The purpose of this first-year of two years research project is to draw up a handbook of school development planning for Taiwan’s elementary and secondary schools and to find out the problems that may be encountered during implementation, and their solutions, through the methods of literature reviews, overseas fact-finding missions, and expert team focus group interview. We have found that Taiwan’s Department of Education have started to require school development plan (SDP) from all schools since 1988. However, the SDP has only been used as a basis for grants allocation, and not as a means to improve the efficiency and accountability of our schools on the whole. We recommend that an ideal SDP for Taiwan’s elementary and secondary schools should include the following five components: 1. school vision, 2. school profile, 3, school goals, 4. action plan, and 5. codes of conduct. We also recommend that a SDP should be part of the accountability framework.