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ABSTRACT National policy initiatives frequently suffer from slow and sporadic implementation, with requirements for school staff to be appraised being no exception. In this paper we identify how policy implementation might be improved if policy formulation was informed by a more detailed understanding of the local conditions which policy is designed to influence. We base our argument on a conceptualisation of policy as a response to a set of frequently conflicting local and national requirements. This conceptualisation, based on Nickles' constraint inclusion account of a problem, informed our case study of the implementation of the national performance management policy in one New Zealand high school. We discuss how the school's professional norms and beliefs about authority and the culture of conflict avoidance precluded effective implementation of the national policy mandate. An intervention that more closely aligned school cultural norms with national policy requirements involved negotiating a new set of constraints and appraisal practices with staff We argue that national policy is more likely to be implemented if the process of policy formulation involves an ongoing dialogue about the adequacy and congruence of the beliefs and practices that inform both the proposed policy and the local practices that such policy is designed to implement.
Introduction
Initiatives for performance appraisal in education have typically come from governments and their associated ministries and departments, rather than from teachers themselves, frequently resulting in slow and intermittent local implementation. In Britain, for example, despite a series of reports on the desirability of appraisal and pilot schemes to trial various appraisal options (e.g. Department of Education and Science, 1983, 1985, 1991; Suffolk Education Department, 1985, 1987; Bradley et al., 1989; National Steering Group, 1989) implementation has been slow and sporadic James & Mackenzie, 1986; Fidler, 1995).
New Zealand is no exception to this international trend. In 1989, performance appraisal, as a mechanism for securing greater teacher accountability (Macpherson, 1989; Capper & Munroe, 1990; Peel & Inkson, 1993) became a mandated responsibility of individual schools' Boards of Trustees. As the employer, Boards became responsible for managing personnel functions that impinged on the quality of teaching in the new system, in accordance with the State Sector Act (New Zealand Government, 1988). Despite these requirements, various reports and publications have commented on...