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This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing instatement of external forms of regulation. Utilising Nancy Fraser's concepts of dis-embedding and re-embedding markets, we track key policy moments in three Australian states (Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales) along with federal interventions. We draw attention to the redistributive and representative justice implications arising from these policy moments as occurring within a consistent trajectory towards a market agenda and argue that future policy needs to consider the effect of past policy.

This paper examines principals' perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal stakeholder organisations in these four state jurisdictions, the paper identifies a number of key issues for school principals and the implications for understandings and practices of educational leadership. These include varied understandings of autonomy, practices of leadership and implications for health, workload and well-being. The paper argues that while principals have mixed perceptions of school autonomy policies, there has been a narrowing of leadership experiences by principals in the form of managerialism and compliance. Furthermore, principals continue to experience high levels of workload, and some principals, depending on career stage and experience level, feel better able to work within and sometimes against these policies in their schools and communities. These practices are sometimes felt to be despite the system and not due to school autonomy policies themselves. The implication of these findings is that principals are inequitably able to respond to and implement school autonomy policies, an issue often glossed over in educational leadership research.

A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the type of leadership necessary to improve outcomes? Drawing from a subset from an Australian study of school autonomy, we argue that reforms simply cannot improve outcomes as they generate work that takes leaders and educators away from teaching and learning activities and sustain if not advance enduring inequities in the system.

Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakeholders in public education across four Australian states of how the latest school autonomy reform policies, including Independent Public Schools, supports corporatized and seemingly depoliticised repositioning of school councils. This data indicates there is a shift from elected parental representation to principal selection of 'skill-based' community members, with the greatest implications for those schools in disadvantaged communities experiencing difficulties gaining voluntary parental participation. We offer new theoretical insights into the links between school autonomy, governance, the role and composition of school boards and social justice informed by Nancy Fraser's theorising of social justice. We identify an emerging tension between first, parent movements as counter publics claiming participatory parity in decision-making in school councils; and secondly, principal selection of self-interested and politically influential actors onto school councils, potentially politicising school councils.

Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honing the ability to notice and attune to the common worlds we inhabit. Drawing on research which deployed a "walking with" methodology with young children in a national park, this article considers the potential of listening in multiple registers as a move toward common worlds justice in post-anthropocentric education. Possibilities for thinking with the registers of sound and smell are put forward for researchers and educators working with young children. The article concludes with a speculative vignette that offers pedagogical openings which make room for common worlds justice.

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are the focus of this paper. We draw on preliminary findings from a three-year study that is exploring the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across four Australian states. Drawing on interviews with 42 stakeholders, the paper identifies four key areas of paradox for social justice currently confronting public schools and school systems. The language of paradox is drawn on to narrate the oppositional politics between the discourses and practices constituting school autonomy and the pursuit of social justice. Such narration raises important questions for Australian public education. It highlights how these discourses are changing what is meant by the public in public education. Engaging with the language of paradox in thinking about school autonomy reform, we argue, is important given the broader landscape where public schooling is being reconstituted and where traditional links to social justice and the common good are under threat.

The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical governance models, the promotion of entrepreneurial leadership cultures, and the promotion of a discourse of pursuing educational equity by means of 'achievement for all'. This paper explores the emergence of a mode of teacher professionalism characteristic of these quasi-autonomous schools, and conceptualises this as being 'neo-performative'. The neo-performative profession is shaped by the shift in the focus of the regulation and management of schools from 'governing to governance', and the consequential rise of the 'responsibilised profession', and marked by the emergence of an entrepreneurial model of school leadership. The paper argues that this new conceptualisation of teacher professionalism requires further, more focused, empirical study in order to explore how neoperformative teachers and school leaders articulate their vision of educational equity and social justice, and how they enact this vision in an increasingly intensified high-stakes accountability culture.

