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Inclusive education in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemicOver the first few months of 2020, the schooling sector shifted to distance education as governments moved to bring the virus, COVID-19, under control. Education sectors rapidly developed online environments. In this milieu teachers have made swift changes to accommodate their students' diverse range of learning needs. In this article we draw on a qualitative study in Australia to identify key challenges and approaches for fostering school connectedness when students with special educational needs are suddenly required to be educated at distance. A heuristic to define school connectedness is supported that involves connecting with supportive adults; a sense of belonging; positive peer relationships; engagement with learning, and the experience of a positive online climate. Findings from this case study signal that, despite the efforts of educators, students who have special educational needs can slip between the cracks and are at great risk of losing connection both academically and emotionally. There were challenges with students who did not engage in online learning at all. Although practitioners in the study worked with parents to provide the structures for curricula to be addressed, teachers working at distance could enhance school connectedness through fostering teacher and student, and student and student relationships.

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Produced through market relations of neoliberal managerialism, teacher subjectivities are becoming progressively commodified. With the increasing casualisation of the teaching workforce, the wellbeing and status of casual relief teachers (CRT) can be seen as an area of concern, at risk of "flexploitation" (Bourdieu 1998, p. 85). More than just a convenient labour pool, CRTs operate on the margins of school communities, a space fraught with a range of issues. In many instances CRTs experience less job satisfaction, less rapport with students and colleagues and less access to school information, professional development, resources and teaching materials. This article draws on a positioning theory to frame the discursive production of casual relief teacher (CRT) selves within the neoliberal milieu. It offers an analysis of collective biographies that explore narrative formations of casual teaching. Schooling discourse is replete with metaphorical language that frame teacher positioning and a range of existing metaphors in CRT literature highlight their vulnerability in particular. Rather than offering an analysis that addresses casual teacher performance as a problem to be solved, this article proposes that the relationship between 'structural marginalisation and the 'othering' that CRTs can experience is associated with the politics of market-related performativity.

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