
Managed change and self management in schools of the future



Jill Blackmore, Chris Bigum, John Hodgens & Louise Laskey
Faculty of Education
       Deakin University



Managing Change and Self Management in Schools of the Future


Jill Blackmore, Chris Bigum, John Hodgens & Louise Laskey
Faculty of Education, Deakin University. Geelong. 3217



 ABSTRACT: In Victoria, Australia, a radical restructuring of state 
education has occurred since 1992 under comprehensive reform policies 
encapsulated in the title Schools of the Future.  The centrepoint of 
the raft of reforms of school organisation,  principals' and teachers' 
work, as well as curriculum and assessment, has been the self managing 
school. The rationale has been that in a time of declining resources, 
self managing schools that are more consumer oriented will produce more 
effective and efficient educational services. Self management in 
education needs to be set into the wider political, social and economic 
context of the changing relationship between the state, education and 
the individual that has occurred in most Western liberal democracies in 
the past decade with the rise of market liberalism. This paper focuses 
upon case studies in four Victorian 'self managing schools' (2primary 
and 2 secondary) undertaken during the radical restructuring of state 
education. We suggest that many of the claims about quality, 
professionality, team work, and cultural change made in the official 
policy texts are not well substantiated, and that indeed many reforms 
work in direct antithesis to what they claim. The paper reflects upon 
how and why teachers, parents and principals change their practices. 
The research draws upon similar studies in New Zealand, the UK and the 
USA to indicate the similarities and differences between 'local' 
manifestations and the global discourses of educational restructuring.  
 


Educational restructuring and the self managing school.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen unprecedented levels of structural and 
cultural change in schools. After decades of relative stability and the 
'bureaucratisation' of education, a period of fundamental educational 
restructuring has produced structural and cultural transformations that 
has made change a permanent factor confronting those managing and 
working in schools. In Australia since 1987, Federal and state policy 
initiatives have linked education more closely and instrumentally to 
the economy (Marginson, 1993), reduced educational expenditure, 
devolved greater responsibility to schools, sought to make education 
more 'consumer friendly' and more accountable. Education, as training, 
has become the central policy focus for the re-skilling of Australia at 
a time that education policy has been to a large extent taken out of 
the hands of professional educators. This tendency in Australia is 
exemplified in major education reform reports (eg. Finn, Mayer and 
Carmichael reports) and the Ministerialisation of policy that reduces 
the influence of both educational bureaucrats and professionals 
(Lingard, 1993). The logic is that skilling workers will improve 

productivity so that Australia will be more competitive 
internationally. This is to be achieved through greater efficiencies 
and flexibility in the system by devolving responsibility for decisions 
to schools within a policy framework balanced by  strong feedback 
mechanisms eg. school charters, national curriculum, standardised 
assessment and performance management. It is premised upon the view 
that to achieve such an agenda we need teachers and schools to change. 

The radical restructuring of state education has been produced by a 
raft of wide ranging, rapid reforms initiated at both federal and state 
level. Schools of the Future (Victorian Department of School Education, 
1993) encompasses a range of policies in Victorian education which have 
sought to devolve increased administrative and personnel 
responsibilities to schools and,  more particularly, principals. The 
rationale for Schools of the Future (SOTF) was that schools should be 
more diverse, autonomous, flexible and community oriented in order to 
meet individual student, community and, ultimately,  national needs. In 
order to achieve these aims,  decisionmaking about priorities and 
expenditure of global budgets was to be passed down to those 'at the 
chalkface'. Teachers, it was argued, would be professionally empowered, 
and parents would have greater choice between a diverse range of 
schools to meet their children's individual needs if schools were more 
consumer oriented. The implicit message was that equity would be 
delivered more efficiently and effectively through the enactment of 
individual choice and recognition of diverse needs. In a self managing 
school, 'true' leadership could be practised. 

At a principal seminar introducing the notion of Schools of the Future 
in 1993, Caldwell and Sawatzki summarised the views informing SOTF. 
Caldwell and Sawatzki (1993) agreed with such management gurus as 
Drucker (1992) that bureaucracies were no longer appropriate in a 
globally competitive environment. The trend, they argued, was  towards

strategic management cores with flatter...team oriented collaborative 
management and work units in which there is shared responsibility for 
outcomes. In essence, these changes are part of a major paradigm shift 
in the way organisations are structured and managed-- a move away from 
Tayloristic scientific approaches to work organisation, towards a self 
managing systems work unit model ..[Self management therefore leads to] 
'a shift away from control to empowerment,  rowing to steering, 
external to internal controls, remote to close- to-customer service, 
individual to team' (Caldwell & Sawatzki, 1993, p. 5) 

These reforms  were expected to 'empower communities through community 
owned government'. Finally,  decisions were to be delegated through 
devolution 'to the smallest  unit competent to handle these decisions 
and to the unit closest to the area of involvement' (Caldwell & 
Sawatzki, 1993, p.3). In support of the need to shift to self 
management, Caldwell and Sawatzki (1993) cited the effective schools 
literature which emphasised school autonomy, reduced central control, 
and the importance of leadership, staff cohesiveness and support 
structures. Their text, as the official policy texts of Schools of the 
Future, tap into 

powerful management concepts such as efficiency, accountability, 
responsibility and authority. In a period in which educational debates 
have become characterised by neo-conservative and new right thinking, 
and by the marginalisation of socially democratic themes which had 
become partially institutionalised in the practice and thinking of many 
education workers during the 1970s and 1980s...we have seen the 
incorporation of all these terms into a rather simplistic slogan system 
of market efficiency and quality control in schools (Angus, 1994a, p. 

80). 

The concepts of market efficiency and quality control are not only 
persuasive slogans amongst educational and government policy makers. 
Discourses about educational standards and accountability for 
expenditure of public funding also tap into community concerns and 
parental anxieties about their childrens' futures in a period of 
economic uncertainty and unemployment.  

Schools of the Future and a raft of associated policies have refigured 
the structure of state education in Victoria since 1993 with an 
emphasis on market efficiency and quality control. The teacher 
workforce has been restructured with new teacher career paths 
(Professional Recognition Program), a new industrial relations system, 
and the downsizing of the teacher workforce with over 8000 teachers 
(20% of the teaching force) taking voluntary packages. Over 600 schools 
have been amalgamated or closed. With the introduction of a devolved 
system of school management, principals now have greater administrative 
(financial, staffing, resourcing) responsibilities and the capacity to 
determine school priorities within the framework of centrally 
determined policy guidelines. Schools are financed through global 
budgets which are determined according to enrolments and other factors 
premised upon student special needs. Schools now negotiate their 
priorities within the policy and curriculum guidelines determined by 
the centre through the School Charter. The charter is also the 
mechanism of school accountability to the centre, as are the perfomance 
management plans of principals and teachers. Curriculum has been 
reorganised into Key Learning Areas and competencies under an outcomes 
based approaches. While much curriculum reform is the consequence of  
national initiatives on developing curriculum frameworks based upon 
competencies, the Victorian adaptation in the form of Curriculum 
Standards Framework (CSF) has been linked to the testing of primary 
school students at Years 3 and 5 first introduced as the Learning 
Assessment Program (LAP) in 1995. The LAP is now to be extended into 
secondary schools in 1997. The ongoing revision of the Victorian 
Certificate of Education has also shifted the balance away from teacher 
to external assessment, and from the use of a range of outcomes upon 
which student achievement is measured to a single tertiary entrance 
score. This is all set into an accountability framework which feeds 
information back to the centre in an outcomes based approach eg. CSF 
and LAP. Schools also undertake three year reviews of their Charters 
and are also expected to use surveys to determined 'client 
satisfaction', the results of which are reported in Annual Reports.  
Schools are linked to the centre through new administrative information 
technology networks (e.g., CASES and Kidmaps). These reforms have been 
implemented simultaneously over a period of three years (Marginson, 
1994; Blackmore, 1994). 