The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as 'curious practice', we story encounters between the authors, young children and the endangered Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton thrombolites and their ecological community in south-western Australia. These visits were not intended to teach "about" extinction or the thrombolites. Rather, our aim was to generate pedagogical insights through approaching the threatened thrombolites and their environment with curiosity, openness and attentiveness, and framed by perspectives that trouble human exceptionalism and Western dualisms. Guided by Haraway's notion of 'staying with the trouble', we argue this approach to encountering extinction generates insights into learning and living with ecological crisis in our shared world. Specifically, that for educators and children to relearn the world and their place in it, educators must enable new senses, meanings, perspectives and stories to populate the Earth and for this to occur they should listen with openness to, and think with, children.

Teacher professional autonomy is important to teachers' work satisfaction, efficiency, well-being, and empowerment. However, it cannot simply be defined as freedom from control because it is relational and contextual. In this paper, we examine the relationality and contextual sensitivity of teacher professional autonomy at 'Newstall' College, a senior secondary government school in Australia. The paper draws on a larger study that examined the social justice implications of school autonomy reform in four Australian state education systems. Newstall College was one of the five case study schools included in this study. Findings generated through in-depth interviews with eighteen staff members (including teachers, professional staff, the deputy principal and the principal) are presented that examine teacher professional autonomy. Conceptualising teacher autonomy as relational and contextual, the paper provides insight into the ways in which teacher autonomy was enabled at this school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about the plight of principals and particular schools when policies of school autonomy converge with market imperatives of economic efficiency, competition and public accountability. Such concerns reflect the significance of education systems providing greater and more nuanced support for principals and schools to manage the extra responsibilities of greater school autonomy and accountability. While these aspects of support are central, we argue that systemic reform that is driven by educative, rather than market, imperatives is necessary for creating a context where school autonomy can be mobilised for social justice.

The public education systems of many countries have undergone governance reforms involving administrative decentralisation, corporatisation and community 'empowerment'. In this paper, we examine the significance of local participation and partnerships in the context of public school autonomy and their corporatisation. Focusing specifically on the use of school boards in the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative in Western Australia, we analyse the interview responses of five IPS principals using Foucauldian notions of governmentality, governance and community. The analysis shows that school boards are conceptualised and mobilised through the narrow technical-rationalist discourses of governance associated with corporatised school autonomy. School boards function as a new form of governmentality that constrains recruitment and participation in school decision-making in ways that depoliticise education. In response to the rise of school autonomy and corporatisation in Australia and elsewhere, we argue for wider local participation on school boards and local engagement with, rather than eschewal of, the politics surrounding education and the public good.

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a 'decentred approach' to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. "Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance." "European Journal of Social Theory" 13 (4): 423-441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices.

This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial injustice in policies of school choice; the spatial and economic maldistribution between state jurisdictions; and the economic maldistribution within state public systems, including the ability of their school communities to contribute funds. Spatial injustice is uncovered in economic maldistribution within and across these policy layers, adding nuance to existing school funding debates. The Australian case is relevant to international explorations of school funding as an example of 'unjust practice' in the hierarchies between schools across sectors, between jurisdictions, and within systems of public [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Teacher wellbeing is a growing international concern. Despite teachers' experiences being deleteriously impacted by education policies and organisational conditions, dominant discourses of wellbeing focus on strategies that enhance individual self-management of wellbeing. This paper critically examines teacher wellbeing and the counter-discourses of wellbeing mobilised by teachers on an online platform, Reddit. Contributors criticise the wellbeing approaches taken in their schools and education systems. They react to the erasure of how work conditions impact their wellbeing. These forums speak back to the assumption that teachers are deficient and that teachers must be positive in self-managing their wellbeing. We coin the term 'cruel wellbeing' to critique wellbeing programs that neglect teachers' challenging work conditions. We question the practices of training teachers to assume responsibility for their wellbeing using strategies of positivity. We suggest that social media is an important political tool for creating and circulating counter-discourses of teachers' work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines conceptions of governance and freedom embedded within a new school autonomy policy in Queensland (Australia). Drawing on interview data from case study research, it foregrounds the practices of two school leaders from a secondary school in regional Queensland. It considers how such conceptions foster an entrepreneurial leadership of competition and compliance but also how they create space for something other than these dominant performative priorities. The paper's theoretical contribution responds to calls for more nuanced accounts of entrepreneurial leadership to better understand how current performative demands are impacting on school leaders amid increasingly autonomised education systems.

Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other school systems. Entrepreneurial policies focused on competition, compliance and improved performance make schools, their leaders and teachers, more responsible to external accountabilities. At the same time, autonomy is creatively exercised by leaders due to public service orientations associated with traditional teacher professionalism. This analysis of two Australian case studies of IPS, a secondary school in Queensland and a primary school in Western Australia, illustrates how school leaders navigate conflicting demands of the audit and performance culture by exercising autonomy according to differing notions of professional responsibility, disrupting and moderating the more inequitable priorities and effects prevalent in many performative systems.

In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week of universal access to quality early education to all children in Australia in the year before they enter school. Taking on board the international evidence about the importance of early education, the Commonwealth government made a considerable investment to make universal access possible by 2013. We explore the ongoing processes that seek to make universal access a reality in New South Wales by attending to the complex agential relationships between multiple actors. While we describe the state government and policy makers' actions in devising funding models to drive changes, we prioritise our gaze on the engagement of a preschool and its director with the state government's initiatives that saw them develop various funding and provision models in response. To offer accounts of their participation in policy making and doing at the preschool, we use the director's autobiographical notes. We argue that the state's commitment to ECEC remained a form of political manoeuvring where responsibility for policy making was pushed onto early childhood actors. This manoeuvring helped to silence and further fragment the sector, but these new processes also created spaces where the sector can further struggle for recognition through the very accountability measures that the government has introduced.

This paper examines principals' perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal stakeholder organisations in these four state jurisdictions, the paper identifies a number of key issues for school principals and the implications for understandings and practices of educational leadership. These include varied understandings of autonomy, practices of leadership and implications for health, workload and well-being. The paper argues that while principals have mixed perceptions of school autonomy policies, there has been a narrowing of leadership experiences by principals in the form of managerialism and compliance. Furthermore, principals continue to experience high levels of workload, and some principals, depending on career stage and experience level, feel better able to work within and sometimes against these policies in their schools and communities. These practices are sometimes felt to be despite the system and not due to school autonomy policies themselves. The implication of these findings is that principals are inequitably able to respond to and implement school autonomy policies, an issue often glossed over in educational leadership research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of "the system" being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule.

This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this paper examines the Australian Government's "My School" website, which publishes academic and organizational information about schools, including national test results. While it is often assumed that such performance technologies contribute to neoliberal reform of education through school choice, the paper argues the website is technically limited in its capacity to facilitate the economic calculations and calculated action of parents resulting in school choice. The paper instead opens "My School" to analysis as a technique of governmental self-formation. Using the theoretical resources of actor-network theory and Foucauldian scholarship, this paper complicates assumptions in the literature about the extent to which "My School" actually operates as a "market mechanism". It argues "My School" attempts to cultivate a calculated form of parental educational agency, irreducible to economic market agency.

Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and management operating in marketized systems of education. This paper considers the perceptions of 12 stakeholders in public education across four Australian states of how the latest school autonomy reform policies, including Independent Public Schools, supports corporatized and seemingly depoliticised repositioning of school councils. This data indicates there is a shift from elected parental representation to principal selection of 'skill-based' community members, with the greatest implications for those schools in disadvantaged communities experiencing difficulties gaining voluntary parental participation. We offer new theoretical insights into the links between school autonomy, governance, the role and composition of school boards and social justice informed by Nancy Fraser's theorising of social justice. We identify an emerging tension between first, parent movements as counterpublics claiming participatory parity in decision-making in school councils; and secondly, principal selection of self-interested and politically influential actors onto school councils, potentially politicising school councils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the type of leadership necessary to improve outcomes? Drawing from a subset from an Australian study of school autonomy, we argue that reforms simply cannot improve outcomes as they generate work that takes leaders and educators away from teaching and learning activities and sustain if not advance enduring inequities in the system.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Independent Public Schools (IPS) program began to be implemented in some Western Australian schools in 2010. The IPS program devolves a number of responsibilities to principals and is part of the political objective of removing the constraints of the education bureaucracy by fostering school level decision-making, problem-solving and innovation. This paper argues that IPS can be understood as an instance of "advanced liberal government". It then explores the enactment of IPS in a Western Australian high school. This paper suggests that while IPS was designed to empower principals from the constraints of the Department of Education, and principals are taking up the flexibilities offered by the program, some principals may be experiencing a lack of support and resources that imposes constraints in their capacity to innovate and problem-solve.

