Managing educational change: issues, actions and example

In this article we hope to provide comments on managing education through policy research and analysis, drawing on our work on a major national post-compulsory contemporary curriculum reform that occurred during the 1990s. In doing so, we briefly revisit dominant policy forms and the assumptions and intentions that drove much educational thinking during the decade before. We make reference to the critique of this work and provide some details of our own positions- as policy adviser and policy evaluator- through reflections on the process and procedures of Australia's Key Competency Projects [KCP] which officially concluded at the end of 1996. The experiences we build on in this paper are grounded in a set of policy processes that are currently impacting on policy decisions in a number of contexts throughout Australia. These processes offer a way forward for future policy development underpinned by practitioner-based research. Finally, we discuss measures of quality and equity which we believe should be at the forefront of deciding which policy initiatives are most worthwhile to pursue in managing educational change.