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Transactional-based: the school is a buyer or seller. This may include promoting

the school, recruiting pupils, or buying suplles and services from external providers. It
includes the traditional elements or marketing: identiflying and providing the
curriculum demanded by the schools customers (parents, pupils, govemment, society).
Relationship-bassed: the school works in partnership with those beyond the school
boundaries parents of pupils, community organizations (churches, police etc.), special
services providers (for example, education psychologists). Here the relationship is
based on mutual profesional trust rather than competiton, buying and selling.
Public accountability: the statutory management of accountability processes such as
inspection, the pubclication of examination results and accounting for the resources
allocated to the school.
The priority of these processes has meant thaa school leaders must be increasingly fpcused
on the external environment as well as the internal world of the school. Furthermore,
understanding the interations between the three sorts of external relations and between internal
and external processes is an important task in the planning and strategic dimensions of
leadership roles. Scanning the external enviroment to identify necessary and desirable
respoinses within the school is a key task, but so is the monitoring of internal processes and the
prioritization of internal marketing activities to ensure that the perceptions of the school by all
external stakeholders are favourable.
Evidence of the prioritization of external relations management has emerged from a number
of studles. In the context of England and Wales Gewlrtz, Balls and Brow (1995) show how
senior managers in a wide range fo schools in London have bugen to consider the external
relations dimensions of the tasks they lead. Foskett (1998) has shown, too, how a cultural shift
has accured to some schools in which external rerations management has a higher status and
roler; a view echoed in the studies og Thrupp (1999) and of Lauder and Hughes (1999) in New
Zealand. Such shift are not confined to the highly marketized educational systems. In Pakistan
(Memon et at., 2000) show how the management of relations with parents is a significant
challenge for headteachers, despite the mainntenance of a strongly centralized system, and in
Tanzania (Babyegyege, 2000) a key funtion for headteachers is the management of relations
with village communities and parents to encourage support in terms of resources and also in
the enrolment of pupils within the school.
Finally, we need to conside the impact of marketization on learning and teaching and on
pupil perfomence, which is one of the key raisons detre of the prioritization of markes and
choice. How far has market policy changed leaoership, such that there is a measurable impact
on pupils rather than a simple cosmetic change to the external appearance of schools?
Meansuring the effects of specific policy actions in education is notoriously difficult, for three
reasons. First, there needs to be the idenfication of appropriate indicators and measure, and
agreement on their value and their application: What outcomes are we actually looking to
identify as the intended effect of policy change? Second, system complexity means that linking
specific ourtcomes to particular actions in policy or practice is rarely possible, for the of other
factors cannot be isolated in the analysis. Third, the impact of change may take many years to
emerge. Individual pupils spend 10-15 years in the education system., and the evidence of the
impact of change can be only whwn cohorts of puplis have passed though the wholesystem
under the new set of conditions. While earlier evidence may emerge. It is clear from out
understanding of the ways in which innovations are taken up and implemented thet patterns of
change in the early phases of cycles of development may not indacate the overall impact,
patterns or outcomes (Roger, 1993). The time requirement for empirical evidence meant that
much or the substantial literture on the impact of marketization on pupil performance in the
first of the 1990s was entirely theoretical in nature, arguing the likely outcomes on the basis of
assumed oprational models of distinct ideological standpoints.
However, evidence is now beginning to emerge, and Caldwell (2000) has identified three
generations of research studies examining the relationship between marketization, self-
management in schools and pupil performence. The first generarion is the reasearch undertaken
pricipally in the context of the USA in the early 1900s, and summarized by Summers and
Johnson (1996). Drawing on a large number of studies, they suggest that three is no
demonstrable link between marketization and the enhancement of pupil performance in
schools. They emphasize, however, than the nature of the data available therough such studies
does not make any testing or the markets-pupil achievement link easy. Furthermore, they stress
that in the context of thr USA there is little explicit infent in the development of self-managing
schools to emphasize the enhancement of pupil achievement, and that most of the
experiments are rooted in aims that are primanly related to libertarian ideologies and
school/teacher empowerment.
The second generation studies are those undertaken principally in the mid-1990s in the
context of significant shift towardsbself-managing schools in England and Wales, Australia
and New Zealand. While such studies demonstrate increases incost efficiency in such schoold
(e.g. Levacic, 1995, in the context of local management of schools in England). They are unable
to show any significant impact of marketization on pupil standards. Drawing from range of
studies in differing national contexts. Whitty, Power and Hlpin (1998) suggest that there is still
insufficient evidence to show that schools operating in a regime of self-management enhance
pupil achievement.
Third generation studies are those that have emerged since 1998, and are founded in a
number of important characteristics. First, they draw on evidance from system that have been
in operation for periods of up to a decade and so have had time to begin to demonstrate impacts
at a systemlevel. Second, the operation of perfomence measurement and accountability system
such as pucblic examination performence and inspection reports has provided a significationt
set or data to enable analysis ti be undertaken. Third, the development of sultable teachniques
of data analysis has analysis in relation to the complex mulufactorial processes at work in such
educational markets. The increased sophistication that such studies provide, though, indicates
that although the relationship between self-management and enhanced pupil performance may
exist, it does so only in some circumstances. At best, such markets provide the circumstances
for pupils across the social and achievement spectrum to enhance performance. At worst,
marketization generates the heat of competition and the accrued losses from declining
collegiality while simply exacerbating contrasts between schools and enhancing polarization
on the basis of socio-ecoriomic status.