Workforce insecurity has significant implications for the role of school leaders and teachers preparing students for changing worlds of work. For educators to better prepare students to enter an increasingly casualised labour workforce, there first needs to be an acknowledgement of how students perceive themselves in relation to post-school life.…

Neoliberal reform of the university sector has resulted in increasing numbers of academics employed on casual or fixed-term contracts. While there is an emergent body of literature on issues of precarity in the academy, relatively little attention has been paid to the roles and responsibilities of those tenured academics who employ and…

Fixed-term contracts are a relatively recent, yet growing category of employment for teachers in the public school system in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. In this article, we draw on quantitative and qualitative data from a large state-wide survey (N = 18,234) of members of the public-school teacher union, the NSW Teachers' Federation, in…

The precarity of professionals working in schools and colleges at a time of change has been strongly accented by the competitive markets that currently characterise education and the influence of its global reforms. In this article, I draw on empirical data from a project located in a sixth-form college to argue that the field of Further Education…

Government policies are forcing universities to narrowly emphasise employability, which does not bode well for the Creative Industries (CI). Despite being one of the fastest-growing and diverse employment sectors, CI degrees have been criticised for failing to deliver adequate employment prospects. The employability focus, which serves 'the…

In Arizona, the expansion and elaboration of neoliberal educational policies over the past three decades in Arizona have placed public schools and the teaching profession in precarious positions. These challenges have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Within this turbulent context, a school district in partnership with a college of…

Research into the effects of pressure on school leaders has focused more on its impacts at the system level than on the human impact on leaders. Using theories of vulnerability, this paper attempts to redress this balance, examining the challenges school leaders in North East England faced during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and the…

This paper reflects on compulsory school self-evaluation in Ireland. It sets important historical and contemporary context by documenting the development of a culture of evaluation in Ireland throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium before charting the rise of school self-evaluation during the austere economic conditions of post-2008…

English education has a long-standing parallel but unequal school system. State-maintained schools are free of charge for attendees; independent schools are free from state control and funded largely by fees. Most independent schools hold charitable status which benefits them in relation to taxation although they cater largely for socially…

This qualitative study compared school leaders' perspectives towards their leadership practices in times of emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of twenty-seven school leaders from public and private schools across five Arab countries (Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, and Qatar) participated in the study. Following Turbulence…

In this article, we explore the role of school leaders in magnet schools, a particular school reform model in the United States. To do this, we review the literature on magnet schools, and cite results from a study based on semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted with participants affiliated with magnet schools who received federal…

This paper is a collation of the experiences of four Black women, all senior-level educational leaders in the United States of America. Considering the predominance of White males in educational leadership, our paper furthers the conversation around race-gender diversification in this realm. We employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach,…

The intensification of data collection practices in schooling -- often due to state accountability requirements -- has resulted in the widespread adoption of commercial student management systems (SMS) in schools. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a New Zealand primary school, this paper investigates its adoption of a commercial SMS, and the…

This paper aims to contribute to the literature relating to the way in which numerical data in IT systems were and are used to govern the development of primary education as data provide the government with the opportunity to 'see' the system of education in a new way. Economic growth in the Western world after World War II was linked to…

Formal evaluation of policies, programmes and people has become ubiquitous in contemporary western contexts. This is the case for equity and widening participation (WP) agendas in higher education, for which evaluation is often required to measure 'what works'. Although evaluation has a 'fundamentally social, political, and value-oriented…