Introduction

Educational institutions are complex organizations in which a large amount of managerial preoccupation is with the present and immediate. Schools and Colleges are not organizations where strategic planning is perceived as enormously important. In the United Kingdom (UK), schools' systems are a part of the local government system and the education department is a unit of local government. Schools in the UK tend to be more independent of politics and the heads have been, until the current economic recession, almost autonomous in the management of their institutions. In other parts of the world, educational systems tend to follow a pattern copied from one of the European systems, even where there was no colonialism, simply because nineteenth and twentieth century history was dominated by the European powers. At any rate, African and Asian systems tend to be centrally administered, highly structured, authoritarian and paternal and greatly vulnerable to economic and political change and influence.