Preface

Quality management is a current field of both educational policy-making, research, development, school management and of institution-level school development/improvement. The management side of the quality issue was chosen as the theme of the 1999 conference of ENIRDEM¹. This volume comprises edited versions of some of the papers presented at the Budapest conference.
The ENIRDEM network was established in 1991 for the purpose of offering a forum for professionals – researchers, educational developers, people involved school management training and for school directors and administrators – to promote their professional co-operation in many different forms. As the list of participants indicates, a goal of ENIRDEM is to support activities which ensure mutual interest where research findings relate to developing efforts and are deeply connected to practical needs and experiences. An outstanding goal of the network is to advance information exchange. At the time when ENIRDEM was established it was especially important for professionals coming from Central and Eastern European countries² and now it has new relevance for educationalists of the unifying Europe.
International collaboration is achieved by the preparation and conduct of common research projects, working seminars, school management training programmes, professional visits and yearly conferences. The way of working in ENIRDEM is networking; it has a bottom-up structure where elements of a formal organization, bureaucracy and fees are put aside and participants’ initiatives and involvement are the engine of processes³. A typical feature of the network – though several kinds of contacts with governmental institutes (e.g. universities, representatives of ministries) can appear in its activities – is that it works as a Non-Government Organization, stressing collegial co-operation and articulation of professional interests. The main and exclusively ‘centrally’-instituted activities of ENIRDEM are the annual conferences, organized around a topical theme and issuing in the publication of books⁴.