It is sometimes claimed that policy makers in the Australian educational system do not give adequate attention to the conceptions and interests underlying and involved with the numbers used in decision making. Can we find an account that maintains the bureaucratic approach while enabling people's conceptions and interests an adequate role? By outlining the theoretical framework of the Williams Report and by considering the roles of people's conceptions in the relationships between the educational system and economic growth, in changes in the educational system and in accounts for understanding and planning the educational system, it is argued that one can find such an account in the form of a peg-board model of rational social action.
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