Commercial triage in public schooling: COVID-19, autonomy and ‘within system’ inequality

ABSTRACT

The importance of commercial products increased in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly as leaders grappled with school closures. Pre-COVID principals viewed their schools as mainly procuring commercial services for administrative support and teacher professional development. After school closures, principals came to emphasise commercialisation as technological infrastructure, online learning platforms, video conferencing software and/or digital tools for community engagement. This shift was borne out of necessity as principals found themselves having to make ‘snap decisions’ as to the products that could best support their school communities. This is a specific form of ‘triaging’ as the pandemic required leaders with pedagogical and curricular expertise to make technical decisions. In systems where increasing autonomy has been offset by decreasing central support, the concern is that issues of access and utility of commercial products can be pernicious in rewarding the privileged and effectively punishing the least advantaged within public systems.

KEYWORDS:

• Public schooling
• commercialisation
• COVID-19
• educational technology
• autonomy
• equity
• principals

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented adjustments to Australian life. State borders were closed, cities and towns locked down and many industries were required to adopt ‘working from home’ arrangements. Like many countries, Australian schools also experienced the full range of COVID-19 adjustments, ranging from anxiety about continuing to hold face to face lessons as community transmission spread, the inevitable school closures and the subsequent stress on school communities of a rapid pivot to online and hybrid models of instruction and assessment. At the height of school closures in the first quarter of 2020, the pivot to remote learning strategies was hoped to provide ‘continuity of learning’ to millions of students around the world. Those remote learning strategies differed across contexts and were largely dependent on pre-existing infrastructures (Internet accessibility and device availability) and government investment (Dreesen et al. 2020; Bansak and Starr 2021; Patrick et al. 2021). However, many of these remote learning strategies relied on the commercial sector for solutions to the crisis and this is not without controversy (Molnar 2018; Holloway and Keddie 2019; Rönnberg, Benerdal, and Carlbaum 2022). In particular, concerns have been raised about issues such as who pays for these commercial products, how quality and usefulness is assured and who advises schools as to the right commercial product for their needs (Kerssens and Dijck 2021).

This paper focuses on public school leader perceptions of commercialisation in one Australian state. We contrast pre-COVID (2019) and post school-closure (2020) understandings of school-based commercialisation. In what follows, we first review relevant research on the commercial response to COVID-19, focusing on the role of commercial products and services in school settings. Second, we develop Gillborn and Youdell's (1999) concept of ‘education triage’ to explain the difficulties principals faced as they were forced to make quick decisions about commercial procurement for their schools without systemic or central support. Third, we explore how a group of principals’ perceptions of commercialisation changed. Pre-COVID, these principals identified commercialisation as most evident in tools that aimed to provide administrative support, teacher professional development and the means to source specialist expertise. Post-COVID, or at least post school closures, principals tended to identify commercialisation as focused on the procurement of infrastructure (devices and Internet), online learning platforms, video conferencing software and tools for community engagement. This shift, was borne out of concern as to how to best provide continuity of learning in a period where the provision of in person schooling was uncertain. This is an example of a form of commercialisation known as ‘platformisation’. Platformisation ‘refers to how entire social sectors such as health or education are transforming due to the mutual shaping of online (often commercial) platform providers and the institutions they connect’ (Pangrazio, Selwyn, and Cumbo 2023, 2).

Evident in the interview data is a pattern that the need to turn to commercial products to continue providing learning opportunities for students under COVID-19 exacerbated inequalities within public school systems that already existed. Those schools with pre-existing access to infrastructure and commercial technologies, and the capacity to resource these needs, felt more successful in providing online learning, while those without commercial relationships and/or with students whose homes may not have easily accessed the hardware and infrastructure requirements were left with concerns for student learning and their ability to monitor student welfare. We argue there is a need for a strong, systemic response in shaping the procurement of commercial technology so that all public schools have access to technological products and services, particularly those that underpinned a successful response to the pandemic. Further, schools cannot compensate for infrastructure inequities, such as access to reliable broadband internet, that remain barriers to access. Governments need to address infrastructure inequalities, as no matter how good the pivot to digital learning is within the school, if students cannot access the commercial platform themselves it will never be satisfactory.

