He’s the one with the catchy tunes, the management guru with style. At least that is the expectation aroused by those punchy titles.

This, it is reasonable to suppose, is going to be The One Minute Manager for schools, full of pithy one-liners and sharp observations.

In practice, it isn’t quite like that. Despite the disclaimer on page two of What’s worth fighting for in your school? - “This is not a research study” - it is fairly clear where Michael Fullan, and his collaborator Andy Hargreaves, are coming from.

This is serious stuff, with all the matching accessories of an academic text - citations, bibliographies and the rest of it. Even where it isn’t based on first-hand research, it leans heavily on the research literature. It is a read you have to plan for and it won’t give you many snappy one-liners for the overhead projector on your next professional development day.

All of which prompts the inevitable question, what’s worth reading in Michael Fullan? If it is more of an effort than the titles suggest, is it an effort worth making?

The short answer is yes. Indeed, both these books and others such as Change Forces and Successful School Improvement would be essential reading if there was such a thing these days beyond Department for Education circulars and letters of complaint from parents.

What makes this even more surprising is that the backcloth to all Michael Fullan’s work is not the British, but the Canadian education system. As Dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto, he is widely acknowledged as one of Canada’s leading educational researchers.

The reason why he is able to speak to us so directly is because the issues he addresses are the big ones, the management of change and the nature of leadership in schools, and because these issues are now more topical than ever.

It may also be that his very distance helps. It allows him to be unequivocal in a way that is denied those who are more closely involved. Can anybody homegrown now comment on the national curriculum without being defensive, whatever views they hold?

In two-and-a-half pages at the beginning of Change Forces, Michael Fullan provides a brief history of the last 30 years of educational reform which ends with the words “we need, in short, a new mindset about educational change”. The problem, as he compellingly presents it, is that reform of the system, whether by professionals or politicians, has failed.

Throughout the Sixties the professionals were hopelessly naive about their ability to effect change by “pouring scads of money into large-scale curriculum efforts, open plan schools and the like”. By the time they had begun to realise that effects were not following causes as they ought to, it was too late, “society had had enough”.

Impatient with the educational establishment and unwilling to tolerate levels of inertia that were beginning to seem endemic, the politicians moved in with “large scale governmental action”. But they too are now “fighting an ultimately fruitless uphill battle”.

Thus far, Fullan’s analysis is bracing but fairly unremarkable. More distinctive is what follows. Unlike others, Fullan finds little to choose between these two approaches.

Far from being at odds with each other, he claims, they are both different versions of the same thing. They both assume that change is simply a matter of developing and introducing new systems to eliminate old bad practices. Change the rules and everything else follows.

What Fullan calls “the implementation perspective” reveals is that this very far from being the case. Indeed, he quotes one research team who refer to “the risk of appraising non-events” as an occupational hazard of investigating the impact of innovation.

His explanation for this is that the system as a whole is fundamentally conservative and that “it is simply unrealistic to expect that introducing reforms one by one, even major ones, in a situation which is basically not organised to engage in change will do anything but give reform a bad name”. New initiatives stand no chance of succeeding, unless the climate is right. Put more bluntly, attempts to change the system without changing the people who make it work are doomed to failure.

Few people would have any problems seeing the relevance of this to what has happened in this country over the last few years and it is interesting to learn that this government has been making the same mistakes as others.

What is depressing is the thought that, if Michael Fullan is right, we are unlikely to make much more progress this time round since “the answer does not lie in designing better reform strategies”.

Viewed from the perspective he offers, we have been peculiarly obtuse in the way we have responded to the collapse of the national curriculum.

The only solution we seem able to offer is more of the same. The medicine hasn’t worked so take another dose. We have ignored the need to create schools that are “better organised to engage in change”, and, as a consequence, we are no more likely to achieve success than we were five years ago.

The real challenge, as he sees it, is “to make the educational system a learning organisation - expert at dealing with change as a normal part of its work, not just in relation to the latest policy but as a way of life”.

Schools, Michael Fullan argues, should be in the business of change because that is what they are there for, and teachers should be open to new ideas because that is what they expect of their pupils.

The key to this lies in empowering teachers, and it is this that is “worth fighting for”. Despite the language, his is not in essence a political position. He is not arguing, as you might expect, that government should return some measure of control to the profession. Quite the opposite.

His point is that we live in a non-rational world, that “there is no point in lamenting the fact that the system is unreasonable, and no percentage in waiting around for it to become more reasonable. It won’t”.

Empowerment is not something that others can give, almost by definition. The first step towards empowerment comes with taking control. It is because he locates the springs of change in the actions of individual teachers that he can so easily make the journey from research findings to practical advice.

The consistent message running through this advice is about the importance of being a learner, of making sure that change continues to be a possibility. With a priority like that, it is hardly surprising that he often finds himself challenging received wisdom.

He argues, for example, that “for complex changes, tighter forms of planning and managing lose on two counts. They place the head in a dependent role, however, unintended, and they hamper the extension of autonomy to teachers and to the school as a collectivity”.

The production of a masterplan is an inflexible way of responding to events which makes learning impossible.

For similar reason, the best kind of leader is not “the charismatic, innovative high-flyer that moves whole school cultures forward”, but rather the headteacher who employs “a more subtle kind of leadership which makes activity meaningful for others”.

A lovely phrase, that. headteachers like this do not put their trust in new systems as a way of effecting change because they recognise that “teachers are not technicians”, and that “teaching is bound up with their lives, their biographies, with the kinds of people they have become”.

What they do instead is to set about creating what Fullan calls “total schools” in which a culture of collaboration allows individuals to learn from each other and the social and professional environment in which they exist.

What he is particularly good at is demonstrating how impoverished are most of our strategies for effecting change, depending as they do on the creation of systems that are essentially coercive, however benign our intentions may be. Nobody who has listened carefully to what Michael Fullan is saying will ever again make the mistake of thinking that systems can deliver more than teachers.

What’s worth fighting for in your school? By Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves, Open University Press (ISBN 0-335-15755-6).What’s worth fighting for in headship. By Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves, OUP (ISBN 0-335-15754-8) Change Forces. By Michael Fullan, Falmer Press (ISBN 1-85000-826-4). Successful School Improvement. By Michael Fullan, OUP (ISBN 0-335-09575-5).

Patrick Scott is senior adviser (inspection and school development) for Cleveland LEA, but is writing here in a personal capacity.