Principals’ support for teachers’ working conditions in devolved school settings: Insights from two Australian States

Policies, principals and points of tension

Devolution of schooling has long been an issue of political significance in Australia, variously articulated in response to particular political climates and governmental goals (see Smyth, 2011; Suggett, 2015). The argument for devolving school systems based on the needs of students and communities, for instance, is considered by some (e.g. Fitzgerald and Rainnie, 2012) to have been co-opted by neoliberal approaches to schooling which devolve responsibility onto local actors in response to economic, rather than educational, imperatives. Such reform is visible in both of the states reported in this paper, with the Independent Public School (IPS) initiative introduced in WA in 2009, and the Local Schools, Local Decisions (LSLD) reform announced in NSW in 2011, both attempting in their own way to devolve greater control – and responsibility – to school communities. In these policies, elements of decision making are devolved to principals around staffing and budget. It is worth noting, however, that such changes have occurred alongside the further centralisation of decision-making in relation to curriculum and assessment, as seen in the advent of a national curriculum as well as testing regimes such as the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). In this system accountability is strengthened and, simultaneously, responsibility for educational outcome is shifted on to teachers and principals.

Both of these ‘school autonomy’ policies have been implemented through differently-selective, state-managed ‘opt-in’ systems with ‘229’ LSLD schools ² in NSW subject to policy change earlier than the rest of the state. In WA, the majority of government schools are now independent public schools. Such developments in policy have been seen to have particular effects on both the nature and scope of the principal’s role. It has been argued that the IPS initiative in WA has led to an increase in principals’ workloads as well as ‘an increasingly CEO-like management role’ (Education and Health Standing Committee, 2016: 65). Similarly, it has been argued that the LSLD reform in NSW is shifting principals’ roles away from that of ‘educational leader’ and towards that of ‘business manager’, again with a higher workload including increased responsibility over financial matters such as school staffing (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017). Notably, while NSW has not adopted precisely the same devolutionary model as WA, thus far the IPS and LSLD models appear to be at least somewhat similar in their effects.

Within this policy context, three significant points of tension for principals are evident. First, principals provide leadership to school communities whose needs are broader than just national or international standardised testing programs. School communities vary significantly and their needs reflect differing socio-economic, geographic and teacher supply factors (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017). Pressure to focus on external accountability measures to the detriment of local needs can exist (Lingard and Sellar, 2013).

Second, effective school performance is seen to reflect the quality of the principals’ leadership. While the performance of the principal is not uncommonly ‘read from’ student achievement data, and a positive link between autonomy, accountability and student achievement has been identified by some (e.g. Caldwell, 2016), principals’ influence over student performance is ultimately indirect (Orphanos and Orr, 2014). A more direct influence, however, can be had on staff, with Orphanos and Orr (2014) identifying that more positive perceptions of leadership can lead to increased teacher job satisfaction and collaboration.

Yet third, the development of trusting and collaborative professional cultures is further challenged by an altered employment relationship between principals and teachers. Staff appointment, retention, discipline and even removal processes can alter the relationship when they are local-site situated, rather than administered by centralised bureaucracies; this has been seen particularly in rural and remote contexts (Clarke and Wildy, 2004; Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017). Contexts with ‘tight’ autonomy structures, where principals are required to comply with ‘external, managerial accountability demands’ (Moos et al., 2008: 349) – such as Australia – have also been seen to constrain relationships between principals and staff, encouraging, in the parlance of situational leadership theory, a focus on ‘telling’ rather than ‘selling’ (Moos et al., 2008).

