ABSTRACT
Researchers increasingly acknowledged the importance of the phenomenology of innovation. They showed that the earlier managerial approach had given too much attention to the goals of central actors, both government and managers of institutions. The values, attitudes and perceptions of those lower down, who were doing the donkey work of putting policy into practice, had been ignored. These people often use strategies which in effect change policy. They inevitably have discretion in order to cope with uncertainty; as a result policies tend to evolve through the interactions of a multiplicity of actors. Consequently policy becomes refracted as it is implemented, that is, it becomes distorted and less coherent as it is interpreted and put into practice by ground-level actors, such as teachers.
