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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.

Often considered dumping grounds for those who cannot function in mainstream schools, alternative education providers are seen as outliers in the provision of schooling. With schools as relatively stable workplaces, alternative education provision makes for a rich laboratory to further our understanding of the causal impact of schooling on a range of outcomes. They are naturally occurring experiments in schooling through interventions in instruction, curriculum and student cohort. Montessori school-based education in Australia is one such case. Experiencing a 31% growth in enrolments since 2009, they offer useful insights for different measures of education. A pre-requisite to such insights is a situational analysis of current provision. Drawing on an interview-based study with 20 Montessori school leaders, this investigation identified three problems and possibilities for schools working on the margins: (i) clarity about what is their distinctive form of education; (ii) building the collective; and (iii) evidencing quality of provision.

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.

Purpose: Steiner schools represent a natural experiment in the provision of schooling. With a history dating back more than 100 years, leadership, leaders and the principal do not sit easily with Steiner educators. The contemporary regulatory environment requires a "principal" or legal authority at the school-building level, creating a tension for Steiner schools. This makes Steiner schools an ideal case study for understanding the contemporary role of the principal. Design/methodology/approach: This paper is based on an interview-based study with 24 heads of Australian Steiner schools. Conducted on Microsoft Teams, all by the principal investigator, the interviews generated a 171,742-word corpus subjected to an inductive analytical approach. Data reduction led to four themes, and this paper focuses on one (principles not prescription) and its implications for the principalship and school governance. Findings: Embedding the principalship in a philosophy (or theory) of education re-couples school administration with schooling and bases decision-making in principles rather than individuals. It also alters the role of data and evidence from accountability to justifying principles. Research limitations/implications: Rather than a focus on individuals or roles, this paper argues that the underlying principles of organisational decision-making should be the central focus of research. Practical implications: Ensuring organisational coherence, by balancing the diversity of positions on core principles is the core task of the contemporary principal. Originality/value: Exploiting natural experiments in the provision of schooling makes it possible to argue for how schooling, and specifically the principalship, can be different.

Schools for specific purposes (SSP) are and have been a significant feature of the education ecosystem since the roll out of mass schooling in Australia and elsewhere. SSPs serve some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged communities. While their social and emotional worth to their communities (students, educators, families) is rarely questioned, the role of SSP in the pursuit of equity and inclusivity remains contested. This has significant implications for those charged with leading such schools, particularly principals. Drawing on the emerging field of relational studies, this paper undertakes a "relational" inquiry into the provision of education (RIPE) analysis of specific purpose schools for students with moderate and high support needs in the Australian state of New South Wales.

Purpose: Education is a key institution of modern society, long recognized for its central role in the reproduction of inequities and with the potential to challenge them. Schools behave as their systems are designed. Achieving equity and excellence is not possible through attempts to fix "the school" or educators. Principles of systemic design that incorporate equity and excellence are needed to increase the likelihood of desirable outcomes. Design/methodology/approach: Using the social contract as a design principle, this paper systematically builds an empirical model of school provision aimed at equitable excellence. Findings: Equitable excellence in school provision is possible if choice is available across geolocation and socio-educational (dis)advantage, schools have autonomy over fiscal, personnel and curricular matters, public accountability is linked to academic outcomes and social impact, all moderated by the quality of teaching. Research limitations/implications: Data-driven empirical modelling is particularly attractive to policy makers, systemic authorities and researchers when theory (of all varieties) does not yield the necessary insights to support the functionality and effectiveness of systems to deliver equitable outcomes at scale. Empirical examples can be used to test the explanatory power of the novel model -- and refine it when necessary. Practical implications: The empirical model and threshold question are the genesis of a common language for assessing relevant costs and benefits of initiatives for government and system designers. Significantly, establishing a threshold question and tests of legitimacy and strength to accompany the novel model provides a more principled way of prioritizing the competing demands on public investment in education. Originality/value: Establishing a threshold question and tests for legitimacy and strength to accompany the novel model provides a more principled way of prioritizing the competing demands to accompany.

