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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]

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.. [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]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The preparation of educational leaders is a global phenomenon. Education systems have developed numerous means by which current and aspiring leaders are prepared for the role. Through the example of a large public school system in Australia, this paper argues that the doxa of school leadership establishes a particular identity of the principalship. One which constructs the principal as the deliverer of state initiated reforms. Theoretically informed by Bourdieu, this paper argues for an alternate way of thinking about leadership preparation, one based on introducing participants to the conversation of the world. [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.