From marketising to empowering: Evaluating union responses to devolutionary policies in education

Abstract

Major reforms in education, globally, have focused on increased accountability and devolution of responsibility to the local school level to improve the efficiency and quality of education. While emerging research is considering implications of these changed governance arrangements at both a school and system level, little attention has been afforded to teacher union responses to devolutionary reform, despite teaching being a highly union-organised profession and the endurance of decentralising-style reforms in education for over 40 years. Drawing upon a power resources approach, this article examines union responses in cases of devolutionary reform in a populous Australian state. Through analysing evolving policy discourse, from anti-bureaucratic, managerialising rhetoric to a ‘post-bureaucratic, empowerment’ agenda, this article contributes to understandings of union power for resisting decentralising, neoliberal policy agendas by exposing the limits of public sector unions mobilising traditional power resources and arguing for strengthening of discursive and symbolic power. JEL Code: J5

Labour Commodification in the Employment Heartland: Union Responses to Teachers’ Temporary Work

“…The union has struggled to argue against ‘local choice’ of staff due to a large portion of their membership (which includes principals) supporting enhanced decision-making power. This weakened the union’s position entering into negotiations of the next Staffing Agreement (2012–16), which industrially operationalised the flexible staffing powers afforded by LSLD (Gavin et al, 2022). The occurrence of (‘substantive’) recommodification concurrent with (‘formal’) decommodification constitutes a refinement of theoretical analysis through connecting the meso level of labour markets (Rubery et al, 2018) with the micro level of the labour process and the macro political economy (e.g.…”

Effects of Monitoring of Teaching and Learning on the Implementation of Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) in Early Childhood Development (Ecd) Centres in Meru Central Sub-County

“…These findings agree with Pangrazi and Beighle (2019) primary school principals must oversee curriculum implementation and offer sound suggestions on programs that will improve teaching and learning in their classrooms. Further a study by Sidow [30] contented that principal's supervision has a great influence on the implementation of the competency-based curriculum in public secondary schools in Mogadishu, Somalia [31][32][33][34][35].…”

Collaborating for policy impact: Academic-practitioner collaboration in industrial relations research

“…At a state (NSW) level, recent policies (e.g. Local Schools, Local Decisions (LSLD), introduced in 2012), have brought renewed attention to devolution and marketisation, by enhancing school principals' authority around staffing and financial management, while encouraging enhanced community involvement in local decision-making (Gavin et al 2022). From the view of the NSWTF, neoliberal policies such as LSLD have imposed demanding and time-consuming tasks onto schools at a state-based level, intensifying work and decreasing job security, with the union arguing for many years that devolution of responsibility to individual workplaces (schools), without sufficient resources and support, increases pressure in terms of how work is organised and carried out in schools (Gallop et al, 2021).…”