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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper is a response to Richard Niesche’s recent JEAH paper claiming a ‘theory turn’ in educational leadership. Bringing Niesche’s argument into conversation with recent work on social epistemology in the field, I argue that any claim for a theory turn is premature and arguably requires further nuancing of enduring issues. Framed around the relational methodology, the argument articulates my own complicity with the proposed theory turn, before problematising the idea of a turn and highlighting the importance of time and space. Importantly, I seek to go beyond the analytical dualism of theoretical and atheoretical categories for the purpose of offering a productive contribution for advancing understanding in the field. This is not to refute Niesche’s argument, rather to highlight some of the problems and possibilities it identifies and to the push the ideas further in the interest of scholarly dialogue and debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Principals’ time use has emerged as a serious policy problem in an era of reported decline in school outcomes - both organisational and individual student - and with difficulties in attracting quality candidates for vacancies. The contemporary crisis of the principalship is centred on an ever increasing workload (volume and complexity) and a deficit of time for instructional leadership. Units of the clock are the orthodox version of time in modern Western society. This however is not a universal and is based on an external measure of practice. This paper presents a theoretical intervention for the field by proposing an alternate conceptualisation of temporality built on relational theorising that sees practice not as having time but generating time and space. It does not assume a single version of time and instead opens a fruitful scholarly direction for recasting principals’ time use literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social sciences are paying increasing attention to relations. In contributing to this ongoing dialogue and debate Educational Leadership Relationally (Eacott, 2015) articulates a relational research program for the study of educational administration and leadership. This paper provides an overview of the relational program with particular attention to the five central tenets of the methodology. Key aspects of the relational program concern the complicity of the researcher with the ordinary language of the everyday, problematizing the research object, locating activity in spatio-temporal conditions, overcoming binary thinking, and productive theorizing. This paper and the collection of papers in the special issue, continue to dialogue and debate on the merits of the relational program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary discourses in educational administration have exponentially grown the number of adjectival leaderships, challenged traditional organisational structures, and offered autonomy as a solution to performance issues. In this theoretical paper, I askwhat does the principalship look like after autonomy?Despite the range of objections that could be raised in relation to thinking with and through an organisational role, it is the contention of this paper that it is in the principalship that we find important resources for theorising educational administration, even if, at first sight, these resources appear to bear little connection to, or resonance with, contemporary discourses of ‘leadership’ in education. Working within a relational approach to educational administration that I am advancing, my argument is built around three key markers: the centrality of temporality, the (im)possibility of the local, and the imposition of ‘quality’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theoretically informed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this paper engages with the contemporary relationship between administration and policy in education. Significantly, rather than map or apply a Bourdieusian lens to educational administration and policy, I argue that the relevance of Bourdieu for advancing understanding may only be made explicit if we understand the contemporary policy conditions as concerning a reworking of relations between the state and administration. This paper therefore contains two interventions: i) the claim that the contemporary capitalist condition represents a decentring of the nation-state; and ii) this warrants a new image of the school -- to which I propose 'the firm'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]