This policy-interested South Australian public education case study problematises how the Chief Executive (CE) and members of the Education Department's Senior Executive Group (SEG) understood system and school improvement from 2018 to 2022. We applied Carol Bacchi's, "What's the Problem Represented to be?"(WPR) policy analysis framework…

Teacher unions are working in challenging times. Building power is important for teacher unions to resist neoliberal reforms that have aimed to restructure school education and weaken collective organisation. Yet we have few understandings of the democratisation project that teacher unions have engaged in to build and renew internal power in this…

The number of students enrolled in government-funded nationally recognised qualifications in Australia between January and September 2024 increased by 4.3% to 995,090 compared with the same period in 2023, representing a 13.4% rise from the same period in 2019. This publication includes data on students who undertook other forms of nationally…

This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing…

Purpose: School climate strikes are opening spaces of appearance, becoming differently active forms of public pedagogy where new and previously unthought collective climate action is possible. This inquiry contributes to understanding school climate strikes as important forms of climate justice activism by exploring how they work as public…

Too few studies of elite private schools consider how they derive power and prestige from their relationships and interactions with other social and political groups and institutions, including the State. This paper contributes to elite school studies by examining the relationality between the Australian State and private sector schools around how…

In this article, in which I draw on a keynote address to the 2022 Australian Teacher Education Association conference, I take up the challenge to provoke conversations about and advocate for public teacher education. I call for a disruption to accountability discourses that locate teaching and teacher education as a contemporary public policy…

Disadvantage in schooling is often constructed as a crisis in need of fixing. Global policy reforms tend to emphasise that solutions for disadvantage often lie beyond the capacity of the state, necessitating private/philanthropic intervention. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by investigating the rise of philanthropy in…

Purpose: This article maps the rise of venture philanthropy in public education in Australia, exploring how policy networks mobilize high-level systemic reform and governance technologies. This is "philanthrocapitalism," a fundamental shift for policy mobility and modes of redistribution. Design/Approach/Methods: Drawing upon network…

This paper is one of two that bring together a range of education scholars to consider how education might be for democracy in a time of complex challenges facing twenty-first century societies. In this paper, scholars from Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom consider how sites of formal and informal education can respond to multiple unfolding…

Over the last twenty years, tertiary education in Australia has radically changed. Major growth in the sector and federal government policy and funding changes have resulted in an increase of providers and a diversification of the quality of education available on the market, particularly in vocational education. Although change presents…

Teacher workload is a growing problem internationally. In this article, we analyse an attempt by the state education bureaucracy of New South Wales (NSW), Australia, to address this through the 'Quality Time Program'. Drawing on labour process theory and Carol Bacchi's framework of 'What's the problem represented to be?', we analyse how the…

This paper focuses on an area of privatisation that has not to date received significant attention in educational research: the privatisation of infrastructure, facilities and maintenance, and in particular the labour of cleaning. Analysing the case of Victoria, Australia, we demonstrate how successive governments have defended the privatisation…

The 'googlization' of education is emblematic of the growing power of private tech companies in schools across the globe, challenging education as a public good. While critical scholarship has started unpacking the ideological, pedagogical and economical logics underpinning Google's digital infrastructure in schools, we have little insight into…

Leadership matters for the success of large enterprises and this is also the case for higher education institutions and universities. Yet, the public nature of universities and of academia means these institutions are usually highly dependent on external actors, in particular government. Viewed through a lens of distributed leadership, this paper…