The Community‐School Partnership in the Management of New Zealand Schools
| Pages | 72-87 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/09578239410063120 |
| Published date | 01 September 1994 |
| Date | 01 September 1994 |
| Author | Viviane M.J. Robinson,Helen S. Timperley,Judy M. Parr,Stuart McNaughton |
| Subject Matter | Education |
Journal of
Educational
Administration
32,3
72
The Community-School
Partnership in the
Management of New Zealand
Schools
Viviane M.J. Robinson, Helen S. Timperley, Judy M. Parr and
Stuart McNaughton
University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
The last decade has seen a substantial shift towards the decentralization of
educational administration in several western countries[1,2]. Two features of
the shift that has taken place in New Zealand mark this country’s experience as
possibly the most radical of all. First, when the new policy known as
Tomorrow’s Schools[3] was introduced in October 1989, all layers of
administration between the central state agencies and the local school were
abolished and many of their functions devolved to a parent-elected Board of
Trustees. The rationale for this degree of decentralization was the need to
locate decision making as close as possible to the point of implementation[4,
p. 42]. The taskforce that recommended this restructuring had received
numerous submissions about the delays, frustration and inflexibility
engendered by the existing highly centralized and complex structures.
The second unusual feature of the decentralization was that the governance
of each school was to be a partnership between the professional staff (principal
and teachers) and the community, with the Board of Trustees being the formal
mechanism through which the partnership would be expressed[3, p. 1]. While
parents had previously been involved in school administration via school
committees (at primary level) and Boards of Governors (at secondary level), the
powers of the Boards of Trustees were considerably broader, par ticularly in the
area of personnel management, than those of the earlier bodies. The Board
would comprise a majority of parent-elected representatives, one of whom
would act as chairperson, the school principal, one staff and one student
representative, and up to four co-opted members. The partnership model
suggested that the purpose of the reform was not just administrative efficiency
but, in addition, alteration of the balance of power between what market
analysts call the providers and consumers of education[5]. Macpherson, an
Australian academic who worked for six months in the New Zealand State
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial assistance of the Research and Statistics
Division of the Ministry of Education, Wellington, and the co-operation of the Boards, staff and
parents of the 38 Auckland schools involved in the research.
Journal of Educational
Administration, Vol. 32 No. 3, 1994,
pp. 72-87. © MCBUniversity Press,
0957-8234
Management of
New Zealand
Schools
73
Services Commission at the time of the change, wrote of the motivation of
politicians and their advisers as follows:
...from the outset, real devolution was considered as a means of altering the balance of power
between the providers and the clients to raise satisfaction levels. Behind what appeared to be
a new touching faith in more direct democracy was a steely resolve in the House and in
Cabinet to create a new system with a sophisticated set of checks and balances that would
embed responsiveness as a norm of professional and administrative practice[6, p. 12].
This rationale is found in both the Taskforce Report which preceded the
introduction of the Tomorrow’s Schools policy[4, pp. 23-24] and, more explicitly,
in the preceding highly influential Treasury analysis of state education[7]. Both
documents describe how a centralized heavily regulated state education system
had become inflexible and unresponsive to local needs and changing economic
imperatives. It was claimed that one consequence of such a centralized system
was that provider groups were focused on lobbying central agencies and
administrators to protect and improve resources and current conditions of
employment, rather than on the quality of the educational provision given to
local communities. It was argued that if schools were managed locally and
parents given a substantial part to play in the process, then provider groups
would shift their focus from the centre to the local communities to whom
decision making, resource management and accountability had been devolved.
While this rationale was accepted in the Tomorrow’s Schools policy as the path
to greater school responsiveness and administrative efficiency, the Treasury
warned that it did not go far enough. It believed that involvement of parents in
school management, while desirable, was a relatively weak way of
strengthening the contractual relationship between educational providers and
consumers. It warned that such an approach to increasing parental influence:
Would be highly susceptible to capture by those most prepared to meet the transaction costs
involved and with the best grasp of organisational forms and information sources - notably
the providers or strongly politically or morally motivated factions. If anything, it could
represent a move to stronger provider and middle-class capture, with parents from lower
socio-economic groups or belonging to ethnic minorities less able to navigate the committee
politics involved and deterred by the transaction costs of so doing[7, p. 147].
The solution, according to the Treasury, was not only to give parents influence
within a school, but to foster greater choice between schools, by allowing them
to choose between a far greater diversity of state and private provision. At the
same time, the State would have to intervene through targeting of resources and
other measures to reduce the inequity that could arise through such a policy[7,
p. 150]. The Treasury analysis suggested, therefore, that a partnership in school
governance as was established under Tomor row’s Schools through the Board of
Trustees mechanism, would not be sufficient to obtain the desired institutional
responsiveness. The data presented in this article will shed some light on the
accuracy of this prediction.
The purpose of this article is, first, to present some descriptive data about
how this partnership mechanism is understood by its various participating
groups, namely, school principals, teachers, Board chairpersons and the wider
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