Government Policy and School Development

The last 10 or 15 years of this century have been a time of great challenge as well as considerable excitement for educational systems around the world. Governments everywhere have been embarking on substantial programmes of reform in an attempt to develop more effective school systems and raise levels of student learning and achievement. We see in these policy initiatives an unfortunate paradox that inhibits them from realising their aspirations. The community of educational change researchers and practitioners has finally begun to learn something about how ongoing improvement can be fostered and sustained in schools. However, government policy on education has not taken adequate account of this knowledge about school development, with the result that an enormous potential source of synergy has been lost and student learning continues to lag behind its potential. Our argument in this article is that as a consequence of this gap government efforts to improve schooling are less effective than they might be and that many school improvement efforts have to swim against the current of government regulation. Following our analysis of this central irony in educational policy, we go on to outline an approach that would be more likely to help governments achieve their educational objectives by building policy initiatives more explicitly on the knowledge base of school development.