ABSTRACT
I want to start this chapter with two related assertions: schools need to change; and societies need mechanisms for ensuring that schools change. These assertions are largely taken for granted as straightforward policy or political questions, except perhaps by students of reform movements and their fate in the education sector. The knowledge built up about how schools change and the problematic significance of school level change is rarely studied by those who decide, supposedly on behalf of the rest of us, what new educational policy directions will be and how they are to come into existence. In particular, as a consequence of the new styles of corporate management and economic rationalism that have swept Ministries of Education in the 1980s, those who were familiar with issues of planning and policy for school level change have been retrenched or displaced. Neutral managers, who (almost by definition) know nothing about the specific area of education, let alone have contacts in schools who could perhaps tell them about the problems of centre-periphery policy initiatives, have been put into place to avoid the educationally-oriented bureaucrats of the past whose task was to act as advocates for education.