COVID-19, commercialisation and triage in schooling

Much research has investigated the initial impacts of school closures and the gradual return of face-to-face learning around the world. On the one hand, some research is optimistic about a model of schooling that is more digital or ‘hybridized’ (Reuge et al. 2021), where technology and consequently, ‘innovation’ and more personalised instruction are embedded across all aspects of teaching and learning (Goldschmidt 2020; Kim et al. 2021; Zhao, 2020). On the other hand, some research has argued that the pandemic has worked to shine a light on a disparity in access to digital devices and the Internet between and within national contexts (Azubuike, Adegboye, and Quadri 2021; Beaunoyer, Dupéré, and Guitton 2020; Harris 2020). Interestingly, this set of literature is not unsupportive of edtech, but rather, equity of access to edtech. We note there is a general understanding that infrastructure and technology are seen as necessary components of twenty-first century schooling, and that this understanding pre-existed the onset of COVID-19. The more nuanced concern about edtech in schooling surrounds the commercial edtech companies offering these services, and the ways they might exploit student data for commercial advantage (Perrotta et al. 2021; Williamson 2022). There has also been a trend during the pandemic to see school closures and the pivot to online learning as a ‘laboratory experiment in mass-scale datafication of education’ (Williamson, Eynon, and Potter 2020, 112). Comparisons have been drawn to Klein’s (2007) concept of disaster capitalism where opportunistic private actors have been able to take advantage of social upheaval to insert profit-making opportunities into public systems. The Charter school experiment in New Orleans post Hurricane Katrina is one such example of how public services become privatised in times of crisis (see Saltman 2009). However, edtech in public schooling is generally not about privatisation but commercialisation (Williamson 2017). Privatisation for instance, is the takeover of public school delivery by private providers (public schools are privatised), whereas commercialisation is the sale of products and services to public schools by private providers (Hogan and Thompson 2017). This distinction is important because in public systems that are nominally geared around equity, there are differing capacities, and relative advantages and disadvantages, that coalesce around issues of access, utility and effectiveness of commercial products. This can be pernicious in rewarding the privileged and effectively punishing the least advantaged within public systems.

Our argument is that far from a takeover, commercial activity proceeds through a series of decisions that educators are encouraged (or feel forced) to make because of the circumstances they find themselves in. Decades ago, Gillborn and Youdell (1999) coined the phrase ‘education triage’ to explain decisions that teachers and school leaders had to make to ration time and resources amongst groups of students of differing abilities. Education triage ‘describes practises of differentiation that sort students based on their perceived likelihood of attaining benchmark grades in high stakes tests’ (Youdell 2004, 408). Youdell (2004) went on to further describe three levels of education triage: bureaucratic (state-level education policy making), institutional (school organisational practices of resource allocation) and classroom (practices of individual teachers) that all depend upon ‘school markets (neoliberal education reforms, particularly school choice) and hegemonic individualism (the delegation of success or failure to individual students)’ as the precondition to make ‘educational triage become necessary and acceptable’ (p.408). This sense of triage, of feeling forced to make decisions about resourcing and where to best focus energy can be a feature of more autonomous schools, particularly where that increased autonomy is offset by the withdrawal of systemic or central support. This describes the situation with commercialisation and COVID-19.

Schools are always engaged in educational triage, but there is a specificity to triage. In the early 2000s when Gillborn and Youdell coined the term schools were responding to the emergency situation of student performance on high stakes tests. The concept of triage is generative in understanding how pressures of limited resources, policy mandates and structural realities interact with specific problems. Triage explains how scarcity in schools is balanced against ethical, philosophical and political commitments on the horizon of perceived possibility. In a report prepared for Education International, the world congress of teacher unions, Ball and Youdell (2008, 48) argue that the creation of education markets forces an accounting as ‘in the market, schools sort, select and unevenly allocate resources to students’ such that ‘the safe, the treatable and the hopeless are differentiated and unevenly treated’. More recent work (Stacey, Wilson, and McGrath-Champ 2022) has argued that teaching itself has become constant triage as teachers are forced to rationalise decisions about work they can and cannot do. Triage is a particularly powerful way to consider how schools in Australia confront challenges and crises because of the constant struggle to match what is materially and physically possible with what is desirable.

