ABSTRACT
Initiatives, changes and mandates in education keep on coming. External reforms have become the norm in education. Yet, schools are also encouraged to be self-managing institutions. These two trends do not always sit easily alongside one another. Self-determining schools find the prescriptions of others difficult to accept, let alone implement. Or, expressed another way: How can we manage ourselves when others keep on setting the agenda? One resolution of this duality, and one which prevents it becoming a dilemma, is to understand that self-managing schools need to be organizations that are constantly aware of their external environments and their internal achievements and always striving to balance the two. Sometimes the external factors will weigh more heavily than internal ones; at another time the point of balance will shift towards internal conditions. However, if the point of balance is dynamic, then what will help staff understand where the fulcrum needs to be placed at any one time is a keen sense of evaluation and school review.
