Revitalizing secondary school structures

Part One sets the context for the thesis. It describes the difficulties Australian secondary schools had in responding to the need for change during the social and economic changes of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Local initiatives, encouraged during the 1970s, were generally ineffective in generating significant or widespread changes. Encouraged by the Commonwealth Schools Commission's funding for Projects of National Significance, attempts have been made to generate more permeating changes in Australian secondary education. The writer was involved as initiator and director of one of these projects. Titled Revitalizing Secondary School Structures, this project provided the impetus and much of the data for the author's subsequent involvement in the Commonwealth Schools Commission's Secondary Education Project. Part Two is the final draft of a discussion paper submitted to the Commonwealth Schools Commission in May 1986. The author was commissioned in August 1985 and was provided with funds to employ three co-workers to assist him in data collection and in consultations in the states. These people were employed, two of them half time, from November 1985 until April 1986. From these consultations and observations, the author drafted a number of working papers which were discussed with members of the Commonwealth Schools Commission before this final draft was submitted to the Commission in May 1986. The author wrote all of this draft with the exception of the final two sections titled \Systems\" and \"Implications for the Commonwealth\" (pages 150 to 193) which were written by Marie Brennan in consultation with the author. The final draft of the discussion paper was tabled with the Schools Commission and was later revised by the author in partnership with Marie Brennan and the editor Christine Davies. The revised published version titled Making the Future: The Role of Secondary Education in Australia was released in November 1986 and marketed through Prentice Hall. Part Three represents the author's reflections on some major issues in Making the future: The Role of Secondary Education in Australia in the light of similar issues in work by Hargreaves in the United Kingdom and by Goodlad in the United States."