachers" needs some historical coordinates to avoid exaggeration. Teacher training in Hong Kong has long run on two parallel tracks: one supplied "non-degree" teachers via teacher training colleges, the other supplied "degree" teachers through comprehensive universities. CUHK's School of Education of 1965 stood near the starting point of the latter track.

According to Hong Kong education history sources, teacher training was long carried out by dedicated colleges. From 1939, there was the Northcote College of Education, followed by the Grantham College of Education, established in 1951 during Sir Alexander Grantham's governorship, and other colleges such as Sir Robert Black College of Education(History of education in Hong Kong · Wikipedia)^※. These colleges produced the bulk of primary and secondary school teachers, but mostly at certificate or diploma level rather than university degree level. On 25 April 1994, acting on the Education Commission's Report No. 5, the government merged four teacher training colleges with the Institute of Language in Education to form the Hong Kong Institute of Education; it was officially retitled the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK) in 2016(Education University of Hong Kong · Wikipedia)^※. This mainline — teacher training college → institute of education → education university — is the volume channel of Hong Kong teacher training.

Alongside that mainline, the faculties of education inside the university system handle teacher training for university graduates and educational research. The University of Hong Kong has had a department/faculty of education since 1917, making it the oldest university-based teacher-training unit in the territory; CUHK's School of Education began in 1965, becoming the training base of another post-war research university. The three institutions are not interchangeable: the Education University of Hong Kong makes teacher training its sole business and is the largest by scale; the education faculties at HKU and CUHK embed teacher training within a comprehensive university's disciplinary ecology while carrying a heavier research and policy role.

There is more than one "cradle," and each rocks differently. To call CUHK one of Hong Kong's "cradles of teachers" is accurate in a precise sense: it is one of the earliest centres in the comprehensive university sector to train university graduates for teaching, and it has kept that mission continuously. It does not compete on volume as the teacher training colleges did, but takes the path of "subject + pedagogy + research." Placed on the full map — from the teacher training colleges, to the Education University, to HKU and CUHK — the weight of the "cradle" metaphor is neither exaggerated nor flattened: what CUHK contributes is the part of the teaching workforce that carries a comprehensive university's disciplinary depth onto the podium.

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# The Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research: the Faculty's research-and-development "out-sourced brain"

If the four departments and the Physical Education Unit are the teaching skeleton, then the Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research (HKIER) is the Faculty's research-and-development brain. According to the Institute's website, HKIER was established in 1993 as the research and development arm of CUHK's Faculty of Education(HKIER website)^※.

Its birth came with a specific donation. According to the Institute, the Tin Ka Ping Foundation donated HK$25 million to CUHK in 1992, of which HK$5 million was earmarked for establishing the Institute(HKIER website)^※. The Institute oversees four units: the Hong Kong Centre for the Development of Educational Leadership (HKCDEL), the Centre for Research on Putonghua Education and Development (CRDPE), the Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies (CLST), and the Quality School Improvement Project (QSIP) — taking deep dives, respectively, into principal leadership, teaching in Putonghua, educational technology, and school improvement.

Among the four units, the Quality School Improvement Project best embodies the "research to practice" thread. It is not a purely academic centre but a hands-on project that goes directly into primary and secondary schools and works with frontline teachers to improve classrooms and school governance — feeding the University's educational research back into the day-to-day running of real schools. At precisely the "school site," this connects with the pedagogical research of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the school-governance research of the Department of Educational Administration and Policy.

On the publishing side, the Institute's journal, the Education Journal, was founded in 1968 and publishes bilingual research on educational issues in Greater China and beyond — among the longest-running peer-reviewed journals in the Chinese-language education world. According to its indexing records, the journal has been included in the Taiwan Social Science Citation Index (TSSCI) since 2013 and in the Chinese Social Science Citation Index (CSSCI) since 2017(Education Journal · Wikipedia)^※. The Institute describes itself as a "resource centre"; according to its website, its goals are to support research and development in education, to promote educational planning, and — on educational issues affecting Hong Kong and the Asia-Pacific region — "informing policymakers." This answers to the side of the Faculty that does more than "teach and nurture": it both trains the people who stand at the podium and studies the whole educational system beyond the podium — one hand puts people onto the podium, the other makes the podium itself an object of research. Only when both hands are seen together does the phrase "cradle of teachers" carry its full meaning.

Two faces of teacher training. Read HKIER together with the four departments and the Physical Education Unit, and the Faculty of Education is doing two things at once. One is "making teachers" (PGDE, BEd — putting people on the podium); the other is "studying education" (HKIER's centres and journal — researching the curricula, policies and schools behind the podium). The former faces individuals, the latter systems. A school that taught a single course in 1965 has, sixty years on, become a "teaching + research + policy" trinity — that is the institutional reality behind the phrase "cradle of Hong Kong's teachers."

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