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This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational leadership discourse has for sometime been the major intellectual pillar of what was once known as the field of educational administration. An examination of the postgraduate coursework programmes available to aspiring principal leaders at every Australian university supports such a contention. While this discourse does shed light on the ubiquitous concept of leadership, it does little to explain the context in which leadership theory is supposed to contribute to the operational environment of schools. This is where Bourdieuian scholarship is particularly helpful. By shedding light on the complex social space in which principal leaders function, Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, field and capital are particularly helpful thinking tools. For a variety of reasons the economic field has held philosophical dominance for much of the last 30 years. This has impacted significantly on the work space of principal leadership and needs to be understood if the familiar narratives of leadership theory are to be of contextual use. When investigating the social space of contemporary principal leadership, my recent study of two sets of Queensland-based principals will be used. The emergence of enterprise bargaining into the workspace of these principals will be used as a means by which to demonstrate the cross-field contagion of the economic field on to the field of schools. The paper contends that the field of educational administration must endeavour to view leadership theory critically and contextually if the complexities associated with contemporary principal leadership practice are to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on Bourdieu's field theory and related concepts of habitus and capitals, to explore policy implementation in relation to a particular case of teacher professional development in Queensland, Australia. This implementation process is described as an effect of the interplay between what is called the policy field and the field of teachers' work. The policy field demonstrates intra-field tensions between the federal Quality Teacher Programme (QTP) and a raft of state policies, particularly those associated with the Queensland meta-policy, Queensland State Education 2010 (QSE2010). To investigate the effects of this complex policy ensemble, the article draws upon the experiences of principals and a group of teachers engaged in professional development across a cluster of six schools in south-east Queensland, Australia. The specific focus is on the 'Curriculum Board', a cross-school body created by the principals in the participating schools, and its mediated work in policy implementation and teacher learning. The article analyses the effects of the involvement of the principals in the creation of the board, the limiting impact of QTP requirements to involve consultants rather than support for teacher release, and the limited influence of the board on teacher learning and policy implementation in the individual schools. By doing so, the analysis shows the disjunctions between the logics of practice of the policy field and that of teachers' work, and the ways in which the differing habitus of principals and teachers and teacher members of the board affected teacher learning and policy implementation. It is argued that effective implementation requires learning within and across fields, and more reflexive habitus of policy makers, principals and teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]