ABSTRACT
In Victorian state schools, a recent organizational phenomenon since the early 1970s has been the development of representative committee systems in schools. Whilst these have been generally unique to Victoria, what is more significant is that these representative committees, more specifically the Local Administrative Committee (LAC) and the Curriculum Committee, have been formalized and legitimated through industrial agreements negotiated between the teacher unions and the government. Given the Labor government’s rhetoric of participatory decision-making which has accompanied educational restructuring in Victoria during the 1980s, the central question of the research project which gave rise to the data presented was what part do representative committees play in furthering democratic and participative decision-making in the administration of education? In this chapter, we focus upon particular issues which have emerged from the current trend in Australian education towards the devolution of management to schools as the key units of decision-making. Whilst corporate management has become the dominant mode of educational management, this process of devolution has also been clothed in a rhetoric of participatory and democratic decisionmaking. Therefore, the chapter initially examines the historical background to the formation of these new structures while also addressing the theoretical issues, particularly that of corporate management. This section also places the Victorian initiatives within the wider Australian context. Second, the chapter presents the data from our case study of a post-primary school. Last, we offer some tentative conclusions and directions for future research. 194
Historical and Current Context
The Victorian Context
The past two decades have been a period of radical administrative reform in Victorian education. Historically, the Victorian state education system has, as with the other Australian states, been highly centralized. The Department of Education (then Public Instruction as established in 1872) placed the Director-General of Education, the permanent administrative head, directly responsible to the Minister of Education. Until the 1970s all decisions, professional and
managerial, were made by senior officers in the department, and schools and teachers were evaluated on a regular basis by a Board of Inspectors. By the early 1970s the increasing complexity of administering over 2000 schools by a highly centralized bureaucracy meant the system was unable to respond effectively to local schoolbased needs. Demands for reform led to the then Liberal (conservative) government’s decision, with the full support of the Director-General of Education, to decentralize administration to regions and schools in 1975. Regional Offices were established and teacher and student representation on what had previously been the largely advisory parent School Councils was initiated by 1976. At the same time, a more qualified, younger teaching force was making increasingly militant demands through their unions for greater involvement in school-based administrative and curriculum decision-making, improved working conditions and the salaries warranted by their profession. A major feature of this activity was the outright rejection by teachers of the top-down control of the Education Department perpetrated primarily through the inspectorial system, but also through prescriptive curricula and examinations. Although the more radical secondary union policy of elected school executives to replace principals was never fully accepted and only implemented in a few schools, many schools had developed some type of committee structure by the late 1970s. Most schools had formed a curriculum committee and some even an administrative committee elected from the school staff to liaise with the principal and School Council. School-based committees became increasingly important as curriculum and assessment became more school-based with the demise of all but the Higher School Certificate, and as the allocation of administrative responsibilities and eligibility for teacher promotion came to be determined by school-based committees.