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have to this land and its First Peoples. We put out a call to colleagues whose work has been concerned with the pedagogies of professional ethics, the ethical burdens of institutional injustice, and the application of ethical theory to education's applied fields. In the responses we received it can be seen that ethical concerns in education are broad ranging, covering terrain varying from the preparation of preservice teachers, ethics in higher education, early childhood and care, educational leadership, relational and communicative ethics. Perhaps it could also be argued that this paper demonstrates Gibbon's observation that 'Assumptions about the particularity of this time as new and ripe with opportunity to make a difference through philosophy of education are not new and there's much to learn from the persistence of wanting to imagine that they are' (in Peters et al., 2020, p. 17). However, while the field of ethics is perennially concerned with human relations and pedagogical interventions to improve these, the responses collected here show that educational ethics is far from static. Educational ethics is a field that continues to develop in response to changing contexts.

Temporality and in particular principals' time use is attracting increasing scholarly attention in educational administration and leadership research. There is a long history of studies looking at how principals spend or allocate their time. This paper draws on initial data from the Principals' Experiencing Time (PET) project which focuses on how principals experience their day rather than conceiving of time as an external resource that is spent (wisely) or wasted. Theoretically informed by Eacott's relational approach and working with data generated through document analysis, interviews, and web-based diary entries, it is argued that the principalship has a temporal foundation. This foundation is constitutive of and emergent from how principals experience their day. Understanding these experiences provides a sound empirical basis for preparation and development programs aimed at current and aspiring school leaders.

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.

Purpose: The pracademia movement is gaining increasing traction in education, particularly in educational leadership. Offered as a means to bridge practice and academia, questions remain as to whether it resolves or perpetuates the theory-practice divide. This paper systematically approaches this problem. Design/methodology/approach: Theoretically informed by the "relational" approach, this conceptual paper articulates the preliminaries and underlying assumptions of pracademia before exploring the implications for the field of educational leadership. Findings: Having established the underlying assumptions, this paper offers three standards -- description, explanation and alternative -- for assessing knowledge claims in the field that does not default to distinct knowledge worlds (e.g. academic, practice) or categories of knowledge generators (e.g. academics, practitioners, pracademics). Originality/value: Through a relational approach, this work breaks down the boundaries of theory and practice to offer a new way of thinking about knowledge claims. The new approach is consistent with the intent of bridging theory and practice without the need to assume them to be separate in the first place.

This paper engages with an innovative approach to school consolidation in regional New South Wales, Australia. Adopting a 'one school, two sites' model, it is argued that this innovative approach to school consolidation requires new theoretical resources to understand 'the school'. Theoretically informed by Eacott's relational approach and drawing on publicly available data (e.g. MySchool) and focus groups with school leaders, this paper argues that: (i) complicity with the idea and materiality of 'the school' makes it difficult to thinking differently about schooling; (ii) the image of the school is at once constitutive of, and emergent from, community identity; and (iii) to articulate an alternative requires a shift away from an entity-based (substantialist) perspective. Working with the three key concepts of the relational approach -- organizing activity, auctor, and spatio-temporal conditions -- this paper proposes an alternate way of thinking about school consolidation and the intellectual resources to do so.

Purpose: Universities claim to provide many benefits to their context. What remains less clear is what is meant by context. Whatever it is, context is fundamental to decision-making. Understanding what context means is crucial to understanding leadership in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: Theoretically informed by Eacott's relational approach, this study is based on interview data from a purposive sample of ten English vice-chancellors and nine Canadian university presidents. Transcripts were analysed for the assumptions participants held regarding the work of universities and how that played out in practice. Findings: Context is not an external variable engaged with or acted upon. It is not separate to leadership and the work of universities but is constitutive of and emergent from activities. There is no single definition of context, and this has major implications for university activities. Research limitations/implications: Context(s) is based on assumptions. Making explicit the assumptions of participants, without pre-defining them, is a key task of research on leadership in higher education. Practical implications: Leaders need to explicitly articulate their assumptions regarding the work of universities. Assessment should be based on the coherence between the espoused position and activities undertaken. Originality/value: Through the emerging resources of relational scholarship, this paper demonstrates how context is constitutive of and emergent from the activities of universities. More than novel vocabulary, the paper makes a fundamental point about the generative nature of context. De-centring entities (e.g. university, leader, context) and focusing on relations our approach provide a path forward by encouraging the articulation of intended purpose(s) and perspective on the work of universities.

