Tomorrow's schools after 20 years: can a system of self-managing schools live up to its initial aims?

Cathy Wylie

doi:10.26686/nzaroe.v0i19.1555

Authors

Cathy Wylie New Zealand Council for Educational Research

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26686/nzaroe.v0i19.1555

Keywords:

Educational Policy and Administration

Abstract

In 1989 the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms brought in self-managing schools as the unit for educational administration. The government’s stated aims included a mix of outcomes and processes, which were to: improve educational opportunities, meet Māori needs more effectively, give local knowledge real responsibility, and encourage flexibility and responsiveness. The system was to be more efficient, and provide greater accountability. After 20 years, progress towards these aims is, at best, mixed. This article provides a broad overview of the frameworks for school self-management over this period, identifying two main phases from 1989 to 2009. The first led schools to develop inward-looking identities. The second introduced a greater emphasis on capability development. The ongoing legacy of the initial phase is discussed, since reform phases do not so much replace one another as build on what has already been established. It also discusses the shortcomings of each of these phases in relation to the aims of Tomorrow’s Schools, and the kind of framing school self-management might need if it is to realise the aims of improved educational opportunities, particularly for Māori, given that this was an initial driver for the reforms.

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Author Biography

Cathy Wylie, New Zealand Council for Educational Research

Cathy Wylie is a Chief Researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. She has published and presented extensively on New Zealand educational policy and its impacts, particularly the country’s experience with school self-management since 1989. Studies she has undertaken cover changes in school roles, relations between central government and schools, school accountability, school financial decision making, and school improvement and development. She has led NZCER’s programme of national surveys of schools since 1989. She also leads the longitudinal Competent Learners study of the roles of education, home, and leisure interests and friendships in educational engagement and performance, and in the development of learning identities, which has followed some 500 participants from early childhood education to age 20.

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