The Australian Professional Standard for Principals

Further complicating this picture has been recent interest in formally codifying the work of principals through the development and introduction of the Australian Professional Standard for Principals (the Standard). The five practices required of Australian principals and now articulated in the Standard are: (a) leading teaching and learning; (b) developing self and others; (c) leading improvement, innovation and change; (d) leading the management of the school; and (e) engaging and working with the community (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL), 2014: 11). Of particular relevance to this study, the Standard observes that, in their

…changing role, today’s principals are expected to master increasingly disparate tasks, some of which include recruitment and succession planning, significant management of staff, responsibility for and allocation of resources, establishment of priorities, policies, programs, and courses, and control and management of facilities. It is a time consuming and challenging role (AITSL, 2014: 1)

Given that there has arguably been both a political and academic focus in recent years on the quality of teaching and teachers at the expense of broader systemic issues (Stacey, 2017), the release of the Standard – especially when viewed in the context of devolutionary policy change – suggests that principals may be the new (or renewed – see Chadbourne, 1996) target of school reform efforts which focus on ‘fixing’ individuals who are seen as failing to meet ever-increasing expectations for school, system, and nation renewal. It is not only the Standard which indicates this focus; for instance, the recent NSW School Leadership Strategy opens by stating that ‘within schools, after the quality of the teacher in the classroom, the quality of the person leading the school makes the most difference to student results’ (NSW Government, 2015: 1). Such statements can uphold a neoliberal perspective on the role of individual actors as almost solely responsible for student achievement and school success. A corollary of this is that support for such individuals can be overlooked, and replaced with problematic discourses such as that of personal resilience (Price et al., 2012) instead of systemic provision; indeed, recent research indicates that principals’ mental health is not good (Maxwell and Riley, 2016). We therefore contend that the development of the Standard, coupled with the devolutionary reforms of IPS and LSLD, constitutes a policy context for principals of increased neoliberal ‘responsibilisation’ (Stacey, 2017; Torrance, 2017).

Space, place and the management of teachers’ work

The (re-)emergence of a spatial turn in education research is part of a broader and deeper (re-)assertion of space in critical social theory. Brock (2013) traces the origins of a turn to geography in education research to the 1980s, but points significantly to a return to spatial analysis of educational issues from around 2000. Within this realm, Holloway and Jons (2012: 483) point out that despite ‘schemes directly designed to address’ inequitable provision, ‘multiple axes of social difference, as well as urban/rural divides, continue to shape access to school education’. Hanson Thiem (2009: 160) puts this phenomenon into the context of state restructuring, discerning that ‘[i]n compulsory schooling systems, commitments to uniform provision (while never perfectly realized) have declined in the context of welfare state retrenchment. New quasi-market regimes close undersubscribed schools and force others to compete for enrolments, thus reinforcing both inherited and engineered inequalities in supply’. Robertson and Dale (2002: 479), in promoting the concept of ‘neoliberal localism’ in New Zealand, discern a ‘local state of emergency’ arguing that:

the combination of decentralisation of governance and marketisation of access to schools results in the local concentration of ‘problems’ and ‘risks’ in areas that have been rendered least capable of responding to them in the manner assumed in neo-liberal governance.

Another recent piece of research relevant to our study focuses on the effects of the LSLD policy’s staffing devolution in ‘hard-to-staff’ schools (which can have higher concentrations of students with greater needs; significant proportions of inexperienced staff; and high teacher turnover). Here Gavin and McGrath-Champ (2017) discern that the geographical effects created by devolving school systems are highly localised:

Because of the particularity of place, where even slight differences mean that the same catalyst (devolution of staffing) is experienced differently, it is difficult to make comparative generalisations about the effect of the reforms on different ‘hard-to-staff’ schools. This problematises policy rhetoric which privileges local space but fails to acknowledge the embeddedness of schools in different spaces (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017: 270).

Process

This article analyses interview data gathered during 2014 and 2015 in NSW and WA. The team interviewed 30 secondary school principals across these states. We conducted 23 interviews with principals working in NSW schools and 7 interviews with principals in WA. The NSW schools included two of the ‘229’ LSLD schools, and the WA schools included four IPS schools. A purposive heterogeneous sampling strategy was used that sought to recruit principals based on their school’s socio-educational status (ICSEA values) and school’s geography (metropolitan/provincial/remote) and the degree of school autonomy (inclusion in IPS/LSLD programs). The professional public sector principals’ association and teacher unions in NSW and WA helped to facilitate the recruitment process.

The interviews lasted one hour on average and covered a range of topics, including introductory information about the participant and their school, their various understandings of policy and their perspectives on how these played out within their school. Interviews were conducted in a range of professional contexts, including at professional association meetings.