The central question in the research project was what it was like to 
work in and manage a school for change under these new forms of 
governance within Victorian education. In particular the focus was upon 
how principals, teachers and parents on a daily basis 'managed' the key 
features of these reforms. Did these reforms increase the discretionary 
power of principals and school councils to allocate resources and staff 
in schools more effectively? What was the impact of the new 
technologies of school management: financial planning, data collection 
for assessment and accountability purposes?  Did these organisational 
changes increase flexibility to meet diverse student needs?  Did SOTF 
give schools the autonomy to determine their own priorities through 
School Charters? Did the changes to teacher career structures encourage 
teacher professionality? And what was the effect  of all these changes 
on the sense of school community? The importance of the study lay in 

its emphasis on managing the above changes, on what principals and 
teachers actually did and why, at a time of radical change. This study 
fills a significant gap in the research on links between management 
structures and school change which are often assumed. In Victoria, 
research on SOTF has been limited, largely quantitative and survey 
oriented, principal not teacher focused ( e.g.Caldwell 1994). This 
study focused upon the changing relationships between teachers, parents 
and principals, the perceptions of their changing roles and 
responsibilities, and how they dealt with rapid change. 

The methodology called upon multiple approaches to gain an 
understanding of how schools conceptualised their futures, planned 
action and produced new practices. The project commenced with four case 
studies selected to gain a representative sample of schools based on 
factors such as level of technological innovation; stage of intake into 
SOTF; male /female principals; and provincial/urban schools. With the 
exception of two schools, all Victorian schools have been inducted into 
SOTF through four intakes over a period of three years. The studies 
included an inner-city primary school in high socio-economic status 
area with female principal in the fourth SOTF intake; a south-eastern 
suburban primary school with male principal and considerable 
socio-economic and cultural mix in the first intake; a provincial town 
multi-campus secondary college with a female principal in the second 
intake, and a technologically well resourced western suburb secondary 
college with a male principal. This school had volunteered to pilot 
SOTF. 

In the case studies we asked teachers, principals and parents in 
unstructured interviews to identify and conceptualise how the raft of 
educational reforms impacted on their futures. What were the 
certainties and uncertainties? How had their practice changed? From 
these case studies, we generated a survey which was delivered to 110 
schools. This survey was based upon the stories collected in the case 
study schools. The intention was to evoke other stories, responses and 
raise issues rather than quantify responses to specific questions. The 
survey sought to identify story patterns by size of school, school 
level and location. The emphasis was upon the micropolitics of school 
restructuring recognising how these were framed and shaped by official 
texts. In this article, we draw data from the case studies only.

Communities of Practice
Change is difficult to identify, measure or assess, particularly in 
educational contexts. The methodology focused upon the types of meaning 
making individuals and groups in schools develop.  Four interconnected 
themes emerged out of the case studies-- all of which ultimately impact 
on the context, content and processes of teaching and learning. One 
theme focused around the management of change and how staff dealt with 
competing demands of  devolution (equity / diversity / community) and 
centralisation (executive line management/ standardised testing / 
accountability / performance management/ efficiency). The second 
centred around how learning communities formed around relationships 
between teachers, parents and principals as they dealt with change. 
Considering such relationships raised issues of professionality, 
responsibility, autonomy, accountability and participation. The third 
focus was on how the new technologies were changing practice. This 
focused upon the impact of new information and management technologies 
such as CASES as well as on staff and curriculum development and 
management (Bigum & Green, 1994). And finally, it was clear that we 
needed to address how the policies and discourses of reform informed 
and shaped teacher and principal practice and affected their capacity 
to produce change.  From this perspective, emphasis is placed upon 
participation in a community of practitioners, what Lave and Wenger 

(1991) call a 'community of practice', rather than merely the 
acquisition of a set of skills, or practices deemed to satisfy 
bureaucratic requirements. These were the 'communities of practice' 
which allowed individuals and groups to work and learn in a context of 
changing representations of schools and the future (Anderson & Dixon, 
1993).

Management of Change
The conventional educational literature on leadership and change tends 
to treat organisations as discrete entities with little regard for 
social, political or economic context (Caldwell & Spinks, 1992; Angus, 
1994a). The effective schools approach tends to see change as resulting 
from external pressure imposed on schools. It tends to ignore the 
considerable reform literature which indicates that teachers initiate 
and produce change, and indeed actively re-read and interpret reform 
policies in often quite creative ways (Blackmore & Kenway, 1995). On 
the one hand, the change literature in management upon which much 
educational reform has drawn (Senge, 1990; Drucker, 1992; Naisbett & 
Aburdene, 1992) focuses upon the complexity and contradictions, 
uncertainty and unpredictability of change, as well as the inability to 
plan due to compression of time/ space. On the other hand, as those who 
work in educational change theory argue (Hargreaves, 1994), the 
management solutions offered for schools tend to be more 'modern' than 
'post-modern'. That is, it is more about 'managed change' imposed from 
above than managing or initiating change 'at the chalkface'. The 
emphasis on visionary leadership has in fact become a form of strong 
leadership imposed from above. Schools are 're-engineered' through 
planning processes and organisational charts which are highly 
controlling. Karen Louis argues that this is not how effective schools 
work in responding to change (Louis, 1994, p. 4). 

As did Louis (1994), we found that in our schools, which did not have 
'larger than life'  leaders, that leadership was not heroic and that 
change was non-rational and non-linear. More often than not, action 
preceded planning in setting up initiatives, vision was generated out 
of activities and not activities arising out of vision, and principals 
and teachers developed school and classroom specific readings of 
externally mandated programs such as the CSF. Most school leaders were 
on about day-to-day management of change, scanning for problems and 
more generally just coping with daily problems and task completion 
(Louis, 1994, p. 4). A key aspect of their work was the capacity to 
mediate and negotiate pressures for change that had multiplied 
considerably as the devolutionary process of Schools of the Future 
became established (see also McRae, 1994; Caldwell 1995). 

All the principals in the case study schools spoke of how they were 
positioned as always reacting to imposed change form above due to the 
deluge of faxes with incredibly short time lines demanding action, they 
handled. But the primary school principals, in smaller schools with 
greater budgetary constraints, tended to be more critical, strategic 
and selective in what changes they engaged with, seeking to, as one 
principal commented, 'protect staff from the overwhelming change 
imperatives'. The primary school teachers indicated that they were 
aware that their principals worked in this way. As one commented : 'We 
are just thankful that much of what comes down from on high does not 
land on our desks'. The secondary principals responded less critically 
to system wide demands as they were also more 'open to the market' at 
the postcompulsory level due to the sorting and ranking processes 
required by certification for employment or tertiary study. They tended 
to take up every issue and 'run with it' out of a concern to gain a 
competitive advantage and attract students who were more likely to drop 
out or change schools in the critical post compulsory years. But this 

tendency exacerbated feelings of uncertainty amongst their staff, as 
there was a perceived lack of direction. 

At the same time, the reliance upon 'principal- led' change and the 
'principal as buffer' meant many staff, particularly in the primary 
schools, did not feel in the position to take the initiative. The 
tendency was for teachers to be less pro-active or aggressive. In that 
sense they 'managed themselves' and channelled their desires and 
aspirations in line with school and system wide policy directions. 
Given that the principal now had significant power over their futures, 
staff were more cautious about opposing issues or even proposing 
initiatives which were 'outside' the school charter or official policy. 
Principals felt equally nervous about risk taking in terms of the 
possible departmental reactions and impact on their student market. 
This fear of taking initiative outside the boundaries prescribed by 
managed change encourages a culture of compliance or what Nicholls and 
Ozga (1995) and Hatcher (1994) refer to in self governing schools in 
England as the manufacturing of consent. The key to compliance by 
teachers was the intensification and regulation of teachers' work and 
the attack on their conditions of employment in the context of an 
increasingly corporatist culture and policy framework which combined 
specific state regulation and quasi-market relationships. 

All the teachers and principals in the case studies spoke about the 
intensity and breadth of the changes they were expected to implement in 
a short period of time. They spoke about how the shifts in 
administrative practices meant the intensification of their labour; 
more authoritarian and managerial approaches and less consultation than 
previously; an increasingly administrative not student centred foci in 
their work; and  more attention being paid outward than on the core 
aspects of schools - teaching and learning. These findings are 
supported by an earlier Australian survey of principals which likewise 
argued that devolution, global budgeting and educational restructuring 
in all states had  led to 'pressures of unrelenting change which are 
not necessarily to education's advantage' (Grady et al, 1994, pp. 
29-34). Teachers in our study commented on the contradictions of recent 
reforms. Schools of the Future rhetorically appealed to seductive 
notions of flexibility, professional autonomy, process, team work, flat 
organisations and diversity to improve educational practice, yet in 
terms of effect in practice, the reforms imposed solutions premised 
upon line management, hierarchy, standardisation, outcomes and 
competitive individualism. The very intangible, ambiguous and 
indefinable nature of teachers' work made it more susceptible to 
intensification. Ironically, the mechanisms of accountability being 
used were actually fragmenting teachers' and principals' work into 
specific tasks or competencies which  often meant they lost the big 
picture as to what they valued in teaching. 

