MUSAC in New Zealand:From Grass Roots to System-Wide in a Decade

Abstract

With a stroke of the legislative pen late in 1988, the whole New Zealand school system was restructured away from central Government control that had been in place for over a century to school self-governance and management by local school boards of trustees. Overnight, New Zealand schools became referred to as ‘Tomorrow’s self managing schools’, mandated by Government to achieve levels of organisational efficiency and effectiveness greater than was ever possible or realised in the past. For some years prior to restructuring, a small but steadily increasing number of schools had been experimenting with and using computer-assisted school administration and information systems (see Visscher, 1991, for discussion of developments internationally). Restructuring was perhaps the single event that pressed schools to take computerised school administration more seriously than in the past as a means to assist them to pursue the organisational efficiency and effectiveness goals they were mandated to achieve. Researchers and developers who had either developed computerised systems or understood their potential began, much more actively, to promote computer-assisted school administration as a direction for the future. This chapter summarises the development of computer assisted school administration in New Zealand but its principal purpose is to tell the story of one particular system developed and marketed to schools by the Massey University School Administration by Computer Project (MUSAC). The two first authors of this chapter are respectively a senior academic of the university College of Education and a university researcher. Their work and positions in the university are independent of MUSAC, maintaining only an arms length relationship with MUSAC. The MUSAC operation, though in the University as a system development and dissemination centre, is not part of the university in the conventional sense of contributing directly to university research and teaching. It is, however, frequently the subject ofresearch and MUSAC staff members make contributions to teaching programmes by invitation, as do other New Zealand system developers who are in competition with MUSAC. The third author is acknowledged because of the key role that he played in providing data and information useful to the senior authors when analysing system uptake and utilisation.