This study stems from research on the "Standing Conferences of Rectors and Vice-Chancellors of the European Universities" (1948-), an experimental initiative for co-operation among European universities, emphasising the reformative ideal that appeared in international circles in the years following the Second World War. These conceptions…

The further education (FE) sector in England has experienced two decades of marketisation. This article takes as its focus the first five years of incorporation (1993-1998) for one case study college in a city ("Coppleton") in the West Midlands of England, five years that were dominated by a contract dispute. Data from interviews with…

This paper builds on recent scholarship on the gendered nature of educational work to argue that while conceptualisations of the principalship are underpinned by scholarship and policy assumptions that construct the work of the principal as a male domain, women have responded to opportunities presented by changing historical, political and social…

This article has a dual purpose. The first is to pay tribute to the work of Richard Selleck and Geoffrey Sherington; the second to argue that historians of education can make substantial contributions to current and future educational policy and practice by identifying what Ravitch has called "time-tested truths". The nature and purpose…

This paper provides an overview of the contribution of Professor Geoffrey Sherington to the study of the history of Australian education and immigration. His academic and leadership roles are summarised and the main themes of his work are briefly discussed. These themes comprise: Australia as an immigrant nation, British colonial values and…

Faiths have long used education as a means to preserve and transmit cultural values from one generation to the next. However, they have also employed education to unite people of different cultures and proselytise others to their worldview. Over the last two centuries, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Latter-day Saint, LDS, or…

William Taylor's 1969 chapter provides a springboard to reflect on how what he termed administrator training has developed since the 1960s. Responding also to Baron's insistence in the same volume that education be viewed as political, the article adopts a critical perspective, focusing on leader preparation programmes and exploring how…

"Educational administration and the social sciences", the landmark text coedited by Baron and Taylor in 1969, represented the study of educational administration as an applied interdisciplinary field. George Baron's own academic career reveals the struggles involved in the construction of this new field and the resistance and…

This concluding article attempts to review some dominant themes from the preceding contributions and relate them to my own preoccupations and perspectives. It focuses on the themes of agency, reform and the field. It points to the risk of polarising the debate about the relative influence of agency and structure but acknowledges and exemplifies…

One social science base for educational administration proposed in the Baron and Taylor collection was organisation theory. In the event this expectation turned out to be over-optimistic. Organisation theory was much too contested and insufficiently pragmatic for the British taste. Major developments in this field occurred mainly in the USA.…

In this article, the author, a former Senior Inspector at Her Majesties Inspectorate (HMI), United Kingdom, presents the historical activities between 1968 through 1991 surrounding HMI and the government agencies and persons who influenced how the inspection of school activities have evolved over that time period. Bolton reports that the HMI was…

This article deals with the "troubled history" of head teachers' evaluation in Italy, as a specific strand of the controversial and fuzzy embedding of New Public Management (NPM) discourse in the Italian education system. Since the 1990s, NPM has shaped both policy agendas and professionals' subjectivities, leading the way to a…

This article reviews the impact of discourses on "New Public Management" (NPM) on compulsory schooling in Switzerland during the last two decades and traces its implementation in the Canton of Bern. The analysis suggests that while NPM reformers initially promoted increased school autonomy, the introduction of market elements and school…

Since the end of the 1980s, the Norwegian education system has gone through major reform, influenced largely by new managerialist ideas. Strategies to renew the public sector were promoted as the new public management (NPM). This paper investigates the way ideas connected to NPM reforms have been introduced and interpreted in the Norwegian…

This paper argues that the "Times Higher" provides a powerful tool for understanding the changing character of UK higher education (HE) and can usefully be seen as representative, and in some ways constitutive, of that changing character. Drawing on an analysis of a sample of stories from the "Times Higher," it documents the…