A significant factor in why schools changed arose out of the 
corporatisation of schools-- in which the market infiltrated the values 
and organisation of schools. The infiltration of the market into the 
schools was evident in the new teacher career structures, which 
increased the differentials between teachers ( novices through to 
leading teachers), and was premised upon performance management systems 
of bonuses and appraisal. These career structures assume the 
behaviourist view that individual teachers change through coercion or 
reward rather than the view that individuals change due to a range of 
political, social, personal and professional factors ranging from the 
enjoyment of working with children, through to pleasure gained from job 
satisfaction and  a commitment to social justice. So while schools can 
be seen to be more 'accountable' due to the range of outcome measures 
(performance management, standardised assessment, annual reports, 

charters), these processes shaped school practices in a number of ways. 
First, they regulate what teachers do as they internalise and construct 
themselves as 'competent teachers' in their curriculum vitae's, 
submissions and appraisals according to externally imposed parameters 
and criteria. The competitive individualism embedded in such structures 
lead teachers and principals internalise the organisational goals 
mediated through contractual relationships between themselves and their 
superiors which are negototiated as individuals and without any sense 
of collective practice. In self managing schools, teachers therefore 
practice considerable management of the self. 

Second,while the justification of a range of accountability measures 
has been to inform the public about state schools, these accountability 
measures are directed more to the centre than the local community. Such 
measures act as new forms of control which are more powerful than the 
direct surveillance of the former bureaucratic models of school 
governance. Both teachers and principals spoke of their reduced 
discretionary capacity to make professional judgements due to the dual 
controlling mechanisms of accountability (standardised testing, 
performance management) and the market. In describing their daily work 
and how they changed, principals and teachers in our case study schools 
spoke of operating at two levels:  at one level they were responding to 
external demands and expectations which focused on image production and 
'performativity';  at the other level they worked to meet the 
educational, cultural and social needs of students, significant issues 
of homelessness, inequality and cultural diversity which had a direct 
impact on student learning. They expressed a sense of the contradictory 
imperatives and external pressures which tended to privilege form over 
substance, performativity over good practice. One teacher commented: 

What I do in my classroom is no longer valued-- the teachers who are on 
lots of committees, do extra-curricular activities, and write good CVs 
as well as plenty of professional development are seen to perform. Yet 
they do so to the detriment of what they do in the classroom. Yet they 
are the ones who get the top jobs under the new system. 

In a secondary school, a senior teacher in the professional development 
position referred to his own mid life career crisis 'now that merit, 
hard work and enthusiasm are no longer rewarded'. 

The real fear of staff is exploitation. The endless workday and 
expectations. And knowing where to draw the line. There is a degree of 
role conflict--what is my role as a classroom teacher and what are the 
expectations beyond the classroom practice? That conflict is more 
evident and stressful. Now it seems you get recognition for things you 
do outside the classroom and not what is going on in the classroom 
anymore...you have to know about industrial awards and conditions, how 
budgets work. Specialist expertise is not enough. All things have 
politicised teaching...teachers do not know what they do well anymore, 
and there is guilt associated with that...You always feel you are not 
doing enough whether it socially for the kids or academically.

The emphasis on performance arose in part from how teachers were 
positioned as resisters to, not initiators of, change, as for example, 
in their public opposition to the Learning Assessment Program. Many 
teachers expressed concern that their opposition was viewed as being 
difficult and not because of sound and well substantiated educational 
philosophies. In part it was due to the outcomes based emphasis of 
school charters and reporting. And in part it was due to teachers 
constructing themselves as successful individual performers in order to 
gain advancement in an increasingly competitive career structure 
(Professional Recognition Program). As Zuboff (1988) has commented, 

administration in an information age is increasingly seen as 
'representation'. That is, while the information which informs policy 
and decision makers is de-coupled from the action context pit still 
allows policy or decisions to be made. 

Third, the market also infiltrates into schools through a shift in 
values and emphasis. All the principals perceived a significant  shift 
in their work away from educational issues towards the market and 
'image management'. This was also in response to system, community and 
media generated images of what constituted a 'good' school. But it 
could not be ignored as a good school image was critical to attracting 
and retaining students in the educational market. 

School charters had been of benefit because it made the staff think 
collectively about priorities..whether they agreed or not about the 
direction was another thing ...it had a marketing dimension...it linked 
marketing to the roles that teachers play and teachers had not seen 
that before. It was not a plus as it put more demands upon the school. 
While it benefits the school for teachers to work towards marketing 
some aspects of the program...and I think we have improved the quality 
of our newsletters and prospectus...We now have to consider our image 
in the community and ability to attract enrolments, to produce the 
substance and not the shadow.

The data pointed to two ways in which change effects could be 
considered. Sproull and Kiesler (1991) speak of two level effects: 
first level effects operate at the level of discourse. They typically 
make claims about efficiency and effectiveness of an innovation and are 
often called upon to justify change. The changes, if any,  are often 
short term and suprerficial. Second level effects are those that 
actually occur when an innovation is implemented and that produced 
fundamental changes in social practices in terms of new contact 
patterns between individuals and changes in what individuals believe to 
be important. The increased emphasis on 'performativity' --'being seen 
to perform' --tended to produce superficial or first level change. But 
there were instances of second level fundamental change in pedagogical 
practice arising out of changes in teacher work conditions and 
assessment reforms. One primary school teacher, an infant coordinator, 
reflected. 

Teachers take on more responsibility for things outside the classroom 
as well as inside. Extra time is spent on professional development, 
both in work time and private time. There are extra responsibilities 
regarding committees, and extra paper work. Quite phenomenal. 
Previously paper work was related to your own planning, preparation and 
assessment, preparing and evaluation of your own work. Now it is 
administrative paperwork...they have devolved all these administrative 
responsibilities.  And there are new reporting forms and new collection 
of data for CASES...You suddenly run out of time and you cannot do them 
in a professional way anymore.  I am going to have to change the way I 
do things soon.  It is all related to time and numbers. Instead of 
working individually with children or a small group of children, the 
temptation is to treat them more as a group. The curriculum is getting 
fuller and fuller. To spend time with each individual child or a small 
group of children who need extra care...that possibility is going out 
very quickly. Thus the only way I get around this is to have the 
parents who always come and help to sit and listen individual reading 
to come and work with small groups of children. I am now getting them 
to do things like letter recognition and work recognition, games and 
other things...They are actually getting into the teaching.  I rotate 
about each of the groups. So I am hanging on to this important work but 
it is also getting sparse as many mothers now work and cannot come in 

regularly. 

The external pressures for change and the intensification of labour and 
increase in class sizes meant that, as in this instance, teachers, in 
using untrained parents as teacher aides, further devalue the 
profession by contributing the view that anyone can teach. Indeed, 
parents (predominantly women) had, in this instance, become the unpaid 
and untrained substitute 'teachers' in classrooms. This, together with 
the shift to contract employment, signals the changing status of 
teachers' work and impacts on teacher morale. This teacher also had 
changed her classroom practice in quite significant and not necessarily 
educationally based ways in response to the intensification of her 
labour. It was about holding ground in order to retain aspects of her 
pedagogy such as group work which she valued.

Likewise the change in  assessment practices accompanying the 
curriculum and assessment reforms such as the LAP undermined the 
expertise of the teacher as a professional who could be expected to 
exercise her or his judgement in relatively autonomous ways. One 
primary school teacher spoke of how she was going to have to change 
from more open-ended exploration pedagogy in which you worked on an 
integrated topic. Her desire was that children could undertake in-depth 
discovery work through working with groups. She sees recent changes as 
moving towards more individualised learning and structured tasks 
because of the outcome orientation of curriculum and assessment 
reforms. 

While the CSF allows for  different methods of teaching the evaluation 
and assessment tasks ...the outcomes that are expected has meant that 
we have shifted back to task specific activity and away from inquiry 
learning.... assessment is driving the program instead of  using 
assessment to judge what children have achieved.  You cannot allow 
children to express what they have learned in their own way.

