School autonomy as ‘the way of the future’

Autonomous schooling in Australia

In Australia, school governance differs markedly from state to state. While national mandates in relation to conditions associated with school funding, curriculum and testing shape powerfully the direction of public schools, governance of these schools remains the responsibility of the states. Within these arrangements, both state policy and practice in relation to school autonomy have varied considerably, but the thrust of such arrangements is similarly framed – as indicated in the introduction – to foster schools’ greater independence from state governance with flexibility and freedom to manage, innovate and respond better to local communities. This rationale reflects the progressive ‘grassroots’ approach to school autonomy promoted over 40 years ago in the Karmel Report (Australian Schools Commission, 1973: 10) which asserted that ‘responsibility [for schools] should be devolved as far as possible upon the people involved in the actual task of schooling’.

From their inception, autonomous schooling systems across the West have been informed by this progressive approach. However, market agendas have permeated these systems, given their emphasis on devolution, deregulation and accountability supported more broadly by the global hegemonic status of neoliberal and neoconservative policy and politics (Dingerson et al., 2008). The strength of these agendas within autonomous schooling in Australia is perhaps no more apparent than in the 1990s in the state of Victoria. During this period school autonomy was embraced in particular with the introduction of Self-Managing Schools. Heralded by a new conservative state government intent on ‘streamlining’ all public services, these policies radically reshaped (or, as some would say differently, decimated) the public education system. Under the Schools of the Future programme, a combination of economic rationalism, devolution and accountability resulted in the closure of over 350 schools (considered by external measures as financially unviable or underperforming) and the loss of more than 7000 teachers in the short space of three years. This state remains the most decentralised system of education in Australia (Masien, 2012). During the same period, policies of devolution in states such as Queensland were also introduced, but these were less radical in their streamlining or ‘rationalising’ of public schooling. However, these policies were, as with Victoria, equally shaped by the state’s political agenda at the time with more managerialist and economically rationalist approaches to school-based management associated with the conservative coalition government (elected from 1996) (Lingard et al., 2002). According to Lingard et al. (2002), the approach to school-based-management evident in Queensland’s Leading Schools policy introduced at this time echoed earlier moves under Victoria’s Schools of the Future programme. The IPS policy in the states of Western Australia and Queensland (introduced in 2010 and 2013 respectively) is the most recent school autonomy initiative nationally.

Like most autonomous schooling reform in Australia and internationally, the IPS initiative has been presented politically and publically as a progressive and positive move. Enhancing local governance is clearly emphasised; for example, in the Queensland version of IPS policy as follows (The State of Queensland, 2014):

The Independent Public Schools initiative recognises the best decision-making often occurs at a local level through direct response to local community needs and aspirations.

By becoming an Independent Public School, Queensland principals, teachers, parents and local communities have greater control and ownership of their schools.

In Queensland (as noted earlier) education is ostensibly a state government responsibility with 25 regional offices across the state charged with managing all public schools in their geographic district. There are now 80 IPS across the state with 120 current public schools expected to convert by 2016. All 1230 state schools can apply to become independent through a process of submitting an ‘expression of interest’ to the state Department of Education. This application process requires schools to provide evidence of consultation in favour of the conversion across stake-holder groups and on conversion IPS are required by the Department to adopt particular practices of governance. The School Council, for example, must play a central role in managing and monitoring school processes. IPS are supported by the department to manage their autonomy with an initial AUD$50,000 grant on converting with a potential further AUD$50,000 available to schools each year on application. Among other freedoms, conversion provides schools with greater flexibility in relation to determining staffing options and departmental policies; shaping curriculum offerings to suit the needs of students; and delivering innovative educational practices that maximise outcomes (The State of Queensland, 2014).

Consistent with contexts such as the USA and the UK, there are major long-held concerns articulated in Australian research about how school autonomy is compromising public education. These concerns, as noted earlier, relate predominantly to the ways in which market ideologies have over-ridden the priorities of this reform. While these ideologies are presented positively in policy, they are seen as undermining the values of equity and public purpose (Dempster, 2000; Kimber and Ehrich, 2011; Lubienski, 2009).