Analysis

Interview transcripts were subject to a range of inductive analyses, drawing on the grounded theory approach articulated by Strauss and Corbin (1998) and utilising nVIVO© coding software. Using an inductive approach enabled the data to ‘speak for itself’. This qualitative analysis was completed by two of the team members, who discussed and refined the generation of codes and categories and cross-checked coding of data to build veracity and validity in the analysis.

Surface, or open coding, was conducted in two ways. First by collating responses to each of the three questions and coding each response, using codes which drew directly on the language of the respondents. Second, the responses were further explored in terms of the language they employed, through word frequency analyses and the production of word clouds. These word clouds helped build our tacit understanding of the language and orientation of principals’ responses.

Axial coding, examining relationships between school context and data codes, was also conducted. This analysis involved disaggregating different groups of principals, by school socio-educational status (ICSEA values) and by school geography (metropolitan/provincial/remote). Comparing and contrasting the responses and language used across diverse school ICSEA and geography revealed variations in responses indicative of trends related to school contexts. This analysis provided an account of the interrelated concepts in the data, in this case mapping out how socio-educational disadvantage and geography relate to principals’ conceptions of their changing role and the conditions of work they seek to develop for their teachers.

Principals’ understanding of their role in supporting teachers’ conditions of work

As already indicated, a surprising finding of this research was principals’ difficulty – and at times, apparent inability – to articulate an understanding of teachers’ working conditions as well as how these may be supported by them at school level. This was a constant regardless of whether principals worked in a newly ‘autonomous school’ environment or not. This was surprising given both the importance of principals in creating environmental supports for teachers (Orphanos and Orr, 2014), as well as the policy shifts outlined earlier which frame principals’ roles more fully as being concerned with management, something that is relatively new within government sector schooling. While we do not take the view that principals should have increased control over teachers’ conditions, it is the apparent lack of any real sense of influence which we found concerning. Yet given the dramatic shifts in principals’ roles, discussed later, the principals’ lack of eloquence on working conditions is also understandable. As we shall explain, principals report that under devolution policies they are now subject to many professional demands that they have not had specific preparation for.

When asked what conditions they sought to create for the staff within their schools, our participants’ responses were found to fall into one or more of five thematic categories;

Re-focussing.

The first of these, re-focussing, occurred when principals actually did not answer the question but rather sought to re-orient the discussion by speaking instead about students: ‘the student is the centre of everything that we do’; ‘the best thing I can do as a leader is to make sure the classroom hums’. Similarly, one participant expressed the non-sequitur that ‘there’s a real focus on teaching and learning as the core of what we do’ before concluding her response with the statement ‘I’m not quite sure what else to say in answer to that question’. Despite new policy directions which give principals increased and different responsibilities for school management – including in relation to staff – principals’ roles are still framed as ultimately being about students. The AITSL Standard, for example, is stated as intended to ‘empower school leaders across the country to develop and support teaching that maximises impact on student learning’ (AITSL, 2014: 3). Furthermore, most principals likely developed their understandings of school leadership in contexts where school-based management was not yet made policy. This legacy, combined with the policy rhetoric outlined above, may to some extent explain the practice of re-focussing that we observed.

The second theme, powerlessness, was evident in responses which suggested that principals felt the working and employment conditions of their staff to be something external to their own role within schools. Such conditions were seen as part of a ‘set up agreement with the [trade union] [in an] industrial landscape which is unchangeable which we…have no influence over’. Similarly, another respondent commented that ‘we don’t have much leeway’. This tension between devolved control and the retention of state-based systems prompted our research team to question just what the relationship between principals and teachers is within this new policy landscape, as well as what it should, or should not, become. The presently indistinct nature of this relationship with current policy documents indicates a need for such questions to be asked.

