My study is of the provision of career education, health education, personal development and student development programmes for students from Years 7 to 10 in ACT high schools. My purpose was to identify why these programmes are not available to all students and what can be done to make them available. The methods I used were an examination of a longitudinal case study of "Bellbird" High School in parallel with a survey of the current system perspective. Although the study focuses on the ACT in Australia, reference is made to the international literature, as well as local, regarding the attitudes of students, parents and teachers to career education, health education, personal development and student development programmes; data collection and interpretation; and the implementation of change. I have used data from three different survey instruments administered at "Bellbird" High School, at five year intervals, in 1978/79, 1984 and 1989. I have used another instrument at system level twice, in two consecutive years, in 1988 and 1989. Each of the instruments was developed for a specific purpose and not for gathering data for this study. All three surveys at "Bellbird" High School were designed to determine the attitudes of students, parents and teachers to aspects of the curriculum. They provided both quantitative and qualitative data. Basically, I have compared the 1979 and 1989 numerical data, and used the 1984 material for confirmation of significant issues. In addition to using qualitative data from these three instruments, I have also used comments from curriculum committee and School Board documents and evaluation reports from the Living Skills Programme. At system level, a questionnaire was designed to gather data about the provision of career education and health education in high schools in the ACT. This instrument, included questions about barriers to these programmes and strategies for overcoming the barriers. The findings were distributed to the schools. The procedure was based on the 'Research, Development and Diffusion' model. People associated with the successful implementation of the programmes under investigation were interviewed to find out what barriers they had faced, how they overcame them and what suggestions they had for overcoming other baniers to these programmes. Using the data CO-jointly with the literature and my own knowledge of cumculum implementation, I have proposed an action plan for "Bellbird" High School to extend the provision of its student development programme to all students. In conclusion, the suitability of the proposed action plan for use in other ACT high schools is appraised and general principles for the system are drawn out.