Globally, a range of new schooling accountabilities have created a complex and often contradictory context in which school leaders work. For principals of low socio-economic status (SES) and disadvantaged schools, they must balance the accountability, performance and reporting requirements against the other needs of their communities. These…

This article explores the context of the period following the Education Reform Act 1988 in terms of the efforts by successive governments to raise academic standards. These attempts are illustrated by discussion of the impact of the introduction of market forces and parental choice, a centralised National Curriculum and associated assessment…

This paper reaches into a comprehensive study of a generation of young people in Australia, drawing on a comparison with Canadian longitudinal data. It argues that this is a generation of reluctant change makers who have created new ways of living as a response to economic changes and government policies. These new ways of living, once exposed,…

New categories of leadership are continually being invented. Because the ways we think are productive of the ways in which we act, it is important to hold these rhetorical innovations to account. This paper focuses on the latest of these categories--creative leadership. Mobilising a Foucauldian notion of "discourse" I deconstruct the notion of…

This article reviews Bernard Barker's claims that "the pendulum is swinging", in relation to school markets and competition. Barker's arguments are complex in this regard. He rejects markets and competition as a means of improving outcomes and equity, but supports some of the system features that are often associated with marketisation, such as…

As Barker notes, the link between disadvantage and poor educational attainments is an enduring one. Educational policy over the last 40 years or so has tended to respond to educational inequality in predominately one of two ways--attempts to raise standards across the system as a whole and attempts to redistribute resources to families, schools…

The purpose of this article is to argue for a social activist stance in educational leadership that fundamentally addresses social change and human emancipation. This call for social activism is framed within neoliberal, neoconservative, and authoritarian populist discourses in the USA, which to social justice educators and leaders had devastating…

Historical synopses of special education litigation in the USA often reflect traditional perspectives. Because these traditional perspectives are commonly referenced by legislators and judges when new legislation is crafted and judicial decisions are handed down, a reliance on these traditional historical synopses may perpetuate a status…

Maori women teachers in nineteenth-century New Zealand have been little acknowledged in educational histories, and indeed, in some instances their contributions have been explicitly nullified. Those who have taken leadership roles have been no more visible. This article examines the silencing and exclusion from educational history of a young Maori…

Australia has been one of the countries to most enthusiastically embrace the neo-liberal conditions conducive to the dismantling of equitably provided public schooling. The article argues that part of the explanation for the absence of any effective challenge to this trajectory lies in the contradictory nature of the Australian identity. The…

An emergent strand within mainstream educational leadership scholarship is an engagement with notions of diversity. This is part of a belated recognition that in an increasingly globalising world the largely masculinist, white norms from which most accounts of leadership derive, lack sufficient explanatory power for educational systems. Utilising…

Despite the powers that parents are endowed with regarding governance of schools in South Africa, they are not yet given sufficient room and space to deliberate on issues of school governance; instead they are still excluded by some teaching staff who deny them (explicitly or implicitly) from taking part in crucial decisions affecting education of…

The aim of this paper is to focus on the distinctiveness of the Professional doctorate in education (EdD) located in the development of higher education (HE) in England using Bourdieu's theory of practice. It does this by building on a previous paper published in this journal, "The Distinctiveness of the EdD in the University Tradition" (vol. 38,…

My doctoral study focused on students' perceptions of educational change in a number of secondary schools in Australia. The research was birthed when I, as a teacher at a school undergoing substantial change, started to listen to students' comments and discovered in them a remarkable similarity to what we as teachers were saying. Yet, students are…

This historical sociology deconstructs the interrelationship between the theory and practice of the troublesome notions of leadership, social justice and feminism. First, it tracks marginalised groups' relationship to the field of educational administration and their claims upon the state. Mainstream approaches have been informed by theories,…