Since the 1990s, Australian schooling has been reorganised through policy ideas that aim to promote marketisation, competition and school autonomy through performative metrics that hold individuals ‘to account’ (Kenway, Bigum, and Fitzclarence 1993; Kenway 1997; Lingard 2010; Wilkins et al. 2019). These policies have been explained through the idea of decentralisation. As systems move to autonomy and competition, centralised support for core school activities is withdrawn in the belief that schools are best placed to respond to the needs of their local communities (Fontdevila, Verger, and Avelar 2021). In Australia, systemic moves towards public school autonomy can be seen in the self-managing schools policy introduced in Victoria in the early 1990s; the Independent Public Schools policy introduced in Western Australian in 2009 and Queensland in 2014; and in the Local Schools, Local Decisions policy introduced in New South Wales in 2013. While these policies promised greater control for schools through devolving decision-making, particularly in relation to staffing and budgeting, in practice they have attracted criticism because they have shifted the work done in central offices to already overworked teachers and principals (McGrath-Champ et al. 2019), shift managing risk onto local school communities (Stacey 2017), required schools to turn to private and commercial vendors to undertake the work that systems once did (Holloway and Keddie 2019) and have created the conditions for residualisation, where schools in disadvantaged contexts are further marginalised (Rowe and Perry 2020).

Now in the early 2020s schools are consumed by the need to provide students with continuity of learning during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our use of educational triage in this paper focuses on the different structural and contextual realities that schools confront, and therefore how different schools rationalise triage (and resource allocation) in different ways. Specifically, we investigate how commercial procurement has become a form of triage, particularly where that procurement (a) asks education experts to make technical decisions about products utility and effectiveness and (b) at a time where there is an obvious or perceived teaching and learning crisis, due to COVID19 and school closures, putting significant strain on already scarce resources.

In the context of COVID-19, Williamson, Eynon, and Potter (2020), observed that many of the commercial products and services that became popular for ‘continuity of learning’ throughout the pandemic already existed, but were not often ‘mainstream’ in schools (total cloud solutions offered by Google and Microsoft, videoconferencing tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, and even online learning providers like EdModo, Canvas and Schoology). In the commercial jockeying that surrounded school closures, schools were offered free or heavily discounted rates to access edtech products and services. Many school administrators entered into hastily arranged contracts and/or agreements (including rushed consent from parents) for technology companies and edtech vendors to provide services and resources to public schools (Eradze, Bardone, and Dipace 2021; Peruzzo, Ball, and Grimaldi 2022). Yet as the data in this paper highlights, many schools already had commercial relationships in place, particularly for the provision of edtech products and services, while other schools were unable to form and sustain these relationships prior to COVID19 and found themselves unable to access these products and services despite a need to pivot to online modes of learning. As Gillborn and Youdell ( 1999) found when researching the effects of performative policies on learners with special needs, being forces to engage with triage rarely delivers a positive solution. At best, educators are forced to make the best decisions possible within the constraints of material resourcing and the limits of their expertise. Triage manifests as within system inequalities given different schools have different opportunities to engage with commercial products and services dependent on pre-existing resources and available budgets.

The Queensland school context

Data for this paper was collected immediately prior, and during, a time of significant uncertainty in Australia in general, and Queensland in particular due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. In Australia during 2020 schools largely remained ‘open’ until late April which saw nationwide school closures and a majority of students transitioning to a remote learning model to carry on with their schooling from home. In Australia, managing public schooling is a constitutional responsibility of state governments. As a result, each state responded to COVID-19 school closures in different ways, meaning the time spent by Australian students learning from home was different. Victoria and New South Wales experienced the longest periods of school closures throughout 2020 and 2021. In Queensland, the context for this study, initial school closures in 2020 lasted for six weeks, before a phased transition back to school was facilitated. There were also a series of ‘snap lockdowns’ that forced immediate school closures for days to weeks at a time throughout 2021 (including a delayed start to the school year by two weeks in January; three days in March and again in April; and a series of lengthening lockdowns from days to weeks depending on a school’s Local Government Area across June to August). During 2020 and 2021, rumours about impending lockdowns were common and schools, school leaders and teachers had to negotiate this uncertainty knowing that their teaching and learning strategies could be forced to change at a moment’s notice. Often lockdowns were announced on the day they were to begin (lockdowns starting at 6pm were announced at 10am of the same day) giving schools very little time to manage a pivot to remote learning.

