ABSTRACT
The 1980s and 1990s saw a wholesale restructuring of both public and non-government school systems around the world. In country after country, just at the point when the fundamental transition was being made out of an economy heavily dependent on manufacturing industry into a post-industrial, internationally oriented economy, schools came under intense pressure and were subjected to adverse criticism. The market analogy produced a new set of metaphors to describe the process of schooling, educational management, educational outcomes and the nature of educational productivity. The Canberra schools formed a self-consciously innovative system, built on a blueprint that broke the pattern prevailing elsewhere in Australia. The New South Wales and Victorian school systems between them account for two-thirds of the nation’s schoolchildren. The result of the revised mode of operation for schools and the new approaches to systemic administration and policy-making threw up new configurations within which Australian schools were set.