The third theme, responsibilisation, involved principals seeing staff as needing to be responsible for themselves rather than actively supported by school management, and reflected a more extreme position on teacher autonomy. Comments such as ‘teachers have to be accountable’; ‘I have high expectations of everyone’; ‘I find most of the time that teachers are not good at communicating what they need’ reflect this attitude. These statements also reflect current, arguably neoliberal discourses of teacher quality (Stacey, 2017), supporting our earlier point about principals as a new or renewed frontier of school reform efforts which focus on ‘fixing’ individuals. Responses reflecting such shifts were, however, in stark contrast to responses which were categorised under the fourth theme of care, where answers that involved attempts to support staff were provided. However, these remained often vague attempts to, in one response, ‘make everyone’s job easier’, or in another to ‘just try to be nice to them; I tell a few jokes’.

Interestingly, recalling our earlier discussion of the geography of education, a spatial pattern emerged, particularly regarding these latter two themes. The spatial patterns we observed within the data are summarised in Figure 1. Principals working in provincial or remote contexts tended to fit into the care category, with more thoughtful – though still not always clear – responses to this question than their more advantaged, generally metropolitan-located peers. According to one WA principal of a provincial school that had gone through an Expert Review Group (ERG) evaluation, ³ ‘I think a lot of it has to do with how you relate to your staff and acknowledge that it is a crap [difficult] time’. A NSW principal of a remote school, meanwhile, referred to the importance she saw of teachers having ‘that feeling of being loved and cared for’. Metropolitan principals were more likely to respond in a way that reflected concerns with teacher responsibilisation, or to deflect the question to the first theme of re-focussing. These findings may be related to the greater concern that can be felt by principals in rural and remote schools for attracting and retaining staff (Cuervo, 2016; Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017), reflecting the centrality of spatial differences in education, and raising concerns as to how this may be being further exacerbated by current choice policies (Hanson Thiem, 2009; Robertson and Dale, 2002; Doherty et. al., 2013)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Principals’ support of teachers’ working conditions by location and ICSEA.

The final category of responses centred on distributive action. In our data, distributive actions were reflected in comments related to physical infrastructure – often regarding the provision of ‘nice coffee’. More substantive responses focussed on issues of staff professional development or the provision of period allowances, or less commonly, mentoring and team work initiatives or discipline policies. Such responses were often found to come from principals in provincial settings, where a greater ethic of care was also evident. Principals from these geographical locations were also more likely to give a response indicating the second theme of powerlessness, all of which supports our thesis regarding spatial distributions of privilege and how these play into experiences of work within schools.

It is important to note, however, that while the patterns evident in Figure 1 were clearly apparent to the research team, they should not be viewed in any kind of reductive manner. Many principals gave responses that covered a number of thematic categories, and some metropolitan school principals demonstrated greater levels of ‘care’ than their peers – generally, but not always, those with lower ICSEA scores: ‘you do whatever has to be done to support people’; ‘you’ve got to be a human being’. Furthermore, for some schools, additional constraining or enabling factors were clear, related to the nature of the school itself – for instance, greater marking loads were noted in selective schools, issues of student violence and isolation were reported in disadvantaged schools and provincial/remote schools respectively, and different levels of flexibility with funding and staffing were noted in ‘229’ LSLD schools (NSW) and IP schools (WA). These nuances reflect the complexity of work in schools and the importance of acknowledging local, potentially less visible, mediating factors when analysing the experiences of those working within them.

Changes to the role of the principal

In light of the unanticipated responses outlined above, we examined other data within the same suite of interviews to understand this outcome more fully, aware as we were of the tensions within the current policy context and how they may relate to principals’ relationships with their staff. Specifically, a consideration of principals’ views on their role and how it had changed was illuminating. As noted, principals’ roles as articulated in policy have changed in recent years, at both national (e.g. AITSL, 2014) and state levels (Fitzgerald and Rainnie, 2012; Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017). Principals concurred that their roles were different now, becoming more administrative and ‘business’ oriented, and moving away from a focus on teaching and learning: ‘I’m more the business manager, I’m more the captain of the ship’; ‘I reckon I’m more of a manager than I am a principal’. The nature of the role, however, was not all that had changed – it had also expanded. This, we felt, potentially – and at least in part – explained the unexpected responses regarding teachers’ working conditions detailed above. An examination of the data revealed that, overwhelmingly, principals’ roles had expanded to the point of being almost unmanageable. In the words of our participants: ‘the actual workload intensification just for the principal is extraordinary’; ‘it gets bigger and bigger almost day by day…there’s just so much there you’re never going to actually get it all done’; ‘I just think we are overwhelmed with how much we have to do’; ‘I think the workload intensifies all the time’; ‘there’s just a phenomenal number of things that have been added to the job’. Comments like this occurred in every interview and supported earlier work on, for instance, the LSLD reform (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017; Martin and Macpherson, 2015), as well as our identification of a focus on principals in the current performative climate.