The complexity of understanding different experiences of COVID-19 across Australia, with particular regard to the extent of schools reliance on commercial products for online learning, is further complicated by the structure of those school systems. In particular, the ways that education departments function, and the extent to which they centralise support or operate through autonomy is different in each state. For example, in Queensland, 250 public schools are designated as Independent Public Schools (IPS) which gives them a level of autonomy, particularly in regards to principal decision making and their control over budget spending (Keddie, Gobby, and Wilkins 2018). Importantly, IPS is not defined by ICSEA or wealth, meaning schools from the least advantaged to most advantaged can be IPS schools. Currently, almost 20% of Queensland public schools are IPS, meaning that there are differences within the system as to the autonomy that schools have over things such as staffing and discretionary funding. While every school had to respond to COVID-19, there were different capacities to do so within the system because of the policy mandates in place. As often happens in systems where autonomy is privileged, the capacity (and desire) of systems to manage what happens in schools is impacted (Keddie, Gobby, and Wilkins 2018; Heffernan 2018). While the Queensland Department of Education (2020) developed a COVID-19 planning framework to be used by schools as a ‘quick check for actions required under the scenario levels in response to COVID-19’, this was largely focused on effective physical distancing and hygiene measures to reduce COVID-19 transmission. In terms of supporting student learning, the only relevant statement from the Department was:

Students unable to attend school or participate in the learning program due to medical reasons should be supported by their school, just as they would in the case of any extended student medical absence. The school's approach to learning for the student should consider the expected duration of absence, the student's learning needs, available tools and resources, and the school's established approach to supporting continuity of learning. (Queensland Department of Education 2020)

Thus, Queensland public schools were largely on their own in managing learning due to school closures caused by COVID-19.

Method

The data used in this paper were collected across two time periods. Initially, in 2019, eight Queensland public school principals were interviewed as part of a broader ARC project focused on public school privatisation across four national contexts and six school jurisdictions. In these semi-structured interviews participants were asked questions about school-based commercialisation (such as commercial products and services their school engaged with), and in general, these eight principals largely understood commercialisation as supporting administrative efficiency, targeted professional learning, assessments and textbooks for teaching and learning and the need for specialist expertise (such as music programmes and sports coaches). Principals were relatively unconcerned about commercialisation, particularly in regards to teaching and learning practices in their schools. Following school closures and school disruptions due to threated closures in 2020 caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and reports about the extent of, and degree of (dis)satisfaction with learning technologies and online learning (Flack et al. 2020), we approached these same principals for a follow-up interview. Our intent was to better understand their experiences and explore whether their perceptions of school-based commercialisation had changed.

Out of the eight original participants, six consented to a follow-up interview. Interviews were conducted during late 2020 via Zoom or phone to comply with social distancing regulations. Questions focused on the experiences of principal’s during the period of school closures, including: how their school developed a strategy for continuity of learning; what commercial products and services helped them deliver teaching and learning across this period; how effective student and teacher engagement and/or communication was across this period; and their views on the longer-term implications of the remote teaching and learning experience. In analysing the data, the lead author conducted inductive analysis to establish emergent conceptual themes. The broader research team then discussed these to arrive at a refined and mutually agreed list of conceptual themes and sub-themes. These themes (see Table 1) indicate that: (1) principals’ perceptions of school-based commercialisation changed over the course of the pandemic and (2) principals understood commercialisation in 2020 as infrastructure (devices and Internet), online learning platforms, video conferencing software and tools for community engagement.