Standardised assessment, therefore, whether it duplicated or extended 
what teachers already knew or produced, as in many instances, results 
which often contradicted the continuous assessments of the classroom 
teacher, re-shaped pedagogical practice.

Finally, the teachers, most of whom were highly experienced and many 
with histories of educational innovation and reform in the 1970s and 
1980s, commented on the loss of institutional memory at system level. 
In particular, they referred to how the new vocabulary of disadvantage 
meant recycling old practices under new names, or about how policies 
failed to address issues of social justice altogether. Many commented 
upon the disappearance of social justice from the discourses of reform, 
and particularly in school charters, because social justice was 
difficult to measure.  One social welfare coordinator at the large 
suburban secondary college suggested that  

A lot of things that were happening in past years are not happening 
anymore. I was involved in helping student with learning difficulties 
(which is different from learning disabilities which are long term,  
diagnosed and catered for). These are kids who just have a problem at a 
particular point in their lives who need some additional help and 
support, in a small group or individually.  This prevents larger 
problems later. These are the potential drop outs in the system--don't 
fit any system wide category...somewhere along the way these reforms 
have lost the connection between teacher and student. We don't have the 
flexibility to respond to that anymore.

Planning mechanisms and priorities meant there was less capacity for 

schools to address specific, if only temporary, needs which arose as 
they were not calculated into three year priorities and planning. 
Difference was addressed if it fell into a pre-designated category of 
disability or disadvantage which could claim funding. And few schools 
had contingency funds. Furthermore, schools with a significant number 
of disadvantaged students were less marketable. Such schools, usually 
smaller and addressing the needs of quite different and culturally 
diverse communities, were also more susceptible to rapid enrolment 
shifts and the resulting funding uncertainties.

Teachers were trapped into managing change imposed from above rather 
than changing their practice in innovative ways arising out of an 
analysis of their local practice.  Many absorbed the changes imposed 
upon them, others re-worked and adapted what and where they could. One 
secondary teacher in charge of professional development described his 
colleagues.

Teachers are like a group of punch drunk fighters who stagger from one 
situation to the next, relying essentially upon their experience. I 
think to their credit they are not resisting. They are trying to do the 
best than can with what they have got. They are genuinely committed to 
their students and conscious of not compromising too much what they 
value. 

So at a superficial level, the system seemed to be 'changing'-- but 
only in the short term with regard to specific system demands 
(e.g.accountability). In the interviews, teachers often called 
discourses which focused upon professionality and the culture of care, 
particularly in primary schools. As Acker points out, caring for each 
other was one way of managing intense and ongoing radical change. At 
the same time, it was evident that managing change was often at the 
expense of teachers professional identity and health (Acker, 1995). 

In the long term, many of the fundamental changes in teachers' work 
actually often impeded rather than facilitated good teaching and 
learning. For example the lack of time resulting from recent reforms 
inhibited teachers' capacities to provide the one-to-one interaction 
with students which is critical to improving student outcomes (Hill, 
1993). Teachers felt that their incapacity to dealt with what they saw 
were important educational issues was heightened because of the lack of 
recognition for the work they did well - both by the system (Bishop & 
Mulford, 1995), by parents, by the media--and how they worked to 
maintain what they valued at the cost of their personal lives (Distant, 
1992 ). One male science teacher spoke of how 

it is hard to justify to your family why you are way at the weekend on 
camps or at school council meetings after hours...and particularly when 
there is no reward for what you put in. You never get parents coming up 
and saying thank you for taking the kids to camp or helping them at 
lunchtime-- only public criticism in the press. And if you do try and 
control kids you are treated in a negative way. The government doesn't 
appreciate us at all. They take and we give. If you don't do all the 
extra work, you are replaced by someone who will.  I can't take on 
further study because of lack of time and money. 

These findings are supported by a range of Australian studies which 
indicate that amongst teachers there is 'considerable frustration, 
anger and even despair' arising out of the way in which their core work 
of teaching and learning is being reshaped (Bishop & Mulford, 1995) . 
Most of all, these teachers expressed a desire for the respect that 
comes from an understanding of what they do, what motivates them and 
what they are trying to achieve. Teachers did change in response to 

SOTF --individually and collectively. Teachers changed, but often in 
order retain the priorities they valued (eg. social justice, 
individualised learning). They learnt to be 'smart' in how they 
channelled their time, emotional and intellectual energy to protect 
core educational values. They changed their practices primarily in 
order to maintain quality teaching in what were often underresourced 
and overcrowded classes. 

Communities of Change

In this project, emphasis was placed on the intricate implication of 
the transformation of  school communities and processes of learning. 
The texts and discourses associated with SOTF, for example, draw upon 
various and often  competing notions of community. The community is 
viewed as an aggregate of consumers who make choices about schools, as 
a forum of decision makers embodied in the school council, as an 
educational neighbourhood both geographically and socially, as a body 
of policy makers with regard to constructing policies relevant to that 
community, and as financial managers of a public service (Blackmore, 
1993; Seddon, 199 ). In practice, particular versions were privileged 
and others downplayed. The school charter was to be the means by which 
the school was accountable to its local community and also to the 
centre. The emphasis rhetorically was on consensus and involvement. 
There was widespread agreement amongst the teachers and principals that 
the charter process was a useful exercise. Some saw the charter process 
leading to greater involvement of some parents, particularly those 
already on council. The charter process was also seen in many schools 
to be making more explicit processes of school planning and review 
which were already a widespread practice in schools. Those who had been 
involved in the charter process pilots in 1993 were more enthusiastic 
about its impact than the later intakes. A common comment amongst 
principals, teachers and parents was that most parents (other than some 
on school council) were not actively involved, that the charter process 
was controlled, and that what could be included and excluded (in terms 
of language and content) was defined by the guidelines. For example, 
only outcomes which could be 'measured' were included. It was therefore 
difficult to include the social benefits of particular programs. It was 
easier therefore to leave such things out. Furthermore, the guidelines 
and the time lines had 'tightened up' by the fourth intake in 1995, and 
there was little time for 'real' community involvement. There was a 
sense amongst the parents that the major role of the school council in 
this process was not to  inform policy but to be supportive of staff 
and the principal and, as usual, do 'a lot of fundraising'. Yet the 
consensus gained and made explicit in such policies as the Charter 
about school vision and goals was to some extent superficial. This 
became evident  once an educational issue which required a clear 
community understanding about the philosophy and policy of the school 
arose. Such an instance was with the LAP. One deputy principal in a 
primary school commented:

It has certainly split communities. There have been a lot of issues 
which are highly political and important educational issues but which 
are treated as 'just commonsense-- for example the Learning Assessment 
Program which split what was a really cohesive consensus driven parent 
body in our school. 

Furthemore, many teachers and parents believed that, despite the 
rhetoric about community,  the change process and practice had been so 
principal and executive centred that it made their participation on 
decisionmaking committees such as councils relatively meaningless. They 
felt they had minimal capacity to influence outcomes. The principal, in 
Victoria as in all self managing school systems, is the linchpin of 

devolution. The principal is characterised in various policy texts as a 
 'strong leader', supervisor, culture builder and initiator of change 
(Victorian Department of School Education, 1993, p.3; Codd & Gordon, 
1991). As many parents commented, their capacity to influence policy 
was limited in scope (to deciding whether or not to have a uniform) and 
to the re-distribution of limited funds within quite specific policy 
guidelines. Parental voice also did not necessarily increase parental 
choice. All parents interviewed commented upon the increased demands 
upon both administrative and teaching staff who were now stretched to 
their full capacity. One parents final judgement was that 'a school is 
only as good as its teachers no matter how good the principal may 
be--that now seems to be forgotten'. 

The issues parents most often cited as being most important 
educationally were large classes and lack of resources. Yet they 
pointed out these were determined externally by central budgetary 
decisions over which they had no control. One parent on a primary 
school council reflected:  

You can't say to these children in the community, you can't come here. 
And if you only have a limited number of classes you can pop them into 
and you start of with a fairly good size at the beginning when you have 
been given specific staffing allocations, then the class starts to get 
even bigger--even up to thirty five of six, as happened this year...The 
parent clubs talked about it and I took it to school council...We 
expressed out concerns to the Department who said basically, do what 
you have to do. We though the alternative was to reduce class sizes and 
drop the specialist programs, or keep the specialist programs and keep 
big classes. So we kept the large classes. And then if more children 
come...we will have to reorganise. It is dreadful. And I think 
basically, all the specialist programs are the ones the parents want to 
keep.
    