The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world's education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities.

Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honing the ability to notice and attune to the common worlds we inhabit. Drawing on research which deployed a "walking with" methodology with young children in a national park, this article considers the potential of listening in multiple registers as a move toward common worlds justice in post-anthropocentric education. Possibilities for thinking with the registers of sound and smell are put forward for researchers and educators working with young children. The article concludes with a speculative vignette that offers pedagogical openings which make room for common worlds justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school 'autonomy' has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are the focus of this paper. We draw on preliminary findings from a three-year study that is exploring the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across four Australian states. Drawing on interviews with 42 stakeholders, the paper identifies four key areas of paradox for social justice currently confronting public schools and school systems. The language of paradox is drawn on to narrate the oppositional politics between the discourses and practices constituting school autonomy and the pursuit of social justice. Such narration raises important questions for Australian public education. It highlights how these discourses are changing what is meant by the public in public education. Engaging with the language of paradox in thinking about school autonomy reform, we argue, is important given the broader landscape where public schooling is being reconstituted and where traditional links to social justice and the common good are under threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as 'curious practice', we story encounters between the authors, young children and the endangered Noorook Yalgorup-Lake Clifton thrombolites and their ecological community in south-western Australia. These visits were not intended to teach about extinction or the thrombolites. Rather, our aim was to generate pedagogical insights through approaching the threatened thrombolites and their environment with curiosity, openness and attentiveness, and framed by perspectives that trouble human exceptionalism and Western dualisms. Guided by Haraway's notion of 'staying with the trouble', we argue this approach to encountering extinction generates insights into learning and living with ecological crisis in our shared world. Specifically, that for educators and children to relearn the world and their place in it, educators must enable new senses, meanings, perspectives and stories to populate the Earth and for this to occur they should listen with openness to, and think with, children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter Schools in the USA and Independent Public Schools in Australia), characterised by heterarchical governance models, the promotion of entrepreneurial leadership cultures, and the promotion of a discourse of pursuing educational equity by means of 'achievement for all'. This paper explores the emergence of a mode of teacher professionalism characteristic of these quasi-autonomous schools, and conceptualises this as being 'neo-performative'. The neo-performative profession is shaped by the shift in the focus of the regulation and management of schools from 'governing to governance', and the consequential rise of the 'responsibilised profession', and marked by the emergence of an entrepreneurial model of school leadership. The paper argues that this new conceptualisation of teacher professionalism requires further, more focused, empirical study in order to explore how neoperformative teachers and school leaders articulate their vision of educational equity and social justice, and how they enact this vision in an increasingly intensified high-stakes accountability culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform within Australian public education despite evidence linking this reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered from a broader study that is investigating the social justice implications of school autonomy reform across three Australian states. We focus on the concerns these stakeholders raise about the plight of principals and particular schools when policies of school autonomy converge with market imperatives of economic efficiency, competition and public accountability. Such concerns reflect the significance of education systems providing greater and more nuanced support for principals and schools to manage the extra responsibilities of greater school autonomy and accountability. While these aspects of support are central, we argue that systemic reform that is driven by educative, rather than market, imperatives is necessary for creating a context where school autonomy can be mobilised for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the prevalence of corporate and performative models of school governance within and across different education systems, there are various cases of uneven, hybrid expressions of New Public Management (NPM) that reveal the contingency of global patterns of rule. Adopting a 'decentred approach' to governance (Bevir, M. 2010. "Rethinking Governmentality: Towards Genealogies of Governance." European Journal of Social Theory 13 (4): 423–441), this paper compares the development of NPM in four OECD countries: Australia, England, Spain, and Switzerland. A focus of the paper is how certain policy instruments are created and sustained within highly differentiated geo-political settings and through different multi-scalar actors and authorities yet modified to reflect established traditions