Table 1. Principal perceptions of commercialisation changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

2019	2020
Administrative efficiency	Infrastructure
Student attendance and communication software (IDAttend)	Devices (laptops and iPads)
Library software	Internet
Printing contracts	Online learning platforms
Targeted professional learning	Microsoft Office, Education Perfect, OneNote, DayMap
School performance (John Fleming)	Video conferencing software
Literacy (Jolly Phonics Phonological Awareness Training)	Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Microsoft Teams meeting, Cisco WebEX
Mentoring beginning teachers programme (YXL)	Technological tools for community engagement
Teaching and learning	Emails, phone, social media (Facebook, YouTube)
Assessment (PAT-R, PAT-M)
Apps (Mathletics)
Textbooks (WordCloud)
Specialist expertise
Music programmes
Sports coaches

To maintain anonymity in the reporting of results, we have removed all identifying characteristics of the participants, including name, gender, geographic location of their schools, and so on. We simply refer to each participant as P1 through P6. Table 2, however, includes characteristics of each principal’s school, including whether it is a primary (P-6) or secondary (7-12) school, its relative dis/advantage according to the Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA), and its number of students enrolled. We suggest these characteristics are useful in contextualising participant perspectives about commercialisation.

Table 2. Principal’s school characteristics.

	Type of School	Relative dis/advantage	School enrolment size
Principal 1	Secondary (IPS)	Disadvantaged (ICSEA 900-999)	Medium (500–1500)
Principal 2	Primary (IPS)	Disadvantaged (ICSEA 900-999)	Medium (500–1500)
Principal 3	Secondary (IPS)	Advantaged (ICSEA 1000–1099)	Medium (500–1500)
Principal 4	Secondary (IPS)	Very advantaged (ICSEA >1100)	Very large (>3000)
Principal 5	Primary	Disadvantaged (ICSEA 900–999)	Small (<500)
Principal 6	Secondary (IPS)	Very advantaged (ICSEA >1100)	Very large (>3000)

Changing perceptions of commercialisation during the COVID-19 pandemic

2019 – pre-COVID

In 2019, principals tended to most readily associate commercialisation with administrative efficiencies and teacher professional learning. These two commercialised practices seem front of mind for principals because of their long history embedded within the day-to-day practice of public schools and the large annual budget attributed to them. As explained by P1, ‘I’ve been using third party attendance and communications software like IDAttend for a long time … and it’s reasonably costly.’ Yet, as P5 argues, the ‘state education department does not provide an identity management system to manage our text messages, but we’re obliged to have a platform that does that now … so we outsource that and pay for it ourselves.’ Le Feuvre et al. (2021, 203) have previously discussed the responsibility placed on individual schools to use their own discretionary budgets to contract commercial providers to manage the ‘infrastructural underlay to school administration, student monitoring and parent communication’ and that these commercial relationships are often necessary for schools to interface with the requirements of a public bureaucracy.

All six principals observed their ‘large annual budgets’ of ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars’ (P1) set aside for teacher professional learning. P4 for instance said,

We bring in some quite expert people; it's a feature of the way we go about our business. We bring people in externally to do that work but it's not on a commercial - it's a one-off basis, I suppose. My total budget for PD [professional development] for the year is about $100,000 … 

Similarly, P2 argued that if they’re spending money on training ‘I don’t muck around with regional trainers … I pay to get the best people in.’ This principal provided an example of introducing the Jolly Phonics phonological programme to their school and that it took a few days to train their staff ‘at a cost of $30,000 per day in teacher relief, and roughly $120,000 in total when you add the cost of the actual resources.’ P1 also stated that they spend at least $5,000 per person, or over $100,000 in total to train their school leadership team in ‘a course delivered by QELi [Queensland Educational Leadership Institute] focused on coaching and feedback to grow them as leaders.’ As a rural school principal, P5 noted that

it actually works out cheaper to bring people in from Brisbane to run a PD … the presenters come up, we pay their presentation fee, their nights accommodation, their airfares and other travel costs, but then it’s our training to control.

