ABSTRACT
Change is unlikely ever again to be gentle for schools, largely because in the newly emerging world economy a country’s power to compete and the productivity of its workforce depend on education. Especially as know-how, information and brain power replace commodities as the things which are traded or which give a country its trading edge, the health of its schooling system becomes a crucial factor in managing the local economy. Furthermore, governments (and ministers) have learned not only that they must deliver, but that they must deliver fast. The processes of planned change have been researched for well over three decades, but in the 1990s much of the creed about the change process no longer works. The essential message in the new approaches is that time itself is an expense, and like all good currency it has to be invested wisely, used sparingly and not squandered. Time has to be spent as though it is money.