Another parent, who had been attracted to the primary school because it 
was smaller and more intimate, now saw smallness as becoming a 
disadvantage in terms of resourcing. The irony she felt was that the 
'smallness' so valued by the parents and teachers was put in jeopardy 
by having to market the school for its intimate and caring community 
ethos in order to attract sufficient numbers to survive. As Watkins 
comments,

While it may seem perfectly rational to maximise student numbers for 
many schools, such a goal is completely irrational. This may occur 
because rational views of administration cannot allow for the 
particular ideologies people carry with them. Thus a school may not 
want large numbers coming into it because it believes that schools 
should be nurturing and caring and this can best be achieved with small 
numbers (Watkins, 1996, p. 96). 

Rational views of administration also have their own ideological 
baggage; about how schools should work, about the nature of individual 
motivation and organisations. This in turn affects professional 
communities. Particular rationalities have been embedded in the 
processes which have, through Schools of the Future and range of 
associated policies, re-constructed principal /teacher relations. 
Principals now have greater discretionary power over teachers with 
regard to the allocation of work and rewards in schools, staff 
appraisal, recruitment and curriculum priorities. The principals' power 
is also heightened in the context of teachers' tenure being under 
threat more generally with the move towards increased outsourcing of 
support services (professional development) and individual contracts.  
Within schools, teachers referred to the  new hierarchies which had 

emerged. Principal's work was now marked out as being significantly 
different from teaching in a range of ways, but most particularly by 
the increased powers over teacher careers (promotion, performance 
appraisal, leave...), the principal performance bonuses which were not 
open to teachers, and the new industrial relations awards which 
principals had to implement. A deputy principal commented :

And then you have the issue of principals and teachers. The principals 
associations now, in seeking to get their award, arguing that they are 
not teachers. Principals also having control over the PRP which links 
teacher appraisal to performance rewards. 

Both principals and teachers in our case studies were extremely 
conscious of, and made specific reference to, the overt shift in the 
locus of power away from teachers and to principals and in the ways 
principals practised leadership (Nicholls & Ozga, 1994). Most teachers 
and principals in these schools depicted the new relationships 
resulting between principals and teachers from Schools of the Future as 
being more hierarchical. The rhetoric and professional development of 
Schools of the Future emphasises team building and collegiality. 
Organisations such as schools rely upon the creativity and initiative 
of their 'intellectual workers' to survive. Recent management 
literature has, through it emphasis on the processes of total quality 
management and quality circles, sought to tap into this aspect of 
creativity. But the focus of the policies is upon principals and 
executive teams, which in itself assumes hierarchical models of 
organisation and not teacher collegiality, a premise upon which 
professional  communities could be realistically built. And then the 
teams are often, as Hargreaves (1994) comments, 'contrived'. One 
secondary principal referred to principal collegial  groups as 
mechanisms for survival, 'not because of the collegial support we get, 
but because we could watch each other more closely searching for slip 
ups so that one didn't make the same mistakes'. All expressed the 
opinion that there were little sharing of information or trust between 
principals as each sought to maintain or gain market advantage. A 
primary school principal commented 'about how have all suddenly become 
good listeners--listeners to what the DSE line is and to picking up 
snippets about what others are doing'. The rhetoric, said a third, is 
on team building but we are rewarded as  individuals. 

As Amanda Sinclair (1994) comments, team work has become reified as the 
key factor in organisational change but it has become technologised and 
indeed loses the essence about what it is about groups which makes them 
able to produce change - the importance of the task, the support 
structures, the emotions connected with the social interaction, and the 
facilitative role of leadership, formal and informal,  from within and 
not outside the team. But organisations have, in seeking to maintain 
control and direct their workers activities towards particular 
political and economic goals, have sought to internalise top down 
expectations through team building processes. This produces a tension 
for those in schools,  most evident in the distribution of power and 
resources in school planning, in the relationships between individuals 
and community, autonomy and control, professionality and line 
management. 

Teachers described the new teacher career paths as being largely 
premised upon competitive individualism and not collegiality, and 
viewed the new industrial relations system as undermining their work 
conditions. They were appreciative of the possibility for merit to be 
rewarded in the new career structure. But while the assumption was that 
new career structures were based upon merit and equity, where the  
roles and responsibilities of specific jobs were are now clearly 

designated based specific competencies, the irony was to some teachers 
the arbitrariness with which the system worked. As one male Leading 
Teacher commented: 'In applying for principal class positions it as 
much as being in the right place at the right time as democrating 
expertise and meeting the criteria'. 
Many teachers were extremely cynical about the performance management 
system. In particular, they rejected the notion that principals be 
rewarded through 'peer' appraisal by performance bonuses for improved 
student outcomes and not teachers,  although research clearly indicates 
it is teacher student interaction which has the most effect on student 
outcomes (Hill, 1993). Yet teachers were now expected to be appraised 
annually by the principal in order to gain their salary  increment 
under the Professional Recognition Program. There was no mandated peer 
review for teachers, although many principals instituted a peer review 
system in their school, whereas principal performance was based on peer 
review without either teacher or parental involvement. At the same 
time, there was agreement by most teachers and principals that the 
processes surrounding professional recognition which required the 
principal and teachers to talk about the type of professional 
development most appropriate for individual teachers and the school was 
valuable and professionally beneficial.  

These reforms changed the social practices and discourses within school 
communities. Certain discourses now dominated within the different 
discourse communities and had impact upon teacher and parent 
relationships. Most of the principals and teachers in the schools spoke 
of low teacher morale resulting from the undermining of their sense of 
professionalism. A female primary teacher felt that the language of 
parental choice had generally raised parental expectations beyond the 
capacity of teachers to deliver given the resources available in 
schools. But more importantly, parents seeking some competitive 
advantage for their individual child in the educational market, 
sometimes made demands for their individual children which were 
inimical to good educational practice. Public debates over literacy and 
standards generated around the introduction of the LAP, she felt, had 
legitimated individual parents' criticism of her pedagogy. 

Parents now feel because of the ways in which they are being encouraged 
by the government to tell us that they don't like the way we teach. 
These are deep philosophical issues. Inquiry based learning takes too 
much time when the same things could be taught through worksheets. They 
tell me : we want the LAP test, so do more work sheets. The government 
is doing the right thing forcing you to bring the basics back.  
Juggling these different philosophies publicly with parents are new 
pressures on us as teachers, and they are often not helpful to other 
children. Its as if we don't have any  respect for our expertise as 
professionals anymore, no voice...we are just going to have to cope at 
being beaten and moulded in the ways we don't like. And we get through 
it because we love our jobs...and that surely is not because I am well 
paid...I am not going to fight publicly anymore, but I will stick to my 
beliefs...and the kids are central to that. There is so much damage 
being done to them. There are kids in my grade who are desperately in 
need of more than I can give...We can't even be sick because we know 
there are no substitutes. ..some people go home and work to midnight.

Many parents assumed that schools were expected to respond uncritically 
to client demands or to follow departmental policy without question. 
This positioned teachers as being 'resistant to change' or 'not meeting 
the needs of their clients'. In either instance, the professional 
judgement of teachers, individually and collectively, was devalued 
relative to the claims of the individual parent in the market. 

Principals and teachers alike talked about how the market had invaded 
the social practices of their school in what is the corporatisation of 
schooling. On teachers comment: 'We used to have a good community 
sense, but now it is a more competitive relationship between schools in 
the area' and within schools between teachers. The two male principals 
(one primary , one secondary) referred to this as 'healthy 
competition'; the female principals were less than enthusiastic. One 
female primary principal actively sought to subvert the market through 
an agreement for all local schools to publicise to their feeder 
preschools in one broadsheet. A female commerce teacher in a secondary 
college believed that  education was now more like a private industry, 
and that the competitive climate undermined more collegial staff 
relationships. Another primary school teacher saw that the impact of 
SOTF was 'learning to become a better public relations 
person...learning to get along with the community'. A secondary teacher 
commented:

We need to display more what we do and get better grades to get the 
clients. But I am concerned about how we do that. Does it mean that if 
I want more 'A's' in the Victorian Certificate of Education that  I 
have to feed kids the results or do I really want to teach them. It 
puts one in a difficult situation. Teachers are consequently getting 
very protective about their curriculum as they are pitted against each 
other for resources and time. Its all about performance.  Do we hide 
what we do from each other or assist others. If two teachers are 
working on a course together, who gets the credit? When I get an 
interview for promotion how do I describe my role ? 