Many of the commercial products and services being purchased by school principals – at least pre-Covid-19 – were seen as essential services that were not being provided by state education departments, or at least, were not nuanced to their individual school needs (PD training opportunities). Further to this point, P6, the principal of a partially selective school with several sports excellence programmes talked about their need to ‘outsource’ expertise and bring in external providers to support sports coaching within the school. This included partnerships with specialist coaches for tennis, golf and football ‘including specialist strength and conditioning coaches … and a partnership with Michelle Bridges around wellness and wellbeing.’ P3 also discussed that they work with ‘companies and external providers in delivering music and our creative industries program.’ This principal also argued that ‘outsourcing’ to a commercial organisation saved the school time and money,

In mentoring new and beginning teachers, we work with a company called YXL. I can't provide for the same amount of funding, the online coaching, mentoring and feedback sessions that that company will provide for those people. For me to take the same number of people offline in this school, it would probably cost me one and a half times more. (P3)

A plethora of recent research has investigated this ‘outsourcing’ phenomenon in schools, often focusing on the ways that ‘non-core’ subjects are delivered through external ‘experts’ (sports coaches, musicians, artists). The rationale for this is often understood as saving money by not having to employ a qualified teacher, but as Enright, Kirk, and Macdonald (2020) argue, this can problematise understanding of expertise, particularly in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Of all six principal participants, only P1 and P3 made explicit mention of commercial products and services that are used by their school to support teaching and learning activities. P1 discussed their trial period of using ‘ReadCloud’ for a semester ‘which is basically online textbooks and very expensive for what it is.’ However as P1 continued,

I do want us to move to an online platform for learning and we've probably got 10 percent of our students that are bringing their own devices. So ReadCloud would be a nice addition to that, and would also support the pedagogical shift required to using online versions of resources rather than print resources.

Interestingly, and as a brief spoiler to the 2020 data, P1 in their follow up interview commented ‘the take up by staff and students wasn’t enough to justify the cost … so we’re not going to go ahead with ReadCloud.’ P3 made broader mention of the

various things we’re using private companies for … including our learning management system Daymap … a variety of software packages, I couldn’t name them all but PAT-R [ACER Progressive Achievement Test - Reading], PAT-M [ACER Progressive Achievement Test - Maths], Mathletics, etc.

Burch (2009) has previously argued that schools tend to focus on buying resources or materials that will help students develop literacy and numeracy skills, often with the aim of providing more personalised pathways towards improving standardised test scores (see also, Oakley, Wildy, and Berman 2020). Thus, commercialisation pre-COVID for our participants followed general understandings within the research literature. Commercialisation was mostly understood to encompass administrative support, teacher professional development, the outsourcing of specialist expertise and/or programmes, and some teaching and learning materials, particularly focused on assessment, remedial instruction and learning apps.

2020 – after school closures

After school closures in 2020, we evidence a dramatic shift in principals’ perceptions of commercialisation in their schools. Instead of commercialisation for effectiveness (staff training) and efficiency (administrative software), we see a pivot to commercial services that can provide online connection and digital interactions. Principals came to understand commercialisation as technological infrastructure, online learning platforms, video conferencing software and technological tools for community engagement.

It’s interesting to note that some principals referenced their already ‘robust systems around processes of technology’ (P3) that aided their transition to an online, remote learning environment. While it wasn’t brought up by principals in 2019, P3, P4 and P6 all indicated that their schools were already BYOD [bring your own device], meaning all their students had their own device, and that ‘teachers were used to incorporating these technologies into learning activities’ (P3). As further explained by P4,

We’re an iPad school and we have a series of 10 core apps that we use. All students already had a device they were using … We had a pretty strong platform of IT in the school already and a pretty good framework around how we use that pedagogically and we were able to leverage that … where teachers who were already doing a great job just went further and faster, and those who were reluctant engagers had to engage.

In contrast, P1 discussed how they rapidly facilitated the roll out of devices to their secondary school students,

When COVID-19 was coming, when I was pretty sure that lockdowns were coming, I said, “Let's get all of our devices out.” We had lots of laptop caddies sitting around the place. We surveyed parents and kids and said, “Do you have a device at home?” As a result of that we had 40% of my school community say no. The best they had was a mobile phone which wasn't good enough … So, we decided to give our devices out to kids to use. And when we knew we were going to run out of devices I spent just under $50,000 of my budget [buying more]. I have got a bit of discretion as an independent public school to have greater control over how I use my budget. So I made that decision, along with my leadership team. We'd already budgeted maybe $20,000 in new devices and I said “Let's just do more”.

