Abstract: The impact of interagency coordination on education reform is mainly reflected in decision-making of goals, resource allocation and policy innovation. Different from the usual practice of collaboration and cooperation between government departments, interagency coordination in education reform aims to form new policies and rules accepted by participant departments which have the willingness to implement them. This research attempts to use relevant theories and analytical tools regarding government reform, and establish a two-dimensional analysis framework of factor-process applicable to the interagency coordination of education reform in China. The dimension of factors briefly analyzes three factors and their possible forms, i.e. coordination matter, coordination organization and coordination method. Process dimension, based on the task attributes of reform at different stages and their differentiation into politics or technology, discusses the interaction between different factors. By using this framework to conduct an empirical analysis on a comprehensive education reform in a province, it is found that the purposiveness of each participant department is an important indicator to test the effect of interagency coordination. At different stages of reform, the nature and complexity of coordination matters are the reference factors to judge the appropriateness for the timing of the coordination organization's involvement and the suitability for coordination methods.

Key words: education reform, interagency coordination, policy innovation, holistic government, purposiveness, suitability