In the context of current reforms, such practices are undermined as 
curriculum and testing requirements increasingly limit such autonomy; 
large classes, administrivia and lack of resources reduce the capacity 
for continuous interaction; and team teaching is discouraged because of 
individual competitiveness. Furthermore, change theorists refer to the 
multi-dimensionality of change and how it impacts upon professional and 
personal identity. Increased emphasis is on emotion, ethics and values 
as important aspects of change as well as changing structures and 
processes (Hargreaves, 1994). Yet there was widespread agreement 
amongst teachers in all case study schools that the externally imposed 
demands of the system with increased meetings, reporting and 
administrative tasks, together with more students, was to the detriment 
of personal and collegial self reflection. The time when they used to 
talk is now taken up with additional classes for students. In effect, 
the imposed changes have impeded rather than facilitated school based 
change initiatives by restricting 'teacher talk', the mode by which 
teachers discussed in relatively social situations the nature of their 
work, the welfare of students, and swapped strategies about curriculum 
and pedagogy (Nias, 1988). As on teacher commented:  

People won't change if they have not input and it has been forced upon 
them. Teachers have been told they have to have this professional 
development program...they are expected to learn computers and there is 
no inservice provided. Older staff often feel inadequate. Now we don't 
have time to socialise and that effects our working relationships. When 
you sit down at a meeting to work together it is like working with a 
stranger - does not help for collegiality.

The evidence emerging in our data suggested that there was less not 
more professional autonomy, in that teachers' capacities to work more 
flexibly in classrooms were being undermined by a range of 
interventionist practices. Standardised assessment and larger classes 
impacted even more directly than Curriculum Standards Frameworks upon 
classroom pedagogies and teacher time. There was less, not more, 

flexibility due to limited resources, tighter global budget planning 
and stronger accountability. As in other decentralised systems of 
educational governance in England and New Zealand, the key issues were 
a deterioration of the relationship between teachers and principals, 
shifts in the nature of principals' work to management and away from 
teaching and learning, lack of external support, and poor relations 
with the centre marked by a cyncism by teachers about the motivations 
for such reform. Wylie  (1995, p.18) reports in New Zealand that there 
is a 40% turnover in principals since 1989, and many senior staff are 
reluctant to apply for the position. In Victoria, there has been a 
similar turnover with up to 70% of principals in 1995 being appointed 
in last four years. Similarly, despite the rhetoric of community and 
local ownership, parental involvement on school council did not 
necessarily increase their influence. Indeed, in all schools, parents 
referred to uniform policy as being the major policy input and change 
in financial practices with program budgeting which increased their 
responsibilities and financial role. 

Thus the social relationships of schools--between teachers, between 
principals and teachers, parents and teachers--were altering 
significantly  during the period of the study due to intensification of 
labour, new hierarchies and increased community demands as the market 
entered the school door. These were the new elements introduced by 
SOTF. Yet school based decision making in both curriculum and policy 
was not new to the majority of Victorian teachers, and indeed many 
parents, with the introduction of Schools of the Future ( Chapman, 
1991). Many teachers had been active curriculum and policy initiators 
in the previous decades. The Victorian state system of public education 
had a history of strong traditions of partnerships between schools, 
parent and teacher organisations during the 1970s and 1980s. But 
Schools of Future has structurally and culturally altered 
parent-teacher-principal relations. Under new legislation introduced in 
1993, teacher numbers were reduced on School Councils, student 
representatives dropped and parents organisations were no longer 
formally represented, although the various parent bodies maintained 
their activities through parallel school based and state committees and 
were often informally represented on councils. But in the legislation, 
parents are now elected onto school councils as individuals without a 
clear constituency or organisational support with regard to policy 
making. Ultimately, SOTF rendered teachers the 'object of policy' 
rather than 'professional participants' in the formation of educational 
policy (Angus, 1994b). 

Technologies of change

The new information and communication technologies are identified as a 
key element in the implementation of the SOTF program. In turn, these 
technologies provide the capacity for the development of the management 
technologies of accountability which require significant data 
gathering. In common with all implementations of computing and 
communication technologies much is envisaged and claimed on behalf of 
planned gains in efficiency and productivity. Implementations of new 
technologies are far from unproblematic. Typically, installation and 
training costs are underestimated, the way older technologies have 
become embedded in the life of an organisation are ignored. Rather than 
supporting people to do old things more efficiently, new technologies 
permit new things to be carried out, none of which would have been 
possible with the old technology. All of these are extremely difficult 
to determine in advance and so the justification of new technologies is 
invariably in terms of efficiency and productivity gains--Sproull and 
Kiesler's (1991) first level effects. Once new technologies are 
implemented it is rare for claims of first level effects to be tested 

(Kling, 1987). Instead, as existing patterns of socio-technical 
relations are disrupted and replaced with new ones, attention shifts to 
second level effects. People start paying attention to and giving 
priority to different things. They attend to the urgency of the fax 
before normal mail, or email before fax before normal mail. They 
develop new and different dependencies and have contact with new 
people. Little of this is predictable and yet it is what determines the 
fate of any new technology in an organisation. 

What we found in our preliminary case studies was that the new 
information technologies changed the social relationships between 
administration (Principals and clerical staff) and teachers, forming 
new relationships; but had less impact on classroom practice. Rather, 
the new technologies  increased demands on teachers for data 
collection. One comment was that 'teachers are being left behind in 
technology. Not because they are deliberately ignoring it, but because 
they don't have enough time to look at how technology is impacting on 
their teaching and children's learning'. Computers allow teachers and 
administrators to work harder and faster at school and, more often, at 
home in organisation and preparation; they allowed teachers to deal 
with more children, rather than significantly alter how teachers teach 
or administrators administer. One secondary college which elected to go 
into the first SOTF intake was already computer oriented. The primary 
school in the first intake felt that the SOTF 'brought a lot of 
technological changes--having a TV in every room, the intercom and the 
fax'. Others did not place technology as a high priority.

There was consensus that it was in the front office that the new 
technologies had greatest impact as bursars and administrative staff 
now managed payrolls, leave and student data collection through 
software programs such as Kidmaps and CASES. The work of the office 
staff had gone from 'a nice little office job' to a 'professional type 
job' which required significant skill on the computer and training in 
areas such as record keeping, superannuation, taxation and accounting. 
In response to these new demands, office administrators established 
informal networks with  other schools. One administrative assistant 
commented: 'We've got to know a lot of people now in other schools and 
been able to compare notes'. The introduction of new technologies and 
their associated administrative functions also changed the social 
relationships of the school. Principals tended to adopt or reject the 
new technologies depending upon their personal proclivities and level 
of administrative support. Some took on the new technologies with 
enthusiasm and did not rely upon the administrative officer for 
information access. Others were more ' Luddite' and most happy for 
their office staff to develop their technical skills.  At the same 
time, the increased load on administrative staff was demanding and 
often undertaken incrementally without adequate preparation and 
training. As administrative officers took on data collection and 
payroll tasks which required a high level of confidentiality, central 
school offices became domains of 'no entry' where previously they had 
been focus points of social interaction. These new responsibilities, 
one administrative officer reflected, had produced new attitudes. 

When I started here in 1983, everybody told you how to do your job or 
expected things of you. ..Now everybody speaks to you very politely, 
can you do something for them. And they thank you very nicely too.

At the same time, she noted that there was a great deal of variance in 
the job descriptions and salaries in her position between schools. She 
commented that she was lucky that she had a 'non-exploitative' 
principal who paid her for the level of responsibility she took. The 
administrative staff's roles varied considerably between schools,  

depending upon the computer orientation of the principal and size of 
school. For the newly skilled office administrators in these four 
schools, the new management technologies had provided them with new 
opportunities and a sense of worth.   