The basic infrastructure requirement to pivot to online learning required a device for every student. While each of the secondary school principals already had, or managed to facilitate this, both primary school principals - in disadvantaged contexts - argued they simply ‘didn’t have the resources to cater for learning at home electronically’ (P2). P2 discussed how they created ‘hardcopy learning packs … including pencils, erasers and rulers to ensure that no kid would have to miss out even if their family had no educational materials at home.’ P5 talked about how initially they ran a ‘hybrid’ programme, where they were using OneNote to set learning activities for ‘kids who come from middle-income families and had access to ICT connected devices’ and also printing 400 learning packs for those families that didn’t have a device, Internet and/or printer. But

by the four week mark we gave in. It was just too hard to manage. We just printed home learning packs for everyone. We sort of found that even students with devices missed out on using them, as the older kids got it, or mum and dad’s smartphone wasn’t cutting it.

Both these principals reflected on how they still used technology to facilitate ‘check-ins’ and disseminate information to parents. P2 said they opened a Facebook page for each year level and P5 said they heavily relied on emails and phone calls. Both noted that they spent a huge amount of time trying to find students. P2 for instance spoke of the system they developed for student welfare checks, where if a teacher hadn’t heard from a student for two days, the deputies would then chase the family via phone, and if they still couldn’t make contact, the school Chaplain would make a home visit. Similarly, P5 said they had a number of families ‘go bush … [and] we literally had no idea where some of our students were … and we just had to report to our regional office that these are the kids we cannot find.’

Even across the four other principals who had the infrastructure to facilitate remote online learning, it seemed their driving force was to maintain connection with their students. P4 reflected that because they are an ‘Apple school’ they used Cisco WebEx as their video conferencing software, ‘and was really the only thing they added in on top of the stuff kids were already familiar with’. They argued the ‘definitive purpose for doing that was to eyeball our kids, to look into their eyes online and just do a check to see how they were going.’ In fact, each of the secondary schools adopted a similar structure where the first session of the day involved video conferencing between teachers and students, the second session was independent work for students and planning time for teachers, and the final session was follow-up contact with students and families. Each school navigated the specifics of this differently, given ‘practicality and what we have ready access to’ (P3). P6 used DayMap. P3 used OneNote and Microsoft Teams. P1 used Zoom while waiting for the Department to make Microsoft Teams available for students. Indeed, P1 reflected that the ‘informed consent required from parents to facilitate student access to these platforms was a bit of a nightmare and I don’t know how compliant we were.’ As summarised by P4,

Our school is part of a big state system, yet we did this on our own, out of necessity, because the system was missing. They provided a set of guidelines and a few bits of high level stuff, but effectively we managed everything. We were autonomous in this space. I’m not quite sure they [the Department] knew what they were doing. So we just got on with it and got the job done and managed everything ourselves.

Similarly, P3 explained that ‘the tools we adopted have been incredibly useful, and our teachers and students continue to access those platforms. So while it was thrust upon us, it’s been effective for us.’ Indeed, P1 - who spent $50,000 in ensuring each of their students had a device to work on - argued that technology quickly shifted from an ancillary resource to an essential ‘tool for enacting curriculum and pedagogy.’

Discussion and conclusion

The first point in this paper concerns the capacity of devolved public school systems to respond to crises in coordinated ways. The Queensland Department of Education (2020) was ‘soft’ in their recommendations about school closures to principals, simply stating that a school’s individual response should consider the ‘available tools and resources, and the school’s established approach to supporting continuity of learning.’ Thus, principals were forced to triage at an institutional level. On the one hand, they had the capacity to make decisions that best suited their local community, but on the other hand, their capacity to respond was necessarily mediated by the size of their school budget, their ability to generate discretionary funding, and relatedly, the technological infrastructure they already had at their disposal. Furthermore, what was happening outside the school gate influenced a school’s ability to provide the teaching and learning experience they wanted. Some schools were significantly advantaged in this regard, however, those schools that had to resort to Facebook as a mechanism for maintaining contact with students and families during lockdowns because of infrastructural inequalities highlights this two-tiered system. This remains an abiding concern of the paper.

