ABSTRACT

It is a widely accepted view that it was Margaret Thatcher's New Right government that first seriously challenged the quality of public services, including education, and set about introducing performance indicators and achievement targets. But concerns about effective public management were around before the 1970s. In 1968, the David Fulton Report on the British Civil Service defined accountable management as 'holding individuals and units responsible for performance measured as objectively as possible'. In terms of central government itself, however, David Fulton's recommendations about performance assessment were mostly ignored by the Wilson Government. According to Peter Jackson (1988), performance measures in the public sector are substitutes for profitability measures in the private sector since they seek to measure productivity and efficiency. Scotland possesses an education system that has developed from its own history and social and cultural values. In the early 1990s, the Scottish Office Education Department produced a wide range of performance indicators at national level.