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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the role of an under-graduate educational leadership in introducing students to the complexity of school leadership practice. Design/methodology/approach – Theoretically informed by Bourdieuian social theory and drawing on a questionnaire with a cohort of students, the paper evaluates a course in relation to achieving its outcomes. Findings – An analysis of student responses indicates that the course did introduce students to school leadership practice and assist in the construction of a school leadership disposition. Research limitations/implications – The theoretical resources used in the paper have significant implications for how researchers conceive of school leadership practice. Therefore, this paper may be the basis of further work. Practical implications – The findings of this work have implications for teacher educators and specifically universities. From this paper, the inclusion of an educational leadership course in under-graduate programs should become more the norm rather than the exception. Originality/value – This paper has value in two unique ways. First, there has been very little work undertaken on the role of educational leadership courses in under-graduate programs and in the context of increased political attention and no formal pre-requisites for the principalship in Australia, this work is both timely and significant. Second, this paper works with a sophisticated notion of school leadership practice and its location using social theory, a perspective that is uncommon in much of the literature on educational leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examined whether the demographic variables of tenure and functional track have a moderating impact on the strategic leadership of school leaders. To collect data, researchers used a static/cross-sectional questionnaire-based study on a sample of public primary school principals in New South Wales. According to the study, the potential implications of tenure and functional track on school leadership is very important in light of the crisis facing education systems across the globe. It adds that the concept of functional track has the capability to reveal the much needed insight into school leadership.

The quality of scholarship in educational leadership has frequently been questioned both within and beyond the field. Much of the work in the field is limited to the analysis of either individual or structural influences on practice. The resulting lists of traits, behaviours and organizational structures provide little in furthering our understanding of leadership. Theoretically informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu and building on a previous special issue edited by Lingard and Christie, in this paper I contend that insufficient attention has been devoted to the temporal features of leadership actions. Analogies provided by practising principals are used to highlight the directly unobservable features of school leadership. The central argument of this paper is that heightened attention to temporal elements of leadership as a social action has the prospect of elucidating that which is not directly observable and consequently move scholarship beyond the superficial measurement of what is directly observable to a thick description of educational leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Strategy is an ambiguous term in the field of educational leadership. This article reports on a study in which I sought to investigate how practicing school principals and the literature construct the concept. Specifically, I investigated the congruence between two sources of data: the transcribed texts of interviews with practicing principals and a systematic search of peer-reviewed journal articles extending over a 28-year period. The poor match between practitioners and the literature in how they portray the strategic role of school leaders challenges scholars and practitioners alike to reconsider the conceptualization of strategy. If strategy is to become a meaningful construct in the field, then a broader, more discursive lens is required; otherwise, the concept risks fading into obscurity or becoming little more than yet another adjectival form of leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the seduction of business rhetoric into the field of education, dating back to at least to Taylorism in the early 1900s, school leaders have shaped themselves as organisational managers and leaders. Terms such as 'strategic' have been introduced to add misleading rhetorical weight to activities. But what do we mean by 'strategic'? Scholarship on strategy in schools and strategic leadership by principals has tended to spike following the enactment of polices such as the Education Reform Act in the UK. This has led to a narrow perception of what it means to be strategic, and legitimised modernistic thinking entwined with Romantic ideals. In this paper, I argue the case for a new conceptualisation of strategy. Strategy as leadership puts social practice back into educational leadership. This paper was written, as is arguably the case of a special issue, to serve as the stimulus for further discussion and debate in the quest of advancing our understanding of what it means to be strategic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]