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…

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…

This paper aims to contribute to the literature on dean's leadership and explores the impact of corporate managerial practices and neoliberal ideology on the mindset and actions of 15 deans and heads of school in eight universities in Australia. We offer perspectives of leaders as emotional individuals who on a daily basis attempt to live up to…

This article emphasises the challenging nature of the leadership role of Faculty of Education Dean in the twenty-first-century university, noting the demands of the managing up, down and out nature of the role. The author argues that leadership expertise is developmental and evolutionary, requiring continual refinement, with experience acting as a…

Although the literature illustrates well how leadership can (and has been) theorised, it is much less common to read about the idiosyncratic demands on leaders that shed light on the emotional responses and their individual learnings derived of those experiences. This paper attempts to document aspects of leadership through a consideration of the…

This article uses a queer narrative hermeneutic approach to interpret higher education leadership experiences of not passing. Developed through biographical narrative depictions of personal and professional experiences informed by theoretical studies of curriculum and learning and queer cultures and histories, the article distinguishes among…

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…

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…