Abstract
The aims of this study were: to examine how boards of trustees were making sense of the changes in educational administration which were the result of reforms initiated by the Picot Report and known as Tomorrow's Schools; and to analyse data in terms of the policy sociology literature with the intention of elaborating on the connections between the macro and micro levels of policy development and implementation.
This was achieved by attending boards of trustees' meetings at five primary schools during 1991 and conducting supplementary interviews in order to collect qualitative data for analysis. The six major areas of activity which were derived from the data were the areas of finance management, property management, community relationships, educational objectives, personnel management, and governance. Further analysis revealed four major themes: an expectation that reforms would be structured; that the trustees would be supported in the new environment; that the new system
involved equal partnerships with shared responsibilities; and that the trustees were elected to meet school needs. These four themes collectively reflected the trustees' expectations about their role of governance.
The data was then integrated with other substantive findings about Tomorrow's Schools and used to develop a model of board expectations about their role of governance. A feature of the model was that many of the same terms used to describe the relationship between the Ministry of Education and the boards of trustees, at the macro-level of analysis, were also used, at the micro-level of analysis, to describe the relationship between the board, staff and community, yet the terms have different meanings at each level. This model was then evaluated in terms of Gidden's (1984) theory of structuration.
The results reveal how trustees were actively engaged in mediating the policy process and indicated that people at the "top" did not have complete control over policy implementation. The boards were able to operationalise their own definitions of governance - management, which was based on trust and co-operation, in order to meet their schools' needs.
This was despite the Ministry adopting a more directive "top-down" approach in its relationship with boards, which reflected the principles within agency theory.
This study makes a contribution to the area of policy sociology by revealing how policies alter their meanings, for the different people involved, and mutate as they descend different social levels. Overall the model developed was successful in indicating how the macro and micro levels interact during the process of administrative reform. There are limits, however, to the value of the model until it is tested drawing on a larger number of boards. In the meantime it is useful as a heuristic device for developing hypotheses about the role of boards in the governance of schools.