With regard to equity, the market ideologies driving autonomous schooling are associated with promoting social segregation and stratification. There is evidence to suggest that this reform has amplified the gap between privileged and less privileged schools (Lamb, 2007; Smyth, 2011). Research conducted in Victoria (Lamb, 2007), for example, reports much fewer enrolments in schools serving the poor, with such schools also left to cope with much higher concentrations of disadvantaged students. In this competitive climate, as with the USA and the UK, schools are engaging in covert enrolment practices to exclude less ‘attractive’ students (i.e. low attaining or high-needs students) so they look better on external measures of performance (Ball, 2003; Dingerson, 2008). Also consistent with research from the USA and the UK, such stratification in Australia has highlighted inherent problems with the notion of choice, with particular implications for equity (Dingerson et al., 2008; Gunter, 2012). There are assumptions that parents can make an authentic choice about the quality or otherwise of their local school; however it is privileged parents and students who win out in this system – as Smyth (2011: 105) points out:

Educational ‘choice’, the heart of the SMS [Self Managing Schools], has certainly worked extremely well for savvy, upwardly mobile, middle-class educational consumers, who know how to work their schools politically to their advantage.

Recent IPS research in Western Australia has emphasised the importance of school readiness in converting to independent status and the significance of strong educative leadership (Melbourne University, 2013). Of interest to this present paper, such leadership will shape how autonomy and accountability are ‘intelligently’ combined (OECD, 2011). As mentioned earlier, this requires a moral leadership that engages with a broad view of the purposes of schooling (Fullan, 2002) as, to refer to the work of Cranston et al. (2010a), pursuing democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility goals. Such leadership will recognise how external accountabilities privilege private rather than public schooling goals and how these accountabilities fail to capture much of what should count in evaluating what constitutes an educated moral person (Gleeson and Husbands, 2003; Mulford et al., 2008). These leaders will understand that an overemphasis on these narrow measures weakens schools’ moral accountabilities (Mulford et al., 2008: 20; see also Kimber and Ehrich, 2011).

The significance of such leadership in relation to the potential of school autonomy to impact adversely on equity and public purpose goals was clearly apparent in the schools featured in this paper. The following section provides details of the study upon which an exploration of these issues is based.

The study

The data presented in this paper derive from research conducted in two public high schools in Queensland. The research was concerned with exploring issues of equity and diversity and, in particular, the conditions and structures that might support or undermine equitable student outcomes in the current economic and political climate. Both schools are large and are situated in regional or sub-urban areas. They were selected for the research in light of the diversity of their student cohorts and their reputation in their local community for catering well to these cohorts. They appear in this paper because both schools have recently converted to independent status under the Queensland IPS initiative. School A’s student population (of over 2000) is predominantly Anglo-Australian, but includes a high proportion of Indigenous students, while School B’s population (of approximately 1400) is highly multicultural, with many ESL (English as a Second Language) immigrant and refugee students. The recent conversion of these schools to ‘independent’ status was regarded as having a significant impact on matters of equity and diversity.

The broader research involved interviews with key personnel (including administrative and teaching staff) and students, observations of classroom practice and an analysis of school documentation. The focus in the subsequent sections of this paper is on interview data as it relates to the issue of autonomous schooling. Within the equity focus of the research, a series of interview prompts were created to stimulate discussion about the IPS initiative. Key personnel (i.e. those generally holding leadership positions) were asked to articulate their thoughts about the IPS initiative, including its equity implications at a school, systemic and community level and its specific impact on their school. They were also asked to comment on any future challenges that they anticipated for their school and the system in light of policy trends towards increasing autonomy and accountability. Participants were interviewed several times for approximately an hour each time. Some participants spoke at length about the IPS initiative because of their direct experience of it and these are the voices that are featured in the subsequent sections. They are Mr J (the Principal of School A) and Ms M (the Deputy Principal of School A), Ms K (the Principal of School B), Mr T (the Head of Science at School B) and Ms G (the Head of ESL at School B).

