Page 6 - Phase 1 - Understanding your organisations' entrepreneurial opportunities

The Rise of the Service Industry

Our inspiration

The above finding of a positive relationship between student intake and a school’s academic
performance suggests that school competition is primarily a battle for booming student
academic performance. Although the government expectation for schools is to nurture
students’ learning and growth (Education Bureau, 2018a, b, c), our results found that
the parental expectation focusses on academic achievement. With the declining birth rate
and increasing competition from DSS schools, schools need to prioritise the focus of
their operations with limited resources. They need to attend to parental expectations
to ensure student intake for their survival and growth. The findings indicate that schools

cannot get away from the game and need to adapt their internal elements to fit the societal
environment. In other words, education is part of the service industry.

Education as part of the service industry

The service mentality is very different from manufacture thinking. In the context
of education, the focus of school operation and leadership towards both students and teachers
have swiftly shifted from ‘production’ to ‘service’.

In terms of serving students, schools need to deal with parent and student satisfaction.

This requires competing teacher capacity due to the intensified competition among schools,
middle management needing to be agile to fulfil a school’s major concern, as well as
school policies becoming more student-centred.

For the teachers’ aspect, with the increasing number of young teachers in the team, whose
values differ from those in previous generations, the management needs to cater the needs
of the younger teachers as well. They need to be engaged through relationship, led by

persuasion. Teachers are not motivated solely by financial factors, and they also aspire
to develop and grow within their career. Ethics is crucial to these generations as well.

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