Autonomy, Instructional Leadership and Improving Outcomes – The LSLD Reforms in NSW, Australia

ABSTRACT

A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the type of leadership necessary to improve outcomes? Drawing from a subset from an Australian study of school autonomy, we argue that reforms simply cannot improve outcomes as they generate work that takes leaders and educators away from teaching and learning activities and sustain if not advance enduring inequities in the system..

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1. Further details can be found at: https://www.education.gov.au/national-school-reform-agreement-0

2. We adopt the stylistic choice advocated by Eacott (2018) of italicizing relational when specifically talking about his approach. Similar conventions are applied to the three key concepts of the organizing activity, spatio-temporal conditions, and auctor.

3. The Gonski Report (Gonski et al., 2011) lists i) attracting and retaining the best teachers; ii) adopting a national curriculum; iii) using data to inform continual assessment; iv) having high expectations for the achievement of all students; v) student engagement and motivation; vi) parent and community engagement; vii) using funding where it can make the most difference; and viii) increasing school-level autonomy balanced with appropriate accountability (p. 23).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme [project DP190100190]. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.