International Baccalaureate (IB) Directors of international schools command a paradoxical space of progressive futures, cloaking injustice and whiteness. This is enacted daily through policy, recruitment, teaching and remuneration which privileges the empowered, exploits the marginalised and thereby delivers a critical education of questionable…

This paper explores the issue of how children come to be treated as workers in schools that are run as though they were businesses. It describes how the 'soft' form of human resource management provides a useful model for school reform, since it seeks to increase the productivity of the worker through 'humanistic' means, treating the worker as a…

This paper presents findings from qualitative research which examines school principals' understandings of digital technologies policies for Australian schools during the period of the Digital Education Revolution (2008-2013). The concepts of 'steering at a distance' and policy enactment are used as a conceptual lens from which to position and…

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has disrupted and posed great challenges for kindergarten-grade 12 education systems. Initial studies on education and COVID-19 often focus on technology use, student learning, and school reopening plans. However, debates on the form of instruction become futile when stakeholders are unclear about what the…

Based on the oral history testimonies of Sister-teachers, this study provides an insight into the impact of the Free Education Scheme (1967) on the lives of women religious in Ireland. This major initiative was generated and driven by men; however, it had a direct impact on the professional lives of thousands of women who ran schools. The article…

The issue of social justice (SJ) leadership has become one of the central topics in educational leadership and management research in recent years. Despite increasing attention to the topic among policymakers and researchers during the last two decades, no comprehensive review of SJ leadership research has been conducted. By using bibliographic…

In this conceptual article the authors outline an approach to leadership in higher education that foregrounds attention to wholeness and wellbeing, framing emotion as inherent to the practice of leadership, with all organizing actions inseparable from and influenced by emotion. The article is framed within findings from their research on wellbeing…

The paper explores the relationship between levels of equity and levels of trust in the English education system from 1944 to 2018. The conceptual framework is that of centralised and decentralised decision making in education governance systems taking a socio-historiographical approach. Evidence reveals the impact of rapid government-initiated…

This study examines the changing style, scale, and scope of raising private funds to provide resources for public schools. In particular, we focus on school fundraising, especially the role of discourse in scaling up school fundraising practices to facilitate education privatisation. Drawing from Stephen Ball's policy sociology, and employing…

New conceptions of public governance across nations have taken hold globally. In this article, we explore the involvement and expansion of a broad range of actors in public services delivery, beyond the remit of traditional government. While there are common features of this trend, variations reflect the significance of context-sensitive policy,…

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…

National philanthropies have recently played a prominent role in spending on U.S. urban school board elections, largely seeking to promote candidates who support charter schools. In Atlanta in 2017, 30 candidates competed for nine open school board seats. One practice has been to fund intermediary organisations (IOs) (e.g. advocacy groups,…

This paper discusses the various ways privatisation processes affect Irish education. Due to the long history of considerable church involvement, the notable absence of middle tiers of governance, and more recently, the embrace of neoliberal principles, in large part due to and for economic reasons, the Irish education system represents a…

K-12 public education finance policy in the province of British Columbia, Canada, responsibilises school district administrators to engage in competitive entrepreneurial practices, not only to increase public funding, but also to generate supplementary funding from private sources. We focus specifically on the generation of revenue from…

Parent involvement in their child's schooling is routinely celebrated and emphasised in government education policy in many countries. We take a critical lens to examining parent involvement by investigating voluntary parent fees in public secondary schools, and how these fees are patterned by school socioeconomic status (SES). In Australia, where…