For teachers the impact of these new technologies was more ambiguous. 
The new technologies of accountability (Kidmaps, CSF, CASES, LAP, 
reporting) demanded increased documentation and surveillance of 
students, creating administrative work which detracted from their time 
on teaching. Many teachers, lacking both the time and opportunity in 
school time to develop the possibilities of the new technologies in 
either their teaching or professional development, took their work 
home. Thus the new technologies did not, as often promised, reduce 
their work, but indeed intensified their work. It also required 
significant personal investment of time and money to keep up with new 
technologies. This reflected the misplaced faith in the new information 
technologies to enhance student learning and teaching and thereby 
productivity. Indeed, Goodman (1993) argues that recent advances in 
electronic technology have the capacity to determine, control and limit 
the experiences of teachers and students in highly regulatory ways if 
they are not premised upon a system which values teachers and students.

 Texts of Change

The policy texts informing the radical restructuring of education in 
Victoria appealed to futuristic and optimistic accounts of the future, 
and about why schools needed to change to meet the demands of new 
times. As texts, the policies of SOTF are the product of the cross 
national 'policy borrowing' between largely but not always Western 
nation states seeking to find quick solutions for similar problems 
(Ball, 1995). Yet the policy documents in their implimentation assume 
highly modernist management models of policy implementation and change 
(Blackmore & Kenway, 1994). This 'modernist' perspective relies upon 
hierarchical organisational structures and line management, which 
assume that it is merely a technical process to implement policy and 
produce change. 

A key issue arising from this project was the way policy texts framed 
the everyday work of principals, councils, teachers and parents. One 
teacher felt that much of policy was symbolic and did not produce 
fundamental change: 'You've got the charter writers, the policy 
producers and the policy workers. We haven't got to the policy working 
yet.'  That is, policy is read as text, is rewritten and reworked 
selectively by those who 'do policy', the teachers, principals, 
parents, and in turn by students  At the same time, these texts have 
material effects, in that particular discourses are privileged over 
others in various sites of decision making, shaping possibilities and 
framing action.(Kenway et al. 1994; Bowe, Ball & Gewirtz, 1992).  We 
found that schools drew selectively from official policy texts, 
appropriating and accommodating what fitted their student needs, 
although some policy texts were more interventionist than others. While 
the Charters replicated consultative and consensus building processes 
already existing in schools, the Learning Assessment Program actively 
worked against valued classroom practices and educational principles, 
creating disunity in schools communities and impacting upon  classroom 
pedagogies. Teachers felt that they could adopt and adapt the CSF in 
innovative ways, but had little to no discretion with regard to the 
LAP. Some policy texts were therefore more open to different readings 
and rewriting than others.  The official texts did not account for the 
range and degree of pressure for change experienced in schools. 

Other, though more amorphous pressures and expectations for change 

often led teachers to change their work and classroom practices more 
than those deriving directly from restructuring. Teachers and 
principals mediated expectations and pressures for educational change 
beyond official policy texts, pressures which arise out of the 
educational needs of their students, public debates about the role of 
education with regard to the economy, citizenship, family life and 
community; and from their own personal / professional lives.  One 
primary teacher commented on the use of announcing new school 
initiatives in the media was so successful and put teachers into 
reactive position. 

This government has been brilliant. I mean you just look at the public 
relations machine and I am just amazed. They are brilliant in methods 
of creating those intricate webs of things that look so sophisticated, 
very professional, very helpful. But underneath, the bottom line is to 
save money.

While these discourses of change could be seen to be merely the context 
in which official policies emerge, there was also a growing awareness, 
for example, of how the media, as one contextual 'element', and policy 
interact, particularly given the increased attention being paid in the 
media to educational issues. Attention is increasingly paid to the 
images of schooling and teachers represented in the media and by 
specific stakeholder groups (parent organisations and business), under 
the rubric of change. As a consequence of Schools of the Future 
policies and other educational reforms, which in turn tap into wider 
educational reform discourses, schools have become implicated in a 
complex web in which their performance feeds from and into media 
representations, public perceptions and community understandings of 
their work (Wallace, 1993).

Finally, many teachers pointed to the contradictions between what the 
policies claimed to do and their effects. Teachers in these schools 
felt confronted with the 'paradoxes of change' embedded in the policy 
texts  (Hargreaves, 1995; Bowe, Ball & Gewirtz, 1992; Halpin et al. 
1993). Teachers, for example, referred to the significant silence in 
reforms about students (except in outcomes language), about the welfare 
and social justice aspects of schooling (Gordon, 1994). While teachers 
spoke about specific aspects of SOTF and other policy texts, they also 
spoke in more generalist terms about wider social and economic factors 
that initiated current changes�youth unemployment, inequality, 
violence, work, citizenship�issues raised in the mass media with regard 
to education, but often absent in official policy texts. These were the 
concrete issues they had to deal with on a daily basis in classrooms, 
but with increasingly limited resources. These paradoxes emerge out of 
the new market orientation towards the education/home/work nexus which 
frames the changing expectations of teachers and principals: how 
parents demand literacy skills and standardised testing yet allow 
children to watch increasing hours of TV; how diversity and difference 
(multicultural and indigenous education) is met by more standardising 
and normalising practices e.g. LAP; how decentralised systems of 
governance are accompanied by stronger centralising accountability 
tendencies (Gewirtz et al., 1995; Whitty 1996; Watkins, 1996) ; how 
professional autonomy/collegiality is undermined by 
controlling/individualising practices and principal not peer appraisal 
(Little & McLaughlin, 1993). Schools are faced with a shifting value 
paradigm about schooling, and principals and teachers are expected to 
mediate these changes unproblematically and with little regard to their 
own professional values or judgement , collective or individual 
histories.  

Contextualising the Victorian Experience


The restructuring of Victorian education needs to be set into the 
context of global economic restructuring in the face of deregulation, 
competitiveness and internationalisation of markets. A global / local 
perspective highlights the new role of the nation-state.  This is most 
evident with regard to devolution which has been the administrative 
solution for many Western liberal democracies such as Norway (Moller 
1993), the UK, New Zealand and USA  (Whitty, 1996) and increasingly 
many 'third world' states such as South Africa (Sayed, 1996) to 
national budgetary crises, changing demographics, the demands of 
socially diverse populations, and the pressures of the market. 
Devolution is also premised in many instances upon economistic 
arguments that a smaller state is more efficient but also more 
responsive to its citizen-clients. From this perspective, the 
bureaucracy and the state are noise-impediments to the new 
communication possibilities of the information age and the market 
(Hinkson, 1991). 

SOTF exemplifies certain patterns in the shift towards self managing 
schools throughout most Western liberal / capitalist democracies 
(Robertson, 1993; Soucek, 1994; Blackmore, 1993). Its advocates see 
SOTF as simultaneously reflecting global megatrends (Caldwell & Spinks, 
1992) which need to be emulated and as the next stage in the evolution 
towards decentralisation in Victoria more specifically.  Its critics 
suggest that such claims ignore the different context in which SOTF was 
introduced compared to past 'reforms', and that the principles 
underlying self managing schools  were hierarchical, depoliticised and 
decontextualised (Smyth, 1993; Angus, 1994a). Devolution, it is argued, 
is a political and economic 'solution' and should been seen as part of 
wider public sector reform in many Western liberal capitalist states 
transforming the role of the state from direct intervention to 
mediating the extremes of market relations (Whitty, 1996; Gewirtz et al 
,1995; Kenway et al , 1994). It has been the means by which to reduce 
public expenditure in health, education and welfare. In Australia our 
percentage of Gross Domestic Product  expended on education has reduced 
from 5.3% to 4.7.%  (Marginson, 1994). Indeed, it is becoming apparent 
that the perceived financial crisis of the state is 'faxed down the 
line' to individual schools. Yet it is the local schools who are held 
responsible for the hard decisions about competing educational 
priorities e.g. special needs staff as against literacy programs 
(Watkins, 1993). The self managing school in Victoria is an expression 
of the tensions which exist in educational restructuring globally: 
between line management and community;  individual choice and equity; 
market values and public education values; management and educational 
leadership;  centralisation and decentralisation; control and autonomy; 
equity and efficiency; competitive individualism and community; 
accountability and responsibility (Bowe, Ball & Gewirtz, 1992; Ball 
1995; Whitty, 1996; Codd, 1993). It is about fundamentally changing the 
relationships between the individual and the state as mediated through 
education. 

