Professionalism and competing responsibilities: moderating competitive performativity in school autonomy reform

ABSTRACT

Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is constrained by technologies of competitive performativity, now the norm across Australian and other school systems. Entrepreneurial policies focused on competition, compliance and improved performance make schools, their leaders and teachers, more responsible to external accountabilities. At the same time, autonomy is creatively exercised by leaders due to public service orientations associated with traditional teacher professionalism. This analysis of two Australian case studies of IPS, a secondary school in Queensland and a primary school in Western Australia, illustrates how school leaders navigate conflicting demands of the audit and performance culture by exercising autonomy according to differing notions of professional responsibility, disrupting and moderating the more inequitable priorities and effects prevalent in many performative systems.

KEYWORDS:

• School autonomy
• leadership
• performativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Brad Gobby is a Lecturer at Curtin University in Western Australia. He researches in the areas of government policy, school reform and curriculum. Brad’s research into school autonomy and the Independent Public Schools initiative has been published in a range of international peer-reviewed journals and edited books. He is co-editor of Powers of curriculum: sociological perspectives of education (Oxford University Press, 2017).

Dr Amanda Keddie is a Professor of Education within the Research for Educational Impact (REDI) Strategic Research Centre at Deakin University. Her research examines the broad gamut of schooling processes, practices and conditions that can impact on the pursuit of social justice in schools. Her recent books are Leadership, ethics and schooling for social justice (2016), The politics of difference in schools (2017) and Supporting and educating young Muslim women: stories from Australia and the UK (2017).

Dr Jill Blackmore is Alfred Deakin Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, inaugural Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia. Her research interests include, from a feminist perspective, globalisation, education policy and governance; international and intercultural education; educational restructuring, leadership and organisational change; spatial redesign and innovative pedagogies; teachers' and academics’ work, all with a focus on equity.

ORCID

Brad Gobby http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2170-5435