Devolving authority: the impact of giving public schools power to hire staff

Abstract

Governments in the western world are increasingly experimenting with education policies that devolve responsibility for hiring and staffing to the local school level. Driven by forces of neoliberalism, marketisation and decentralisation, such reforms differentially affect schools as a result of various geographic and socio‐spatial factors. This article presents the findings of a recent study of public schools in the Australian state of New South Wales, and the impact that the government's Local schools, local decisions policy has had on staffing and hiring decisions within schools considered ‘hard‐to‐staff’. Drawing on interviews conducted with school principals and representatives of industrial bodies, this article reveals the differential and geographically diverse impact of devolutionary reform on ‘hard‐to‐staff’ schools. It posits that while the reforms facilitate the augmentation of staffing composition and enhanced decision‐making flexibility, the interaction of the policy with existing staffing processes undermines the reform's potential.

Intensification of teachers’ work under devolution: A ‘tsunami’ of paperwork

“…The increased workloads were discussed in relation to the removal of central DoE services and also the loss of other within-school budgets and support. It is interesting that while teachers clearly perceived these as losses, they can be explained in relation to the new autonomy of principals who are now free to control substantial budgets (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2016). This aspect of the changing form of management that governs teachers' labour process was not highlighted by the respondents.…”

“…In the state of NSW, reform in recent years has brought a renewed focus to devolution and marketisation policy previously associated with, for instance, the de-zoning reforms of the late 1980s (Considine, 2012;Sherington and Hughes, 2012). Current reforms such as Local Schools Local Decisions (LSLD) (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2016) have sought to devolve authority to school principals, while a focus on teacher quality has been evident in policies such as Great Teaching, Inspired Learning (Stacey, 2017). Documents such as these have worked in tandem -and at times in tension -with federal intrusions into education as evident in the Rudd/Gillard Labor government's 'Education Revolution', which sought to encourage competition between schools through the publishing of literacy and numeracy results on the My School website (www.myschool.edu.au), and which was associated with a shift from a focus on quality teaching to more prob-the 'free market' (Connell, 2013;Wilkins, 2018).…”

Teachers, school choice and competition: Lock-in effects within and between sectors

“…However, there has been less focus on teachers’ working conditions in relation to the current context of choice, competition, marketisation and privatisation (Lundström and Parding, 2011). This is especially true from the perspective of the diversified labour market and its implications (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, in press). Below, we outline previous research relating to teachers’ working conditions and school choice.…”

“…The Australian context is a unique, yet generally accurate representative of the transnational Global Educational Reform Movement (GERM) (Sahlberg, 2015). Indeed, additional to the above focus on encouraging choice through the creation of differentiated marketplaces, there have also been recent moves to devolve schooling across the states (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, in press). The GERM is also evident in the introduction of teaching standards and the publication of the results of standardised testing (which test only ‘literacy’ and ‘numeracy’) on the My School website.…”

“…Teachers accumulate transfer points based on length of service in these schools. Staffing appointments to a proportion of vacant positions are made to the teacher with the highest accumulated transfer points (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, in press).…”