ABSTRACT
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 explore the capacity of schools to meet the demands for change; the present chapter addresses a source of those demands, policy. Policies for schools can be initiated at many levels: government, local authority or school. They can originate from a variety of sources: administrators, teachers, parents and, on rare occasions, children. Whatever their source, most are probably formulated with the intention of bringing about change. Since the mid 1980s, there has been an increase in policy writing for schools by central and local government departments and a corresponding rise in the number of policies that schools are required to have in place.
