Positional matters: school leaders engaging with national equity agendas

ABSTRACT

This paper claims a central role for school leaders (principals or head-teachers) in the enactment of social justice policy in schools, who act as key agents or ‘gate keepers’ for what counts as social justice in their contexts of practice. Social justice means different things in different contexts depending on where leaders – who use policy as an opportunity to advance what they think is achievable within the limits of available resources – are positioned in the field and how that defines their stances. Drawing on qualitative data generated through in-depth interviews with ten secondary school principals in two Australian cities, the paper analyses the engagement of school leaders with nationally prescribed equity-related policies. Our analysis shows that, depending on the institutional ethos and resources of schools and their own social justice dispositions, school leaders tend to take different stances towards nationally defined equity agendas. Their responses range from compliance to compromise to contest. The paper suggests that doing social justice in schools can never be unilateral, as policy documents suppose, but is characterised by context-informed policy translation, mediated by a range of interactive forces and interests.

KEYWORDS:

• equity
• policy enactment
• principals
• school leaders
• head-teachers
• position and position-taking

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the Australian Research Council for its financial support of the project (DP130101297 Social Justice Dispositions Informing Teachers’ Pedagogy) and the generous participation of teachers and principals. We also acknowledge the Queensland and Victorian Departments of Education for their support to conduct the research. The research team included Trevor Gale (Chief Investigator), Russell Cross (Chief Investigator), Carmen Mills (Chief Investigator), Stephen Parker (Research Fellow), Tebeje Molla (Research Fellow) and Catherine Smith (PhD candidate).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In the education system in which our study is located, the school leader with final responsibility within schools is referred to as the ‘principal’. Some readers will be more familiar with the term ‘head-teacher’. In this article, we tend to use the terms ‘head-teacher’ and ‘school leader’ interchangeably with ‘principal’.

2. The Australian Productivity Commission recently reported (September 2016) that no significant improvement in student achievement had been achieved since NAPLAN’s introduction and in some cases it had slipped, despite a 14% increase in spending per student over the last decade including spending on standardized tests.

3. Names of people, schools and places used in this paper are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the ARC - Australian Research Council [DP130101297].

Notes on contributors

Tebeje Molla

Tebeje Molla is an Australian Research Council (DECRA) research fellow in the School of Education, Deakin University, Australia. His research focuses on education policy analysis, educational inequality and policy responses, and teacher professional learning. Theoretically, his work is informed by critical sociology and a capability approach to social justice and human development.  His latest publications include: Higher Education in Ethiopia (Springer, 2018); Human Development Optimism and Political Pitfall in Ethiopia (in Forum for Development Studies, 2018); and Access to Languages Other than English in Australian Universities: An Educational Pipeline of Privilege (in Higher Education Research and Development, 2018).

Trevor Gale

Trevor Gale is Professor of Education Policy and Social Justice, and Head of the School of Education at The University of Glasgow, UK. His research focuses on the reproduction of inequalities in and through policies and practices in formal education systems, particularly in schools and higher education. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, including Practice Theory and Education (Routledge, 2017), ‘What’s not to like about RCTs in education?’ (in Mobilising Teacher Researchers, Routledge, 2018) and ‘Socially Inclusive Teaching’ (in the Journal of Teacher Education, 2017). He is the founding editor of Critical Studies in Education and of the Springer book series Education Policy and Social Inequality. He is co-CI on two research council projects, researching the social justice dispositions of teachers (recently completed) and the distinctiveness of college-based degrees (current).