Organisation and management of education: Development and growth

In the last few decades in the Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world, education was clearly assumed to be the key for economic, social and political developments, and was thus expanded quickly (Fullan, 1998; Lieberman, 1998). Given the limited resources and various kinds of contextual constraints, inevitably there are dilemmas and tensions in the efforts of expanding education systems, financing the increasing educational provision, ensuring the accountability of educational services to the public and improving the effectiveness of learning and teaching during the growth of educational services in the Asia-Pacific countries. Particularly in response to the challenges of globalisation, information technology, international competitions, knowledge-based economy and fast societal developments in the new millennium, more and more issues in educational management, organisation and provision have been raised for discussion, debate and research (Chapman, Sackney, & Aspin, 1999). Since the 1990s, there has been numerous educational reforms launched in nearly all countries in the Asia-Pacific region (Cheng & Townsend, 2000). The various waves of education reforms (Cheng, 2001a) have induced a lot of changes in different aspects of organisation and management of education. Copyright © 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.