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AbstractThe logics of policy privatisation in schooling, including decentralisation, school autonomy, and discretionary funding mechanisms, shift responsibility for particular types of students onto individual schools and their staff. Burch (2021) asks to what extent the most disadvantaged students in government schools are able to access services most beneficial to them, under these emerging forms of privatisation. With this question in mind, this paper considers the delivery of English as an Additional Language/Dialect (EAL/D) services under the umbrella of the Queensland Department of Education Inclusion policy, in two Queensland government secondary schools. We tease out how the Inclusive Education (IE) policy, of which EAL/D is a subset, is interpreted and translated (Ball et al. 2012) in the situation of privatisation practices. We found that inclusion was understood as primarily targeted at students with disabilities, and that mainstreaming of all learners was considered unsustainable for teachers. In interpreting and translating inclusion for EAL/D, both schools pushed back against the ‘mainstreaming’ discourse, and instead, EAL/D service was provided through targeted programs, staffed with key specialist personnel. In both cases, privatisation logics enabled the ‘EAL/D aware’ principals to justify and enact specialised EAL/D services. In this policy context, there is a need for widespread professional development to ensure all principals understand and apply appropriate supports for EAL/D learners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the policy logics of privatisation through service provision for students with English as an Additional language or dialect (EAL/D) in the state education system of Queensland, Australia. In the context of EAL/D, specifically targeted policy has been subsumed by a broader umbrella or meta-policy of inclusion, whilst at the same time, funding support for EAL/D learners is substantial. The devolution of EAL/D support to individual schools through autonomous targeted funding results in policy 'everywhere', distributed across broad portfolios dedicated to ensuring schools provide quality education services for all learners, but also 'nowhere', lacking systemic support and detail on how inclusion should be enacted for EAL/D and with no accountability placed on schools to demonstrate that they are addressing EAL/D learner needs. The co-location of EAL/D policy with a broad systemic policy of inclusion, the absence of systemic professional support, combined with devolution to school sites has had real effects on the policy in practice. The analysis demonstrates there is the potential opening of EAL/D provision to market forces at school sites, where the private sector can potentially sell commercial 'solutions' directly to schools, which have greater autonomy over one-line budgets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a synthesis of research literature concerned with teachers’ and school leaders’ experiences of workload and work intensification. Forty papers met the inclusion criteria for the research synthesis. From the analysis, we drew out both definitional and experiential accounts. Firstly, while we mostly found a conflation of the concepts of workload and work intensification, there is a distinction between the two that was apparent in some studies. A clear explanation of how they are related is not evident across the suite of studies, although there have been recent attempts to quantitatively interrogate this issue. Secondly, the research indicates that the effects of workload and work intensification negatively impact teachers, in relation to health, wellbeing, and attrition. Further, teachers’ capacity to deliver educational priorities which support the learning of all students is undermined by the experience of a heavy workload and heightened work intensification. The paper advances the notion of “time poverty” to explain how workload and work intensification function together in teachers’ work. Without a clear understanding of the particular affordances and limitations of conceptualisations of workload and work intensification, interventions are unlikely to resolve the contemporary and damaging problem of time poverty for teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we reveal the nature and effects of data infrastructures on the authorisation of data that represent students and educational practitioners, including how such data can misrepresent and govern educational policy and practices in sometimes problematic ways. To better understand the governance capacities of data infrastructures, we draw upon notions of discursive practices and materiality, and apply these to a specific school management system, OneSchool, in Queensland, Australia. We show how data infrastructures both promote and impede educational practitioners' use of data in decision making and daily practices. This includes precluding information about students' (positive) behaviours and omitting important enrolment information about students' Indigenous languages. By doing so, we show how data infrastructures govern in ways that authorise the preclusion and omission of data, thereby representing students and schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how trust in teacher professional judgment has been reconstituted through the globalised trends of performative accountability and reductive data-driven logics. The article draws upon empirical research from interviews with teachers and school leaders as well as observations of teacher preparation days, classroom and staff professional learning communities (PLCs), as part of a larger study of schooling practices in two geographically and contextually bound Queensland public schools. The paper focuses attention upon the socio-political, material-economic and cultural-discursive conditions inscribed in how data are currently understood and deployed, and how these conditions constrain trust in teachers, devaluing teachers' own professional judgment. Specifically, we flag how the practices and conditions that constrained trust were manifest in a) pressures to ensure teachers generated and collected data on an ongoing basis to substantiate their claims about student learning, and b) a perceived mistrust amongst parents and a subsequent need to justify decision-making on the basis of 'hard evidence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]