Dr. Brian J. Caldwell is a Professor of Education and Head, Department of Education Policy and Management at the University of Melbourne. He was appointed to a Personal Chair in 1993, the first such appointment in education at the University of Melbourne, which is Australia's leading research university. This appointment was largely in recognition of his scholarly work over two decades in the field of school-based management.

Dr. Caldwell served as Chair of the Education Committee on the School Global Budget in Victoria, making recommendations to the Minister for Education on how resources should be allocated to schools in this Australian state where 90 percent of the education budget is decentralized for local decision-making in the public system of 1,700 schools. He is co-author with Jim Spinks of two books that have influenced policy and practice in school-based management in several nations, The Self-Managing School (1988) and Leading the Self-Managing School (1992). Beyond the Self-Managing Schools will be published in 1998. With Don Hayward, he proposes a new framework for the resourcing of public and private schools in The Future of Schools: Lessons from the Reform of Public Education (1997).

Dr. Caldwell obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Alberta, Canada with a dissertation on pioneering practice in school-based budgeting in the Edmonton Public School District in the mid-1970s. He is Fellow of the Australian College of Education and the Australian Council for Educational Administration.

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