In the event, payment by results was rapidly abandoned, but interestingly enough, given the historical amnesia of educational policy, the British Government is again promoting payment by results as are some states and districts in the USA. In the nineteenth century episode, in due course, a more sensitive balance between external prescription and internal expertise was negotiated. As some of the current initiatives began to founder, I suspect the same re-negotiation will take place as ‘external’ change theory begins to confront the challenge of sustainability and generalisability. Already, in some countries, we can see how overreach has led to a progressive handing back of professional power to internal practitioners and educationists.

In England, for instance, the Private Finance Initiative has allowed private sector entrepreneurs to build and lease schools and provide a range of associated services. They have, however, been reluctant to enter the professional terrain of teaching and learning. Here, new funding for developing ‘pedagogy’ and internal expertise is becoming available. Hence, in this new discussion, a good deal of professional power to initiate change is left to internal agents. Once again, change theory will need to concentrate on those changes that are being internally generated, as well as externally mandated. I believe we shall, once again, see ‘bottoms up’ change, internal to the school, generating new agendas of change for a time, maybe alongside top-down externally mandated change. Those different models and sequences of change will now be tested for their crucial capacity to sustain and generalise school change.

For this reason, in the last section, I want to revisit our models of school change to point to a few lessons from past change initiatives.

Conclusions and Complexities
The moving matrix of change models and theories has taken us from a confident belief in professionally generated internal change to triumphally proclaimed externally mandated change. The move is now well enough established for us to begin to interrogate externally mandated change for its capacity to sustain new reforms. The acid test is the sustainability of change.

The key lacuna in externally mandated change is the link to teachers’ professional beliefs and to teachers’ own personal missions. In the previous model of change, this was built in as an integral part of the model; in the externally mandated model, it is merely assumed.

All the evidence that is now gathering shows this assumption to be patently false. The personal and professional commitment that must exist at the heart of any new changes and reforms is absent. Not only is it neutrally absent, it is in fact positively absent in the sense that there is a mixture of profound indifference and active hostility to so many changes and reforms.

Profound indifference, in the sense that many teachers report a moving of their centre of gravity towards personal and social missions outside their professional life. Active hostility, because so many changes seem ill-conceived, professionally naïve and against the heart and spirit of professional belief.