Abstract:
The National Professional Development Program (NPDP) has had a remarkable impact on the Australian professional development scene. What started out as a device for implementing a centralised national curriculum has produced a plethora of localised and unintended responses. Ironically, this slippage of intentions has also resulted in considerable progress towards the national curriculum agenda. In this paper the authors call upon several evaluation studies of the NPDP to develop these ideas about curriculum reform in Australia. The principal data source is an longitudinal evaluation of the Western Australian NPDP conducted by the authors over the three years of the program. Several issues are explored in the paper, including teacher professionalism and the role of the professional associations, federal state relationships, and the implications of the NPDP for future reform efforts.