3) Change legislation provides the legal inducement for schools to follow externally mandated changes. In some countries, schools are evaluated by examination results (which are published in league tables). Measures also exist or are under way to link teachers’ pay to teachers’ performance in terms of students’ examination or test results (Menter, >et al, 1997). Such legislation leads to a new regime of schooling, but allows teachers to make some of their own responses in terms of pedagogy and professionalism. Overall, school change policy and curricula and assessment policy is thereby legislated, but some areas of professional autonomy and associated arenas for change can still be carved out. In certain countries (for example, Scandinavia), this is leading to progressive decentralization and a push for new professional autonomy. Again, the world movements for change are historically refracted by national systems.

4) Change establishment. Whilst external change has been established systematically and legally, the power resides mostly in the new categorical understandings of how schools operate - delivering mandated curriculum, being assessed and inspected, responding to choice and consumer demands (Hargreaves, Earl, Moore and Manning, 2001). Much of the marketisation of schools is taken for granted now in many countries and, in that sense, has achieved mythological status. (pp. 51-2)

Change versus Continuity: External versus Internal

In the contemporary conditions of change, educational change forces are mainly driven by external constituencies. These external forces have essentially followed the seismic shifts of the decade since 1989 in promoting globalisation and marketisation. In the triumphalist period of the 1990s, this appeared to be the end of the story, or ‘the end of history’ in Fukuyama’s (1993) felicitous phrase. As our combined ethnographic and historical work focuses on the longer cycles of change, it becomes clear that, in fact, the apparent triumph of markets and globalisation in schooling is likely to be a temporary phase. Schools themselves are major repositories of institutionalised practises, social memories, and the procedures and professionalisms that have been historically constructed and embedded over many centuries. Hence, the apparent triumphalist externally mandated changes confront what might be called the contextual inertia of the existing school system. The changes which will actually emanate in the post-Millennial period will come from a collision between externally mandated change forces and the existing historical context of schooling.

Already, the optimism of externally mandated change in many western countries can be seen to be weakening in the face of the continuity of school practice. In many countries, there is a moral panic because so much financial and political capital has been expended on educational reform for such little apparent result that a delicate game of ‘blaming and shaming’ is often played out. The teachers are blamed or the pupils are blamed, or the families are blamed: what is seldom blamed is the poorly articulated external change programme.

To analyse change sustainability, we have to understand the conditions of change, and to do this we have to develop our historical and ethnographic studies. That is why this chapter argues so consistently for a sense of history in our analyses - not out of some obscure scholarly belief, but because, quite simply, we cannot pursue change sustainability without such understandings. Without context sensitivity, the new change forces may be shipwrecked in the collision with the hard sedimentary rocks of existing school context. Externally mandated change forces are all very well as triumphalist symbolic action pronouncing the new world order, but unless they develop context sensitivity, the triumph may be short-lived and unsustainable. In this sense, a more historical understanding of change theory is a deeply pragmatic project.