and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines conceptions of governance and freedom embedded within a new school autonomy policy in Queensland (Australia). Drawing on interview data from case study research, it foregrounds the practices of two school leaders from a secondary school in regional Queensland. It considers how such conceptions foster an entrepreneurial leadership of competition and compliance but also how they create space for something other than these dominant performative priorities. The paper’s theoretical contribution responds to calls for more nuanced accounts of entrepreneurial leadership to better understand how current performative demands are impacting on school leaders amid increasingly autonomised education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other school systems. Entrepreneurial policies focused on competition, compliance and improved performance make schools, their leaders and teachers, more responsible to external accountabilities. At the same time, autonomy is creatively exercised by leaders due to public service orientations associated with traditional teacher professionalism. This analysis of two Australian case studies of IPS, a secondary school in Queensland and a primary school in Western Australia, illustrates how school leaders navigate conflicting demands of the audit and performance culture by exercising autonomy according to differing notions of professional responsibility, disrupting and moderating the more inequitable priorities and effects prevalent in many performative systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week of universal access to quality early education to all children in Australia in the year before they enter school. Taking on board the international evidence about the importance of early education, the Commonwealth government made a considerable investment to make universal access possible by 2013. We explore the ongoing processes that seek to make universal access a reality in New South Wales by attending to the complex agential relationships between multiple actors. While we describe the state government and policy makers' actions in devising funding models to drive changes, we prioritise our gaze on the engagement of a preschool and its director with the state government's initiatives that saw them develop various funding and provision models in response. To offer accounts of their participation in policy making and doing at the preschool, we use the director's autobiographical notes. We argue that the state's commitment to ECEC remained a form of political manoeuvring where responsibility for policy making was pushed onto early childhood actors. This manoeuvring helped to silence and further fragment the sector, but these new processes also created spaces where the sector can further struggle for recognition through the very accountability measures that the government has introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this paper examines the Australian Government’sMy Schoolwebsite, which publishes academic and organizational information about schools, including national test results. While it is often assumed that such performance technologies contribute to neoliberal reform of education through school choice, the paper argues the website is technically limited in its capacity to facilitate the economic calculations and calculated action of parents resulting in school choice. The paper instead opensMy Schoolto analysis as a technique of governmental self-formation. Using the theoretical resources of actor-network theory and Foucauldian scholarship, this paper complicates assumptions in the literature about the extent to whichMy Schoolactually operates as a ‘market mechanism’. It arguesMy Schoolattempts to cultivate a calculated form of parental educational agency, irreducible to economic market agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater school autonomy from the state education bureaucracy by providing selected principals and school communities with a range of responsibilities. This paper seeks to better understand the kind of post-welfare form of government IPS enacts. Using concepts from the governmentality literature, this paper analyses documents related to the program, and interview data collected from key government officials responsible for the initiative. It finds that while IPS renders operable a neoliberal critique of the public sector by implementing the processes of contractualization, it also diverges from the ideal schema of neoliberalism. Analysis reveals that a number of strategic, pragmatic and political concerns have resulted in what some may view as a contradictory rationality of “the system” being instituted as a key element in this autonomizing reform. The paper calls for attention to the actual operationalizing of neoliberal reform projects to gain a nuanced understanding of modern regimes of rule. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The current COVID19 pandemic has forced major adjustments, often at short notice, on schools and schooling. Educators have been working in a constantly changing environment to continue to deliver for students, families and communities all the while maintaining the necessary supports for themselves and colleagues. In Australia this has led to debates concerning when and who can close schools, the authority of schools to enact context-sensitive activities, and amplified existing inequities. Informed by a larger Australian Research Council grant focused on school autonomy and social justice, we argue that the pandemic and responses to it have highlighted the idiosyncratic nature of Australian federalism, drawn greater attention to the role of school autonomy, and amplified inequities in the access to quality education irrespective of location [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]