Increasing awareness of the difficulties of innovation in schooling is accompanied by rising pressure on education policy and administration to go ahead with ef ective reforms. The “governance perspective” is a comparatively new approach in educational research which aims for analyzing processes of forming and reforming the school system. The paper at hand discusses some elements of a social scientific concept of “system regulation”. Then, some perspectives and categories which are applied by the “governance approach” to analyze issues of school reform are explained and used for putting forward some consequences for school reforms.

Keywords
governance, system regulation, school reform, school development