Brad Gobby

Reactionary political formations have become increasingly prominent in political and public discourse and are no longer confined to the political fringes (Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2023; Wodak 2021...

In line with global trends, Australia has a teacher turnover problem. This turnover has been associated with challenging working conditions, excessive workload, occupational stress and burnout, and...

In this paper, we explore Thelin’s (2024) proposal to add the notion of ‘feelings’ to the long-standing and oft-invoked triad of sayings, doings and relatings in the theory of practice architecture...

Devolved governance, school autonomy and marketisation impact the employment practices of schools and the working conditions of teachers. However, the employment-related effects on school services staff are under-researched. This study draws on data from interviews with staff at one public high school to analyse school services staff experience of school autonomy and the employment practices of principals in the context of competitive education markets. This case study illustrates how a principal's management of employment and labour relations in a school experiencing declining enrolments and reduced resources impacted the labour and working conditions of school services staff. We argue that the principal applies a calculation of utility-maximisation and entrepreneurship to the non-teaching staff's employment and carelessness to their employment conditions, thereby producing flexploitation that relies on the unpaid time and emotional commitment of their staff to do the best for the students. We recommend systemwide policies and practices that effectively train and support principals to protect the employment rights of all school staff should accompany decentralisation policies where responsibility for staffing is devolved to principals.

In this chapter, we consider the voices of school principals as they engage with school autonomy reforms on the Australian context. There has been little research that has explored how school principals engage with and respond to these kinds of reforms through a Foucauldian theorising of principal resistance. We draw on interviews with a range of relevant stakeholders to examine how these principals perceive these reforms and how they engage forms of resistance and compliance to the increased regimes of accountability and performativity. We undertake this analysis via the work of Michel Foucault and his understanding of power and resistance and also the notion of parrhesia, or speaking out, to show a more nuanced theorisation of resistance and subject formation of these school principals as they describe their practices of resistance.

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 education.