Crisis or Crossroads?

Abstract

Educational management is a relatively new academic discipline but it has grown strongly in the United Kingdom and in most other English-speaking countries. The widespread shift to selfmanagement has served to enhance the importance of effective leadership within educational institutions and the parallel need for theory and research to establish what constitutes good practice. Rapid and multiple policy change constitutes a challenging context for educational management but also points to the need for a review of the discipline. This article examines the opportunities and challenges for educational management at the end of the 20th century and concludes that the discipline has to develop a new sense of direction to meet the needs of educational institutions and practitioners in the new millennium.