The data were analysed with reference to the literature explored earlier – the focus was on articulating the effect of school autonomy on equity and public purpose and the significance of moral leadership in shaping each school’s approach to these two areas. This analysis was mindful of the new policy discourses shaping autonomous schooling in Queensland. While definitive statements about school autonomy cannot be gleaned from such an analysis, given the small number of participants and the newness of the IPS initiative, the resonance of this research with the concerns articulated in the broader literature, especially in the areas of equity and public purpose, strengthen the need for continued caution about and research into how this initiative is currently being taken up across and within different systems.

Autonomy and accountability

Participants from both sites were generally positive about their school’s conversion to independent status. Consistent with the intention of school autonomy reform, such independence was seen as allowing the schools greater control, flexibility and efficiency in terms of governance, and as fostering higher levels of responsiveness to their local community. That said, it was clearly understood at both schools that such autonomy was restrained by the parameters of external accountabilities: these parameters drove how the IPS initiative was taken up. Indeed, the schools’ acceptance of such accountabilities was seen as central to ensuring their survival and success – as made clear in Mr J’s earlier comments with his view that: ‘Schools are going to have to be more accountable or they’ll die on the vine’. It was within these accountability parameters that the concerns with equity and public purpose were articulated.

Concerns about equity

Concerns with the effect of the IPS movement on equity at both a system and school level were predominant for all of the participants. Consistent with the literature reviewed earlier (e.g. Ball, 2003; Lamb, 2007), these equity concerns were associated with ensuring that the needs of disadvantaged learners were adequately resourced and addressed, and with the potential exacerbation of the structural inequities already characteristic of the public system through exclusionary admission practices and parents’ differential social resources and capacities to access and negotiate the system (see also Welner, 2013).

In both schools, external accountabilities were welcomed in the sense that they drew attention to the underperforming students who required specialised support. In School A, for example, National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test results provided, in Mr J’s words, a ‘wake-up call’ in relation to the poor literacy and numeracy levels of Indigenous students. In School B, such testing drew attention to the specific literacy needs of ESL students. These groups were already equity priorities at these schools, but broader external accountabilities lead to a more targeted approach to supporting particular Indigenous and ESL students. The autonomy granted through the IPS initiative had a significant effect on how this targeted approach played out. At School A such autonomy enabled equity; while at School B it was feared that it could constrain equity.

At School A, both Mr J and Ms M spoke positively about the increased funding directed to their school as an IPS that would otherwise have been subsumed by their regional district, and their use of these funds to employ extra staff and to run extra professional development for teachers. Mr J referred to how the new system worked better to support his large cohort of Indigenous students:

Currently in this region we have half a million dollars taken out of the Indigenous budget to make sure that every school gets a CEC, a community education counsellor…now I’ve got 400 [Indigenous] students [but only] two CECs…at a school down the road they’ve got [one CEC] to look after 20 [Indigenous students]. The regional director who brought this in said that it was on the grounds of equity…but what about the 400 kids at my school? What I’m saying is that direct funding of schools gives schools the money they deserve. (Mr J)

At School B, however, the discretionary aspect of IPS funding was seen as potentially constraining equity. The Head of ESL at this school, for example, referred to IPS as ‘disastrous’ for her unit, given the political contention surrounding the students she caters for who tend to be of immigrant and refugee backgrounds. According to Ms G, these students tend not to be seen as a ‘deserving’ group and they also tend to lack agency and a voice. She feared that such a combination would greatly undermine the ESL area:

ESL tends to kind of like be associated with asylum seekers and that kind of thing…their parents are not very vocal [and they attract] all this political stuff…I’ve got kids in community detention and every time I mention that I want to use some of that funding to support them in some way I hear people go ‘oh well what are they doing here, blah, blah, blah’ and I kind of go ‘Can we not have the political discussion now? Can I just sort out the finances please?’ It’s very loaded. (Ms G)

