This study is exploring the complexity of school change employing the Finnish curriculum reform as an example. The aim is to gain better understanding of school change process in terms of school policy, school culture and educational leadership and how they are interrelated.

The case study is based on a long-term communicative action research project concerning the new curriculum reform which took place during the years 2000-2006. The National Curriculum entered 2004. It is based on the comprehensive school model that is now realized in all schools. The nine years school system is based on the the principle of continuity due to the individual student´s right to receive tuition in accordance with one´s talent and other academic prerequisites.

The worldwide neoliberal restructuring of education has increased pressures to dismantle viable national and local solutions in the name of effectiveness, standardization and accountability. It seems legitimate to ask wether the school is increasingly in the instrumental stranglehood of neoliberal education policy that appears as a step towards stronger segregation and competetion? (Ahonen 2003, Autio 2006, Simola 2006) The complex linkages between contextual factors in strategic and educational practice may remain unconscious but which still affects the ways how teachers understand their professional autonomy and power of influence and how they are able to interpret the direct and tacit norms and pressures around their work. The results from Finnish working life research show that teachers´quality of working life has deteriorated in some vital aspects since 2001.

The aim of the study is to critically scrutinize how the educational curriculum reform policy based on larger transnational trends appears in teachers´work at the grass-root level, in the practice of educational leadership, and at the strategic level in the municipality. How does the school institution manage in responding to the demands in this era of instability, economic depression and to the variety of contradictory goals? How do the teachers interpret, shape and transform the reform as they try to put it into practice?

The school is regarded as a social institution with moral purposes, as a community in increasingly heterogeneous society, as a site for alleviating or reconciling the tensions between individualistic postmodern subjectivity formation and social, democratic reconstruction. School is explored as a kind of hybrid constellation between the cross-pressures of ethical ideals and bureaucratic-administrative traditions (Dewey 1966, Hunter 1994). Curriculum theory is used as an analytical tool in describing the interrelated shifts between educational policy, curriculum design, and school practices (Autio 2006, Kelly 2004). Educational leadership and teachers´work culture are regarded as intertwined concepts in attempts to analyze the school as community (Sergiovanni 2000, Stoll & Louis 2007). How the school is organizationally and institutionally conceived shapes teaching profession which in turn affects the learning environment of students (Hargreaves 1994).

The participating municipality is one of Finland´s biggest towns and the school is a big comprehensive school. There are about sixty teachers, ten other workers and seven hundreds students, of whom 20 % are immigrants.

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