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Article History

Received: 16 February 2025

Accepted: 16 February 2026

First Online: 27 February 2026

Competing interests

: The authors declare no competing interests.

: This research involved human participants and was reviewed by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) of The University of Hong Kong, which approved the research on 17 May 2016 (approval number: EA1604035). The approval covered multiple studies with various populations and means of data collection, including data collected from secondary school students for the current analysis via skills assessments (tests) and self-report questionnaires over time. The procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and all applicable legal and institutional regulations.

: Before any data collection, the research team or Policy 21 provided all school principals, participating students, and students’ legal guardian/next of kin with information sheets that fully informed them about the purposes and procedures of the research, the types of data to be collected and the means by which the data would be collected and stored, as well as the voluntariness of participation, participants’ right to withdraw without penalty, the absence of any known risks of participation, details about intended data use, and the measures to ensure anonymity and confidentiality. All school principals provided written informed consent (between July 2018 and April 2019) to participate in this longitudinal study before the first data collection at their school. Student participants provided written informed consent before participating in the first and second waves (i.e., between October 2018 and April 2019 and between January and July 2021). Students’ legal guardian/next of kin provided passive consent (i.e., they could let the school or research team know at any time, orally or in writing, if they objected to their child’s participation in the study, in which case their child would not participate or continue to participate in the research, and previously collected data would be deleted if so requested). Participants’ consent covered data collection via assessments and questionnaires, linkage of data from different collections, analysis of anonymized data, and reporting of anonymized results/data in aggregated form.