Another equity matter that respondents raised concerns about related to what Ms G described as ‘game playing’ – in terms of schools playing the system to look good on external measures (Ball, 2003). This occurred, according to the respondents, through schools tacitly excluding more ‘needy’ (i.e. socially or academically disadvantaged) students. Ms G noted, for example, the practices of schools manipulating their testing outcomes by restricting who they permitted to sit for externally mandated tests. She provided the following example:

One school that I know [of], they got an award last year because they had no kids below [an OP ¹ ] 15…but then go and look at the statistics. [Only] 11 kids sat [the test] so if you put 11 out of a cohort of 60 seniors sitting [the test]…of course it looks good…this is a classic case of data manipulation…kids are actually told ‘you are not doing [the test]’…I mean not that legally you can, but schools do. (Ms G)

Such specialising with the IPS, however, can work to exclude students who do not ‘fit’ with a particular school’s identity. To refer to Ms G’s example, the school in question that recommended that the ‘too hard’ boy transfer to School B, was indeed ill equipped to support him because, according to Ms G, as an IPS it could ‘choose to only employ a part-time ESL teacher’ while School B’s unit employed several full-time specialists. As an IPS, this more-preferred academic school was able to specialise and focus its resources on areas not aligned with the high needs and expensive area of ESL. This redirection of resources and exclusion of more needy students no doubt improved this school’s performance and reputation. Ms G’s concern in relation to the enabling of such redirection under IPS was that it:

…just make[s] the better schools become better and the worse schools become worse because ‘needy’ kids have got to go somewhere…what you end up with is these ghetto schools that have got all the kids that have been rejected by everybody else…it’s a bit like kind of wearing shape underwear, it might flatten your tummy but you know [the excess flesh] moves up there from down there…it doesn’t get rid of it – it moves the problem around.

Concerns about public purpose

As explained earlier, there are key notions that usefully describe schooling in relation to its public and private purposes: democratic equality, social efficiency and social mobility (Cranston et al., 2010a; Labaree, 1997). Democratic equality given its focus on creating active and competent citizens tends to be aligned with the public purposes of schools, while social efficiency and social mobility in focusing respectively on creating competent and productive workers and labour market credentialing are more aligned with private purposes (Cranston et al., 2010a). The participants expressed concern about how market ideologies and, more specifically, the ideologies of competition and accountability were leading to excess attention being given to the private purposes of schooling at the expense of its public purposes. This was particularly apparent in the strong critique, especially in School B, about the excessive focus on, and punitive use of, narrow external accountability measures such as NAPLAN. Mr T, for example, described the current environment as ‘high stakes stuff’ where the Department has ‘threatened and bullied principles’ to ‘prioritise’ NAPLAN results as ‘number one’ (Lingard, 2010).

This prioritising (of the private purposes of schooling) was not only seen as undermining autonomy but also as escalating competition between schools. The respondents were acutely aware of their schools’ performance on external accountabilities in relation to how they compared with other schools and how this affected their school’s status and credibility within the broader education system. This was evident in how staff in each school spoke of their school’s reputation in the community. For example, Mr J noted that the people in his school and the broader community were highly aware of the social and academic hierarchy organising schools in his area. They knew, for example, that his school was preferred in the local community and, as Ms M added, a ‘danger’ to these schools in terms of competition for students. In Ms M’s view, IPS could potentially ‘take the very best’ students in their local area (Dingerson et al., 2008; Lamb, 2007).

