ABSTRACT
Introduction Every nation is striving for a world-class education system. As we move into a new millennium many countries are putting programmes in place that they believe will lead to a fundamental transformation of public education systems and a significant rise in educational standards. They all believe that they have the key to educational improvement. The Australian academic Brian Caldwell has analysed these programmes and clustered them in three parallel tracks. These are ‘building systems of self-managing schools’, ‘an unrelenting focus on learning outcomes’ and ‘creating schools for the knowledge society’. They are not mutually exclusive. He has identified that some countries have moved faster along one track rather than the other two, but all three are recognized as defining the scope and thrust of the current educational moment (Caldwell, 1998). In this chapter I will focus on track three: developing an education system that locks in with, and prepares people for, the emerging knowledge-based society. There is, however, an underpinning assumption that the other two tracks, school autonomy and a focus on educational outputs, are significant complementary developments that are almost precursors for real progress to be made in the third area.
