This thesis is a study of the implementation of the Queensland Education Department's 1992 Social Justice Strategy in a high school in the eastern corridor of Brisbane. The study captures a moment in time when the staff at Brookridge State High School attempted to balance the conflicting and overwhelming pressures of socio-economic change as the area moved from a Fordist to post-service society, and consequent changes to education where the community looked to the schooling system to provide solutions to fulfilling employment options and issues of post- compulsory retention rates. In turn, the State education system compounded the problems of the school with an expectation that the Social Justice Strategy and a plethora of other reform packages were to be implemented without support in terms of staffing, funding and incentive to make those changes. The thesis therefore is an apposite representation, in microcosm, of the broader debates occurring both within the National and international policy terrain and seeks to show that not only does the schooling system require a moratorium or slowing of the pace of change, but also that policy makers need to recognise, and be sensitive to, different pressures occurring at different sites in different times - pressures in this school studied which were strong enough to refract the benefits of the 1992 Social Justice Strategy. The study concludes, on the basis of evidence available in one school, that the implementation of the 1992 Social Justice Strategy was a semi- cyclical rather than cyclical policy process and that established policy orthodoxy, which suggests that some refraction of a policy is inevitable, is augmented by the notion that, in this case, much of the refraction was sufficient to reflect the Strategy' s contents out of the school, back into the arena of State action. Parsimonious funding, reform overload, residual conservatism both within the school and within the State, and Commonwealth equity reforms in the past based on a micro-economic distributive agenda, combined to prevent the full acceptance of the Social Justice Strategy. The thesis shows clearly that, although staff at Brookridge State High School generally were not averse to the values which underpinned the Strategy, they were upset by reforms which asked more of their time and energy. In this. the study seeks to provide a timely warning.