In many schools hours of energy and effort are dedicated to making decisions and developing policy. At the school level issues of curriculum, faculty groupings and structure, strategy for staff allocations and resourcing of faculties, often results in debate before being decided upon. So often valuable time and resources are wasted in argument, disagreement and political activity. This study has been designed to determine what actually happens in the decision process, with the subject of the study a single committee. The aim of the study is to determine the style of policy development that took place and what influences affected the decisions made. The study is in two parts. The first section develops a Conceptual Framework and research questions to categorise, summarise and organise data collected from policy development processes. The Conceptual framework was designed to permit analysis of the major components of the stages of Problem Structuring, Generation of Alternatives and Recommending Policy Actions. The second section in includes further Research Questions to determine whether the process applied to developing policy was Rational, Nonrational (Incremental/Political) or a Mixed Model type. The research method used was naturalistic and qualitative in nature and in the context of a case study. The main findings were that a Mixed Model of policy development was used by the Committee with elements of both Rational and Nonrational process evident from the research data.