Similarly, at School B there was acute awareness of the school’s relative place in the broader hierarchy. Ms K and Ms G named several schools within and beyond their catchment area that were considered both more and less preferable by the community. Much of this preference was directly related to the public accountabilities of MySchool (a website that displays and compares all schools in Australia on the basis of their standardised test results). Ms G explained, for example, that prospective parents consulted the site and confronted her about the school’s performance and that this created pressure for the school because they ‘leaked’ students to preferred (more academically high achieving) schools:

I think it [creates pressure] because I get a lot of Asian parents who come in here…and say ‘so how many OP1s did you get last year?’ And they know, they can tell me, because they’ve done all the research and you know this is why we leak to…better academic schools…we lose students [to these schools] because they’re perceived to be the schools who get the OP1s.

For Ms G the current excessive emphasis on pragmatic goals failed to capture the broad scope of her work with students through reducing education to what can be measured and quantified (see Ball, 2003). She viewed this as inadequate in evaluating what constitutes quality teaching and as adversely impacting on her ESL learners:

…actually I’m having NAPLAN nightmares…The other night I woke up in a cold sweat because I’ve been dreaming of NAPLAN!…it [was] about kids kind of going ‘But Miss we can’t do any more’…‘Miss, please, no more’…because we’re keeping them back after school…kids have been pulled out for extra NAPLAN practice…people are only seeing the outcomes but they’re not seeing what goes in…it actually doesn’t reflect the quality of teaching…we have moved to that outcome mentality where everything needs to be measurable, it’s all about quantifying [but] how do you measure some kids, you know, kind of capacity to better deal with life’s problems?…if a kid [is] kind of is at the end of their tether, I don’t know, with their home situation or with themselves or whatever and then somehow you’ve made a difference and you see them out there and they’re smiling and happy and they’ve got friends, you know, how do you measure that? So and so is smiling! Sometimes I think people will think I do nothing because I can’t show what I do.

In more positive references to public purpose, participants from both schools mentioned their commitment to maintaining their connections with and support of schools in the broader public system. This is important given that autonomous schooling initiatives are seen as undermining public education through failure to share innovation and resources (Darling-Hammond and Montgomery, 2008). As with Mr J’s earlier remarks, Ms K stressed the importance of ‘public’ in the label Independent Public School in her resolve to ‘maintain networking’ with other schools (both IPS and non-IPS) in the region. There were various programmes, for example, that she was involved in, such as leader of behaviour management for the district – a role that she could have relinquished with her school’s conversion to IPS status but which she chose to maintain as a public and ‘moral’ responsibility. Mr J was similarly committed to such public responsibility. He spoke, for example, of not ‘wanting’ his school to ‘just be out there on our own’ and as such was committed to engaging in regional activities. He described the public system as a ‘great support’ with ‘a lot of strength, experience and resources’. In his view ‘cutting’ the school from such support ‘would be stupid’. Such views resonate with one of the original progressive aims of autonomous public schooling – that it seek to connect with and improve, rather than work in isolation from, the public system (Dingerson et al., 2008).

The point here is that the autonomy granted through IPS will have an effect on how the value of public purpose is understood and taken up in schools. When teachers are dogged by the ‘terrors’ of NAPLAN performativity and when schools feel pressured to compete with each other in relation to these external measures, it is more than likely that they will narrow their curriculum and pedagogy to focus on these areas. In so doing the private purposes of schooling in relation to social efficiency and social mobility will be privileged while a focus on the public purposes of schooling in relation to democratic equality will be side-lined (Cranston et al. 2010a). The flexibility of the IPS initiative to ‘shape curriculum offerings’ to ‘suit the needs of students’ (The State of Queensland, 2014) allows this sort of delimitation – as is evident in School B, as Ms G stated earlier, with its shift to an ‘outcome mentality’ with ‘kids [being] pulled out for extra NAPLAN practice’. The freedom of IPS also allows delimitation in terms of school-to-school collaboration. Although such delimitation seemed not to be the case for the two schools in the study, granting schools greater autonomy with regard to the public system amid a high stakes environment can undermine public purpose because it encourages isolation and competition rather than the sharing of innovation and resources requisite to improving the public education system (Dingerson et al., 2008).