Debra Hayes

Developments in school-based management: The specific case of Queensland, Australia

This history of the politics of moves towards school‐based management in Queensland education is located within a broader historical and political analysis of such moves across Australia since the Karmel Report. This paper specifically focuses in on developments in Queensland. The Queensland analysis traces the moves from Labor’s Focus on Schools through the Coalition’s Leading Schools and the most recent Labor rearticulation in the document Future Directions for School‐based Management in Queensland State Schools. The analysis demonstrates that the concept of school‐based management has no stipulative meaning, but rather is a contested concept. More generally, the paper provides an account and analysis of new forms of governance in educational systems and the tension between centralising and decentralising tendencies as school‐based management is adopted in order to address a number of competing policy objectives.

Productive leaders and productive leadership: Schools as learning organisations

This paper draws on a three-year study of 24 schools involving classroom observations and interviews with teachers and principals. Through an examination of three cases, sets of leadership practices that focus on the learning of both students and teachers are described. This set of practices is called productive leadership and how these practices are dispersed among productive leaders in three schools is described. This form of leadership supports the achievement of both academic and social outcomes through a focus on pedagogy, a culture of care and related organizational processes. The concepts of learning organisations and teacher professional learning communities as ways of framing relationships in schools, in which ongoing teacher learning is complementary to student learning, are espoused.

Enabling and aligning assessment for learning: some research and policy lessons from Queensland

Drawing on the Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (QSRLS), this paper documents the assessment practices of about 250 Queensland primary and secondary classrooms and the extent to which they align with those pedagogical practices described as ‘productive pedagogies’ in the research. In considering the extent of this alignment, the paper outlines in some detail the concept of ‘productive assessment’, which also developed out of the research. The QSRLS demonstrated the necessity of aligning pedagogies and assessment practices with curriculum purposes to enhance student learning and contribute to socially just outcomes. A lack of visible alignment in the assessment practices of teachers in the study is demonstrated and discussed. When considered in conjunction with the low intellectual demands of the pedagogies observed, there are serious social justice implications to be drawn from the research. The paper also shows the significance of systemic assessment policies in relation to teacher assessment practices. The paper conceptualizes ‘productive assessment’ in relation to broader sociological considerations of assessment practices. Some possible explanations for the findings are proffered and some brief recommendations about a way forward in relation to teacher professional development around assessment literacy are suggested.

Creating enabling classroom practices in high poverty contexts: the disruptive possibilities of looking in classrooms

Looking in classrooms is one of the most basic requirements of school improvement, and yet it is one of the least practised skills of teachers and one of the most contentious methods of educational researchers. When it does occur, it is difficult to agree on what to look for and even more difficult to agree on what is seen. This paper outlines an approach to recounting classroom practices adopted in a three‐year study of four schools in New South Wales (NSW) that were all characterised by high levels of poverty and difference. The research examined the processes and conditions under which these schools were attempting to bring about improvements in student learning. The creation of jointly produced accounts of classroom practice, what we have called day diaries, provided opportunities to examine teaching and leadership practices in schools. It also revealed that, for the most part, classroom practices in the participating schools followed a standard and widely adopted script. We argue that disrupting this script requires innovation and the production of new knowledge about what works in the local context, and that such innovation is most needed in high poverty contexts.

Re-engaging marginalised young people in learning: the contribution of informal learning and community-based collaborations

In the twenty-first century, a socially just system of schooling prepares all young people to adapt to new technologies, and participate in a global economy that is highly differentiated at the local level. In Australia and other countries where local markets have become heavily dependent on service economies, ‘working-class’ families are less able to exchange their labour for low-paid wages in factories and other industries, and they are more dependent on education and its accrediting authority than they have been in the past. At the same time, the influence of markets on education has allocated schools to these families, which operate under the least favourable conditions and produce weak outcomes. This paper illustrates how enterprising community collaborations can ameliorate some of these effects. It outlines relevant research about young people who do not complete school, and it describes the implementation of a learning programme in inner Sydney as a means of explicating some of the conditions required to re-engage young people in learning. It is argued that a socially just system of schooling assists young people to construct life narratives in which they are able to chart their way through and around problems, and accumulate the skills, knowledge and dispositions they need to access the formal economy.

