How school leaders navigate the priority school support review process: an Australian case study

ABSTRACT

In Australia, policy makers demand school leaders focus on raising student achievement levels when planning and implementing a school improvement (SI) plan. This paper explores the SI process for two Australian primary schools deemed to be underperforming and underwent a priority school support review (PSSR). In this study, 2 principals and members of their leadership team and 10 teachers across 2 schools were interviewed to explore how they experienced the PSSR process at different stages of the review process. Two assistant regional directors assigned to supporting the two schools during the PSSR process were also interviewed. The findings suggested that initially, school principals wondered how a PSSR would impact the morale of teaching staff already working hard to support student outcomes. However, as the schools progressed through the process, the principals’ perspectives shifted to see the PSSR as a valuable process for building leadership and teacher capacity and improving student outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• School improvement
• leadership
• support
• student data
• student outcomes

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the project wasprovided by a Department of Education .

Notes on contributors

Rebecca Spooner-Lane

Rebecca Spooner-Lane is a Senior Lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. Rebecca is the Academic Program Leader the Quality Teaching Performance Assessment (QTPA) for preservice teacher education and three partner universities in Australia. In 2020 she was awarded the QUT Vice Chancellor’s Excellence Award for her leadership of the QTPA. As a teacher educator and registered psychologist, Rebecca teaches child and adolescent development, educational counselling, and prepares pre-service teachers for the QTPA. She also trains teacher educators to assess the QTPA. She has a keen interest in the professional development and career progression of teachers from graduate to lead teacher. She has worked on a number of projects investigating mentoring, school leadership and school improvement, and highly accomplished and lead teacher certification.

Nerida Spina

Nerida Spina is a Senior lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research interests concern teachers’ and school leaders’ work in an era of accountability and quantification. She examines these issues through a lens of social justice and equity. Nerida teaches the sociology of education at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and has also worked on a number of major research projects including the Stronger Smarter Research Evaluation Team, and the Australian Research Council Linkage grant, “Ethical leadership: How educators address learning, equity and accountability”. Nerida hopes to continue to explore how assessment and the “datafication of education” impacts on practice, policy, and the everyday lives of children, families, teachers, school administrators and staff. Recently, she has also investigated the experiences of non-tenured academics working in universities.

Suzanne Carrington

Suzanne Carrington is a Professor at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Her areas of expertise are in inclusive education, disability, and teacher preparation for inclusive schools. She has engaged in research to inform policy and practice in Australian and international education contexts, more recently extending this research to the South Pacific and Asia. Currently she is the Program Director of the School Years Program for the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC). This is the world’s first cooperative research centre focused on autism across the lifespan.

Megan Kimber

Megan Kimber is a Senior Researcher at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. As an experienced researcher, her interests encompass Australian politics, policy, and public management; democratic theory; educational administration and education policy; and inclusive education. Megan has published on public sector accountability, ethical leadership, inclusive education, service-learning, and public sector reform. Her most recent publications are on social justice challenges confronting school leaders in Australia and ethical leadership for inclusion.

Kate E. Williams

Kate E. Williams is an Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology. Her research focusses on children’s development of self-regulation and the parenting, educational, and intervention contexts that support such, along with the developmental outcomes associated with children’s self-regulatory functioning. Kate is also a Registered Music Therapist and so is interested in the ways that music can be used to support children’s development. Kate has been published in international early childhood, education, and medical journals and has won awards for her PhD and Masters theses and conference presentations. In 2018 she was awarded a prestigious Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council.