MIE 1987-2017

This issue under a new editorial team marks the 30th anniversary of Management in Education. I was the national Chair of BEMAS (then without the L) in 1986 when Grant Walker, a representative of the Australian division of the US publishing firm then operating as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, asked to see me in my room at The Open University. He told me they ran a successful magazine on educational leadership and management in association with one of the Australian professional bodies. Would we like to start something similar with them in the UK?

We already had the scholarly journal Educational Management and Administration (the L again came later). Typically over-cautious, I hummed and tutted and said I would put it to Council. They leapt at the suggestion.

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As I write I hold in my hand the first issue from Spring 1987. Richard Finn, the first editor, wrote: ‘this new magazine is designed to help you, the hard-working manager in education, do your job even more effectively. In each issue there will be a number of short updates on issues we think are important, followed by a series of articles on a theme’. The theme for the first issue was staff appraisal, then a relatively novel process in educational organisations. The first article, under a series banner of ‘Primary World’, was headed ‘No Bloody Meetings: ten commandments for more effective meetings’, and the second, written by the head of a Cheshire secondary school, argued that busy head teachers should themselves take ‘the best first step in staff appraisal; a fixed reflective time for self-appraisal’.

Over the years the magazine’s ‘personality’ has altered several times as it passed through the hands of different editors and publishers.

By Autumn 1994 the magazine was published by Longman. The article titles and blurbs reflect the immense changes then taking place in England, mainly as a result of the Education Reform Act of 1988 with its measures to promote school autonomy, competition and accountability. So there are titles like ‘Making Sense of Power Shifts’ and ‘A Swing to the Centre’. I was gratified to note that an article by me was described thus: ‘Getting together may be the way schools decide to govern themselves’– an accurate prophecy at last! Perhaps even more prescient was a piece on chaos theory. An article from Scotland asserted ‘Scotland is not quaint and remote. It is at the heart of the action’. Who could doubt that now?

Only a few months later, by Summer 1995, the imprint had become that of Pitman Publishing and the theme was the then highly topical one of ‘Marketing the School’. That issue included critical and conceptual articles as well as ones reporting good practice, and satire wasn’t entirely absent. An article by the late Professor Ted Wragg, apparently (and no doubt legally) reproduced from The Times Educational Supplement, was described thus: ‘Ted Wragg proposes putting pupils into doublets and ruffs and you’ve cracked the image problem’.

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At the end of 1996, the theme was ‘Budgeting and Resources’. One article focused on linking budgeting to educational objectives and another raised the issue of how and by whom spending decisions should be made in schools. There was also a piece celebrating 100 years of cinema and arguing that certain classic films, such as Kes and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, can illuminate issues of educational management and administration.

By the time the new millennium arrived the magazine was being published by the Educational Publishing Company, a small operation led by the indefatigable Demitri Coryton. He wrote in Issue 1 of 2000: ‘The heart of MiE will remain the challenging feature articles that combine useful information with a capacity to make the reader think’. Lists of references began to appear at the end of articles and there was a reference section including abstracts of conference papers and a digest of research articles in current academic journals.

Since 2007 MiE has been published by the respected academic publisher SAGE, which also of course produces our journal Educational Management, Administration & Leadership (EMAL). While it has perhaps become a little more sedate in appearance, the diversity of its topics, the eclectic and challenging approach to them and the focus on present practitioner concerns have remained intact. So for example ‘staff appraisal’, which as I mentioned earlier was the theme of the very first issue in 1987, had transmuted into ‘performance management’ by January 2011 when MiE spotlighted it again and the first article asked pointedly ‘Performance management in education: milestone or millstone?’.

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MiE has had just four editors over its 30 year life – Richard Finn, Angela Thody, Neil Herrington and Linda Hammersley-Fletcher. Inevitably each editor has brought their own distinctive style and emphasis to the magazine, as has every one of the publishers. Special mention should be made of Linda’s highly impressive contribution as editor for the past ten years. The magazine has covered a vast amount of territory in that time. The international dimension has grown and there have been numerous special issues on themes of great current importance: early childhood education, student voice, governing and governance, leadership for social justice around the world, structural reform and others.

Now MiE will be under the stewardship of co-editors Jacqueline Baxter and Joan Woodhouse. Doubtless they will offer fresh ideas and approaches as education and its leadership face a host of challenges both nationally and globally. But the aims and scope will remain the same as set out in that first issue 30 years ago: to provide a forum for the exchange of trends and innovations, to evaluate developments and share ideas and techniques related to the broad spectrum of education at all levels. And I am sure the new editors would reinforce this appeal from the first editor: ‘Please help us to make the magazine relevant to you, and let us know if you have any ideas for improvement’.