Such changes were also tied up in what seemed to be an increase of accountability: as one participant noted, ‘now you have to be able to provide evidence for everything’. However, despite this, there was a reluctance to label changes as entirely to do with accountability. In WA, for instance, ‘they don’t even use the word “accountable” they use “responsible”’. This semantic consideration perhaps reflects some of the ambivalence also seen in how principals felt regarding the LSLD and IPS initiatives and their related technologies. As Gavin and McGrath-Champ (2017) have demonstrated in relation to the initial LSLD ‘pilot’ schools, although the NSW reforms had brought an increased workload, the accompanying sense of control was much appreciated by principals. For whilst almost all principals reported feeling overworked, most described the changes as either inevitable and/or necessary, a response also described by Chadbourne (1996): the changes were occurring, in the words of one participant, for ‘the right reasons’. Yet despite this, many principals lamented the effects of the changes – as expressed by one, ‘I don’t want to be a business manager. I’m a teacher’. Principals in metropolitan schools more often spoke in favour of the changes than those in provincial or remote schools, which may again reflect that these latter schools can face somewhat greater complexity in their work, with new changes to their roles consequently presenting a greater challenge. This had also led in some cases to negative effects on principals’ health – ‘people are feeling totally smashed and their health is suffering’. The AITSL framework does little to indicate support in response to such issues, stating that principals must be ‘committed to their own ongoing professional development and personal health and wellbeing’ (AITSL, 2014: 16), effectively relying on principals’ resilience in overcoming such obstacles. This is a problematic strategy, with such discourses seeking the solution in the individual rather than the system (Price et al., 2012), and it is a policy position that supports our point about principals as targets of neoliberal responsibilisation within schools.

Principals’ own support (or lack thereof)

When viewed in the light of principals’ self-reported experience of overwhelming change, over-work and poor mental health (the latter supported in recent work by Maxwell and Riley, 2016), their responses to questions of support for teachers during this period of change become more understandable. The picture is even more concerning when we consider the responses given by principals to the question of whether or not they themselves felt supported, given all of the new demands being made of them. Generally, principals felt there had been inadequate preparation for their new role and what it had come to involve. Principals commented that they had had ‘very little preparation’ for the changes: ‘I mean, if you miss one email you don’t even know [the new information or change is] there’, supporting earlier findings in NSW from Martin and Macpherson (2015). Most participants responded negatively to the question about whether they had enough professional development themselves, one stating ‘no, not at all, not at all, and I think that a lot of people feel very anxious’. However, this was usually seen as a problem of time or the quality of the training rather than opportunity. One principal noted that ‘there’s the constant conflict’ in choosing how to spend one’s time. Many more commented on the ‘ad hoc’ and inadequate nature of the training provided by the Department, which was depicted as ‘hit and miss’, ‘varied’, ‘not so crash-hot’ and ‘a bit tokenistic’. Generally, metropolitan principals were more satisfied with their professional development, which may reflect their closer proximity to opportunities for professional discussion. What was seen as more valuable across the board, however, was professional learning undertaken independently, or – crucially – that provided by professional bodies such as the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council (SPC), something flagged in earlier research as a likely outcome (Martin and Macpherson, 2015), and referred to frequently in the NSW interviews: ‘the other support that is there now that wasn’t there years ago is the massive support of the principal’s council’; ‘I think the SPC does a great job’; ‘a lot of it’s supplied by the SPC though rather than the Department’. This kind of more unofficial support was also flagged as critical by WA respondents – the collegiate network was described by one principal as ‘probably the only support principals get now’. As one NSW participant phrased it, ‘the higher you climb the lonelier you become’, and professional networks were seen as vitally important to the work of the principals in this study.