Along the way we will challenge our experiences with school improvement efforts and raise questions concerned with the "skilling and de-skilling" of teachers. School improvement and school effectiveness reforms have remained a commitment for both policy and practice for many decades. In terms of policy, the low- and middle-income countries have depended on the first world and international bodies such as the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF and UNDP for policy direction, ideas and project funding. While the idea of borrowing is inevitable, the importance of "context" should remind both borrowers and lenders of the room for contingencies. Research has found that most educational reforms that fail are those that ignored the school culture. Unfortunately borrowers become deluded by the power of foreign currencies, and develop a "take it or leave it" attitude. In Botswana, though we are not dependent on foreign loans like many other countries (where up to half the national budget is provided by northern countries), we were influenced by pressures for educational reform from outside. For example, Botswana has borrowed the content of reforms and innovations in the past, particularly from Washington and London. The Primary Education Improvement Project (PEIP) of 1980 was an American driven innovation. The project came out with innovations such as staff development, clinical supervision, peer assisted leadership, teaching by coaching, teaching competencies, breakthrough to Setswana, the project approach, special education and others. Was the PEIP sensitive to context? The Primary School Management Development Project (PSMDP) of 1997 was a United Kingdom driven activity. It included innovations such as instructional leadership, school development planning, staff development, team building, resource management, classroom management, mentoring, clinical supervision and many others. Was the project sensitive to context? We may assume that these two reform projects had very good intentions for school improvement. Both wanted to achieve their objectives by targeting school leadership. The effort of the Ministry of Education was to train school heads (then senior staff) so that they would have the right skills and competencies to lead schools effectively and efficiently. "Skill" and "competency" are the key issues in both projects. What can we learn from these endeavours? What was the relationship between the American driven project and the British driven project? Where teachers do not see a relationship and recognise continuity in the innovations, they could lose faith in future efforts. Debates and research on the subject of educational change argue that educational systems have a weakness for introducing projects that contain multiple layers of "hidden" innovations. In the process of the implementation of a project, the multiple innovations overload the teacher and the student so much that the innovations actually become a block to change instead of facilitating school improvement. Such innovations require the understanding and commitment of the "chalk-face artists" and if teachers are not in consensus on the way forward, if they have failed to understand and be committed to the new innovations, they will never succeed. There is a tendency for innovations in management to fail where the previously developed skills are not utilised. It appears that experienced personnel, such as long serving school heads or teachers actually resist change. What comes out is that when they feel they have acquired some skills and competencies through a new innovation, a new one that starts them from assuming a zero-skill base, it is perceived as de-skilling them from their prior competencies. Thus they have tended to resist change. Have our educational systems not been a victim of this scenario? Did we overload heads and teachers with projects with "hidden" multiple innovations? These questions are some of the critical ones we have to ask to evaluate approaches to innovation and reform in skill and competency development and to avoid de-skilling teachers from what they are already able to do.