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Legal attendance requirements and national declarations establish a social contract between the State and its citizens for the provision of schooling. Any shortage of teachers compromises the ability of the State to meet its contractable obligations. The sovereignty of the social contract is complex as no single body has ultimate responsibility for housing the teaching workforce, but everyone has a stake in it. Empirically focused on the largest school system in the southern hemisphere, the New South Wales public education system (Australia), this paper demonstrates that 90.8% of teaching positions, over 50,000 full-time equivalent posts, are in Local Government Areas where the median rent and house sales price are severely unaffordable on a top-of-the-scale teacher salary. With the system requiring additional teachers to meet increasing enrolments, and housing costs outstripping salaries, many schools not traditionally considered difficult to staff are becoming, if not already, inaccessible for teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attracting and retaining a stable supply of effective teachers is critical to the provision of schooling that meets international commitments to equity, excellence, and inclusion. Initiatives targeting school staff are predicated on the accessibility of schools for the workforce. To this point, the empirical impact of housing and transportation costs on the school education workforce has been relatively poorly understood. Based on a novel approach describing workforce distribution, our analysis of the Greater Sydney statistical area in Australia found that not only is the city unaffordable for the school education workforce, but unobserved characteristics (e.g., intergenerational wealth, housing assets, high income housemates) fill the income to cost gap. De-centring the individual, we show that the sustainability of the Sydney school education workforce is fragile and should it collapse, the consequences would be sudden and acute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For an applied field, the role of research expertise is of considerable importance. With an increasing number of school leaders turning to social media for their professional learning–as part of a broader digital turn in knowledge generation, distribution, and consumption–the argument of this paper is that the notion of research expertise in educational leadership is shifting. Traditional modes of acquiring and sustaining research capital (e.g., publications, citations, research income) have been replaced by social presence, profile building, and the curation of followership. Building on work claiming there is a 'cult of the guru' in educational leadership, this paper draws on an appropriation of Hall's Kardashian index (K-index) for 50 researchers, an analysis of Twitter user networks using NodelXL, and relational theorizing to investigate the ways in which research expertise is being mobilized / recast by educational leadership researchers on Twitter. Establishing an empirical foundation for ongoing dialogue and debate it is argued that the recasting of research expertise to those curating followership, and potentially divorced from research performance, is of timely significance for the ongoing credibility of the field both internally and within the broader academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]