Notwithstanding their individual response to the crisis, we note that the principal’s perceptions of commercialisation changed from pre-COVID-19 as something that added value to the work that schools were already doing (such as teacher professional development, textbooks, furniture, food services, administrative programmes) to the core decision making regarding teaching and learning. Commercial products and services change from auxiliary (nice to have if there is the budget for it) to necessary (must have such that other resource commitments must be triaged). Each participant discussed their process of ‘triage’, in first assessing the technological resources their school community could potentially access, and then how to best utilise these along with available commercial platforms and video conferencing software to maintain a sense of ‘connection’ with their students. Clearly, a school’s capacity to do this work virtually was stratified by dis/advantage (see also, Heffernan et al. 2021) and their financial capability at repurposing their ‘one-line’ budgets (see also, Gerrard and Savage 2022). P1 reported that their schools spent $50,000 buying computers to try to offset the lack of appropriate devices an audit revealed. P2 and P5 reported that they had to resort to printing workbooks because they were aware that many members of their school community just did not have the capacity for online learning. If these tools are going to be an essential component of teaching and learning practices into the future, then Covid-19 has highlighted the vast technological inequities that exist within the public school system.

While school closures ‘accelerated the uptake of technology in classrooms and helped teachers understand the improvement it can bring to their teaching’ (P4), the long-term implications of that remain unclear. It may be argued that these online tools will have an ongoing positive impact on student learning, but as our data shows, there are different realities, experiences and possibilities for individual schools based on their relative socioeconomic advantage. Inequalities that existed before Covid-19 have been exacerbated (Dolan 2016; Heffernan et al. 2021; Trippestadt et al. 2022). In particular, we observed a differing capacity for principals to manage commercial procurement. While there was a common understanding that edtech products were vital to manage online learning, some principals led schools that lacked the financial resources required to manage the complex ecosystem that surrounds the effective use of technological tools. Further, many of the decisions had to be made quickly, and could be based on relative cost rather than effectiveness or how well one platform or product linked with the IT ecosystem that a school was already managing. At the very least, it is likely that the complexity of platform and software interoperability that Pangrazio, Selwyn, and Cumbo (2023) found in schools will only be exacerbated by crisis-produced procurement.

We argue that the capacity for schools and school administrators to respond to crises institutionally is inherently limited, and instead requires a strong, coordinated and systemic approach. This systemic intentionality, that is, a coordinated decision-making process at the heart of the system supporting principals and school communities, is also necessary for procuring commercial tools. Decisions made at the school level show how a lack of coordinated intentionality has caused individual schools to buy the wrong tools (ReadCloud (P1)) or suffer from limited access to devices (P2 and P5). It also shows the pronounced reach of technological brands within some public schools (‘we are an Apple school’ (P4)).

There is an obvious need for ongoing work about the effects that this technologisation has on the working realities of teachers and principals. As Heffernan and Selwyn (2021) have shown with the enduring significance of email in principals’ work, technologies provide opportunities for new practices to emerge and for existing practices to be reconfigured. Ideland (2021, 43), for instance, talks about how technology changes the ‘desirable’ teacher as one ‘who is coaching, not lecturing, flexible, willing to speed up, and ready to work whenever and wherever’. Technology is creating a limitless surface, or time, for teachers and principals to always be at work, always contactable, always online. What schools do as the pandemic subsides, and the risks of school closures abate will be important. While schools and systems appear to have a desire to ‘wind-back’ this platformisation in the return to face to face teaching, this should not be assumed to mean that all digital technologies and infrastructure are being mothballed until the next crisis. What remains, how it is being used, what practices change as a result of the pivot to online learning and how this impacts teachers’ work and student learning remains important.

Finally, we emphasise a point we made earlier. Berstein famously stated that schools cannot compensate for society. As our data shows, schools cannot compensate for inequalities through purchasing commercial software and/or learning platforms. Infrastructure inequities, such as access to reliable broadband internet or ability to purchase hardware and software, remain barriers to access. Governments need to address infrastructure inequalities, as no matter how good the pivot to digital learning is within the public school system, if students cannot access the commercial platform it will never be satisfactory.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council: [grant number DP170103647].

Notes on contributors

Lauren Cuskelly

Lauren Cuskelly is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at the University of Queensland.

Anna Hogan

Anna Hogan is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology.

Greg Thompson

Greg Thompson is a Professor of Education Research in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership at the Queensland University of Technology.