Over the period 1982-84, the newly elected Victorian Government issued a series of Ministerial Papers relating to education. The documents, which were concerned with decision making in the Victorian state school system, as well as with the responsibilities of school councils and curriculum planning, effectively transferred the major responsibility for curriculum policy development from the central bureaucracy to school councils. The purpose of this study was to identify and interpret how selected primary school councils in Victoria assumed their new found responsibility. A description of the political and educational events in curriculum policy development in Victoria over the period 1872 to 1982 is offered first. Identified are those factors which led to the transfer of responsibility. The literature of curriculum, policy making, devolution and decentralisation, participation and collaboration, schools as social systems and as political systems, motivation and change was then explored. From the findings, the study recommends a form of school improvement plan devised to address the responsibilities held by individuals at all levels of the Victorian State education system. It concludes that teachers, parents, principals, bureaucrats or politicians, should all be 'contracted' to plan, resource, implement and evaluate curriculum programs.