From Centralized Imperialism to Dispersed Management: The Contribution of Phillip Hughes to the Development of Educational Administration in Australia

The year 1966 was in retrospect a pivotal point in transforming the way schools were to be managed thereafter in Australia. In the early 1960s there was growing interest in the role of the principal of schools. The early landmark Australian text by Bassett, Crane, and Walker, Headmasters for Better Schools, first appeared in 1963; but in the second edition of that work, the authors were able to say that “in the four years since this book was first published there has been a marked intensification of interest in the problems of school administration in Australia” (Bassett et al., 1967, Preface). Much of that intensity was generated in New England, the northern tablelands of New South Wales, where Bill Bassett, a former school inspector, was at the time Professor of Education at the University of New England (UNE). Bill Walker was an Associate Professor in the same faculty, and Alan Crane was principal of the regional Teachers College in the same city. They were colleagues, working closely together and making public the huge theoretical advances occurring in the modes of school and system organization. Educational Administration was, indeed, a new scholarly specialization with enormous consequences for practice.