The global shift to self-managing schools occurred with little 
empirical evidence to justify its claims: that self managing schools 
lead to greater choice, autonomy, flexibility and diversity; that they 
better meet equity needs of students and staff; that they impart 
community ownership; that they are more efficient; that they are 
facilitated by more sophisticated technologies; and that they improve 
student outcomes (Hannaway & Carnoy, 1993; Newmann, 1993). These early 
findings indicate how schools deal with the contradictory 
centralising/decentralising imperatives of global trends in educational 
restructuring (Ball, 1992; Whitty, 1996;  Codd, 1993; Wylie, 1995; 
Moller, 1993; Sayed 1996). The teachers responses in our study also, in 

part, confirm Canadian and US studies about how change occurs in 
schools (Fullan, 1994; Hargreaves, 1993)
The changing social practices arising out of the education reforms in 
Victoria are in direct antithesis of what a growing body of research 
tells us are the conditions which are enabling and empowering to 
educational change (Hargeaves, 1994; Fullan, 1993). There is now 
significant body of research on educational change which points to the 
centrality in any change process of the need to impart to teachers a 
sense of professional identity through recognition of their expertise, 
a capacity to use discretionary judgement, and which is premised upon 
their ownership of change. Important conditions for change are good 
collegial relationships and recognition of the capacity of teachers to 
act as change agents (Hargreaves, 1994; Fullan, 1993; Lieberman et al., 
1991; Little & McLaughlin,1993). Research  indicates that while 
principals are significant in terms of facilitating and enhancing 
conditions for change, that it is teacher-student interaction in 
classrooms which makes the difference between like schools (Hill, 
1993). In this literature, teachers are motivated more by  a sense of 
professional responsibility than a concern about performativity 
(Seddon, 1991). The role of the principal is one of negotiator of 
different cultural perspectives, facilitator and enabler, story teller 
and coper, not a 'strong' or visionary leader out in front (Louis, 
1994). Little and McLaughlin (1993) characterise collegial schools as 
those in which teachers engage in frequent, continuous and increasingly 
concrete and precise talk about teaching practice; where teachers 
design, research and evaluate teaching material together; and where 
teachers teach each other the practices of teaching. 

Nor does changing of structures from centralised bureaucracies to 
centralised decentralisation necessarily change cultures in schools. 
Lyn Davies suggests that the link between school based decisionmaking 
and democracy are popular myths which can be disputed historically when 
considering how highly centralised state systems of education have 
produced more equitable outcomes for students than decentralised 
systems (Davies, 1992). Indeed, Australia with its tyranny of distance 
is one such example where highly centralist systems were justified at 
the time of their establishment and growth on grounds of equalising 
student opportunities. And as Middleton (1992) pointed out in New 
Zealand, equity could easily drop of the agenda of local communities. 

Devolved systems premised around managerialism and market liberalism do 
not necessarily, these case studies suggest, produce more democratic  
communities or professional autonomy. Indeed, as English studies of 
grant-maintained schools indicate,  devolved systems within a market 
framework can, in encouraging increased competition between schools, 
work to the detriment of smaller, isolated schools. This  can often 
exacerbate inequality between schools on the basis of race, class and 
locality and lead to the privatising of educational costs, particularly 
of 'extra-curricular activities' through user-pays, as schools seek to 
make up for the reduced central funding as their enrolments fall (Ball, 
1995; Brehony, 1990; Gewirtz et al., 1995; Deem et al 1995; Codd & 
Gordon, 1991). Small schools are particularly susceptible. They have 
less discretion in their budget use, cannot provide the same curriculum 
choices at upper secondary and are more effected by enrolment shifts. 
Studies in Edmonton Canada indicate that principals had less 
discretionary power than expected after devolution, were constrained by 
reduced funds, central demands and the intensification of labour 
(Brown, 1990). Recent surveys of principals in Victoria indicate 
similar issues are emerging(Caldwell, 1995).  As Bowe et al comment on 
reforms in England:

the autonomy of schools is more apparent than real. There may be no 

real contradiction  [between  centralising and decentralising 
tendencies] after all. The use of performativity and target -related 
funding as a form of control, linked to the localised, productive and 
capillary power of the 'manager', presents a solution to the problems 
of 'ungovernability'; that is, government overload which allows the 
state to retain considerable 'steerage' over the goals and processes of 
the education system (while appearing not to do so). Indeed the market 
form offers a powerful response to a whole lot of technical, managerial 
and ideological problems ( Bowe et al 1992, p. 10)

Studies focusing particularly upon parent involvement in England and 
New Zealand have found that active involvement is often limited to 
white middle class male professionals, and even then, they have little 
say in educational policy (Deem, 1989; Middleton, 1992). Indeed, some 
argue that there has been 'principal capture' of the educational agenda 
(Halpin, Power & Fitz, 1993). Principals have in Victoria become both 
the mediators in these new sets of contractual relationships and also 
the buffer for the state against teacher resistance (Tickell, 1994). 
'Good leadership' in  a Victorian school is where principals manage to 
quieten dissent and debate. Good management is about  managing change 
within the financial constraints. 

Devolution has led to a shift away from direct bureaucratic 
intervention to 'self management' of and by institutions (eg.self 
managing, site based and self governing schools); of local communities 
(School Councils and Charters); of teachers ( performance management, 
staff appraisal); and of students (competency based curriculum and 
outcomes oriented learning, standardised assessment, discipline 
contracts)(Rose, 1990). Yet our study as others indicated that 
teachers, confronted with intensification of labour, possibilities of 
individual contracts without security of industrial awards, and 
increased principal power feel more threatened and controlled (Lingard 
et al., 1993). Teachers therefore are less likely under these 
conditions to initiate innovation and change (Anderson & Dixon, 1992). 
This project indicates that there are two levels at which teachers and 
principals manage change: one is at the level of image as required by 
the range of accountability mechanisms or in satisfying parent wishes 
and demands unquestioningly (Ball, 1995). The other is at the level of 
responding to the educational needs of the students, and indeed to the 
needs of themselves as professionals. These are often not related and 
indeed require two different ways of thinking-- the latter is concerned 
with substance and process, the former with outcomes and display. 

Paradoxically, there are USA studies of unprecedented local 
collaborative partnerships between teacher unions, school management, 
community representatives, universities and teachers which arose out of 
the failure of top down imposed managerialist reforms eg. Coalition of 
Essential Schools (Weiler & Mitchell, 1992; Shedd & Bacarach, 1991; 
Fine 1995). These are akin to the partnerships involved in 1970s 
Victorian history of school based decision making than current forms of 
self mamagement in SOTF which is not what autonomous reflexive self 
professionals could expect to enjoy. Self management in Victoria is 
premised upon new employer /worker and contractual arrangements which 
have particular world views about motivation and particular value 
systems based upon individual competitiveness. These new 'technologies 
of the self' are about control not empowerment, technique and not 
substance. They have particularly narrow views of professionality. 
Nikolas Rose (1990, p. 94) comments

the link between democracy and productivity, between justice and 
contentment have been displaced in policy texts and discourses of 
change by the view that workers do not seek work satisfaction through 

'social rewards' and a sense of belonging to an organisation, but 
instead by monetary rewards based upon differential systems of payment 
and promotion opportunities (highly modernist  behaviourist notions of 
motivation). Management has increasingly focused upon utilising the 
psychological and  interpersonal resources of their workers by self 
governing mechanisms of self evaluation, self presentation and social 
competence.  

The structures, discourses and language of self management  as framed 
through current policies are not 'value free' although the policy 
processes themselves may appear to be 'generic' across a range of 
educational sites, sectors if not countries (Logan et al 1994). While 
there are unexpected outcomes to any policy initiative, the policies of 
self managing schools in Victoria frame the possibilities and 
constraints at the level of the local school where they shape the 
nature of leadership and of professional educational work.  These 
discourses produce different expectations of teachers and schools, 
expectations only informed in part by official policy texts, but which 
provide a context and parameters which privilege particular readings of 
policy texts eg. economic rationalist discourses which have particular 
instrumental and narrow views of education privilege efficiency over 
equity, and of the market which privileges individual choice over a 
sense of the public good (Bowe et al , 1992). While devolution is seen 
to be an efficient administrative solution to wider political, social 
and economic problems, its effect in the form of the self managing 
school is to construct new sets of relationships in schools which are 
often antithetical to long held values in public education. In that 
context, teachers change, but as much to do 'maintenance work' to 
retain what they value in public education as in response to new policy 
initiatives. 

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