Purpose: School consolidation reforms are underway in regional New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The purpose of this paper is to establish an evidence base of research literature on school consolidation in regional, rural and remote locations. Design/methodology/approach: A scoping study of empirical literature on school consolidation, with a particular focus on regional, rural and remote education, since the year 2000 was undertaken. A corpus of 35 papers were identified and subjected to analysis based on: year of publication, country of origin, unit of analysis, data sources, timeframe and theoretical model. Findings: There remains a limited evidence base for the success of school consolidation reforms for turning around student outcomes. In addition, a number of social implications are experienced by communities losing their local school. These issues are amplified in regional, rural and remote locations. Practical implications: School consolidation reforms are used by governments/systems wanting to reduce costs and address issues of student disengagement and under-achievement. Despite a lengthy history internationally, there is at best mixed evidence regarding these reforms. With a consider disparity gap between urban and regional, rural and remote school outcomes, robust evidence on the success of reforms has major policy implications for government, systems, educators and communities. Originality/value: With reforms already underway in NSW (and elsewhere), the need for a rigorous and robust evidence base, such as this scoping study, is timely and significant.

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.

As cross-country comparisons of education systems have become increasingly important for policy-making, different structural arrangements have attracted attention in the pursuit of equity and excellence. One area of interest has been instructional time in formal schooling. Missing in such comparisons is the role instruction outside of formal/compulsory schooling. Supplementary education in its many forms has a long history, global reach, and is increasingly attracting scholarly attention. Asia is a notable location and particularly China, where there has been rapid expansion, intensification, and visibility. In this paper, we mobilise Eacott's "relational" approach to argue that supplementary education, at least in the highly competitive urban centres, is no longer supplementary and that orthodox approaches to understanding it based on a perceived separation from compulsory education cannot adequately describe the contemporary condition. Our argument is that orthodox approaches conceive of the problem of supplementary education as one of access. We seek to unsettle orthodoxy by re-casting supplementary education as not supplementary at all and instead.

This paper describes and justifies the protocol for a research project investigating regional secondary school consolidation reforms in New South Wales, Australia. The study is designed to describe the experiences of those directly involved in the transition to a consolidated school in a way that has so far eluded educational leadership researchers. Identifying five themes from the international literature on school consolidation (leadership and governance; staff and student wellbeing; teaching and learning; curriculum and pathways; community satisfaction), the paper then articulates a systematic research protocol for examining the transition from individual schools through to a consolidated school. Previous studies have not systematically examined this transition and how it shifts practices and perceptions from different stakeholder perspectives. Using a purposeful merger of quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence, this study protocol has the potential to play a defining role in the area of school consolidation reforms. The applicability of the study design holds promise as an adaptable, focused, and sustainable protocol for generating understanding of school consolidation transitions and developing an empirical evidence base that is localised, internationally benchmarked, and critical for school decisions about investments and outcomes for educators, students, and communities.

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]

Globally, education systems are faced with dual workforce crises: a shortage of teachers and a lack of affordable housing. Attracting and retaining teachers through improved renumeration, working conditions, and quality preparation have been central. However, initiatives to attract and retain teachers mean little if the workforce cannot find appropriate (quality and affordable) housing within commuting distance to their workplaces. The present study undertakes a scoping review of research on the intersection of housing and the school education workforce. Specifically, we examine the volume, variety, and characteristics of evidence through the question of 'What empirical studies have been published on the relationship between housing and the school education workforce?' Online databases were used to identify 23 studies published in 2000–2024 from Australia, China, England, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Tanzania, Uganda, the UK, and the USA. Publications drew on a range of methods and housing was rarely the focal unit of analysis. This study finds that beyond establishing unaffordability through salary and housing costs ratios, and the peripheral inclusion of housing issues in studies, there is insufficient published peer reviewed evidence available to purposefully inform and measure interventions. Greater interdisciplinarity is required in research to highlight the complexity of issues at the intersection of housing (availability, affordability, and distance from workplaces) and workforce distribution. More rigorous data should be collected to support robust reporting on the state of housing for the school education workforce to deliver the type of evidence necessary to develop targeted and tailored interventions to improve outcomes for the workforce and ultimately students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]