Alternative education and social justice: considering issues of affective and contributive justice

This article considers the ways in which three alternative education sites in Australia support socially just education for their students and how injustice is addressed within these schools. The article begins with recognition of the importance of Nancy Fraser’s work to understandings of social justice. It then goes on to argue that her framework is insufficient for understanding the particularly complex set of injustices that are faced by many highly marginalised young people who have rejected or been rejected by mainstream education systems. We argue here for the need to consider the importance of ‘affective’ and ‘contributive’ aspects of justice in schools. Using interview data from the alternative schools, we highlight issues of affective justice raised by students in relation to their educational journeys, as well as foregrounding teachers’ affective work in schools. We also consider curricular choices and pedagogical practices in respect of matters of contributive justice. Our contention is that the affective and contributive fields are central to the achievement of social justice for the young people attending these sites. Whilst mainstream schools are not the focus of this article, we suggest that the lessons here have salience for all forms of schooling.

School–community links: supporting learning in the middle years

This paper reports on research into how schools, parents and local communities work together to support students’ learning during the transition from primary to secondary schools in what is referred to as the middle years of schooling. The research was conducted in four Australian schools within one urban school district. These schools were located in low‐income communities and had high numbers of bilingual students. We mapped existing school–community links that support student learning by identifying key participants and describing how they perceive these links—particularly in relation to improving students’ engagement in learning. Our approach was qualitative in nature, utilizing interviews and focus groups. We found that students, families and teachers commonly expressed the view that learning is limited to schooling; that contacts between schools and communities about learning are difficult to negotiate and are heavily mediated by school principals; and we describe a lack of consensus about the nature of communities and the potential of school community links to contribute to enhancing student learning outcomes.

Introduction: Rearticulating gender agendas in schooling: an Australian perspective

Lazy summer days by the beach in Australia are sometimes punctuated by the raucous sound of a shark alarm. What follows is a period of panic as swimmers leap from the water, parents scramble to find their children and everyone looks for the tell-tale sign of a dorsal fin slicing through the water. Sometimes the fin belongs to a dolphin and sometimes it is simply a false alarm, but, even after the all clear is given by lifesavers, it takes some time for swimmers to go back into the water. The alarm bells that sounded around boys’ education over ten years ago were certainly raucous. The panic that followed has endured but some of us have started to wade back into the waters of gender equity in education to rejoin those that had bravely refused to leave, whilst others continue to look on from safer ground. The papers in this collection contextualize, analyse and deconstruct these waters from feminist and pro-feminist perspectives. The period in which gender became an issue of concern in education was also a period of broad-based change in society, bracketed by mass social movements for equality and the effects of globalization. Deb Hayes, Bob Lingard, Jo Ailwood and Martin Mills have attempted to make sense of the alarm sounded about boys within this broader context. Their approaches are aligned by their feminist/pro-feminist standpoints and they share a strategic intent to talk back to backlash arguments that attempt to undermine feminist concerns. However, they use different approaches to analysing gender equity texts including policy, textual and post-structural analysis. In so doing, the papers raise questions in relation to desirable future directions for gender equity policies in schooling. And gender here indicates that

Making all the flashy stuff work: the role of the principal in ICT integration

The pervasiveness of new technologies and their rapid spread around the globe belie the fact that educational leaders still struggle with how to integrate information and communication technologies (ICT) in schools. This article describes the form of these struggles for a small group of Australian principals. Their stories emerged from a set of five longitudinal case studies of ICT integration in a range of Government schools in the state of New South Wales. During the three years over which the study was conducted, the difficulties associated with leading the integration of educational technologies in schools were common and recurring themes that emerged in interviews with principals. These cases reveal the local variations and specificities of ICT integration through a range of issues including infrastructure development, human resource development, curriculum design, pedagogical practices and futures oriented planning. In describing these issues, many of the effects of ICT integration in schools are discussed. One such effect is the requirement for principals to develop the skills of new knowledge workers, in particular they require access to knowledge and support that is sufficiently flexible to deal with immediate and practical problems.

Difficult Dialogue: Conversations with Aboriginal Parents and Caregivers.

Indigenous conversation and voice are increasingly heard in the research literature but there needs to be more dialogue in order for it to be a two-way conversation. This paper contributes to research that attempts to redress this situation by reporting on conversations with Aboriginal parents and caregivers of students enrolled in a public secondary school in a large New South Wales country town. The conversations were conducted over a three-year period (2005-7) by a team non-Indigenous researchers working in collaboration with Indigenous researchers. In this paper, we describe the various approaches we developed to establish conversations with Aboriginal parents and caregivers, and the various themes that emerged over the course of the study. We also assess how this type of research is located within and contributes to, the existing research literature. Finally, we discuss the importance of ongoing conversations with Aboriginal parents and caregivers, and how schools and systems can better respond to well-established policy goals of productive parent-school relationships.