Executive Summary
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The work of Principals is highly complex.
At any one time the Principal is undertaking a number of activities, all
of which demand specific combinations of professional practices. Further
more, these activities are not isolated from one another but are connected
in the school ecology. Section A suggests that the sociocultural practices
that comprise Principals' work may easily be reduced to generic lists of
competencies but the everyday reality and lived experience of Principals
is such that this neatness rarely comes anywhere near what actually happens
in its complexity, a rich mixture of competing demands and multi-focussed
activities.
The Principal's job is primarily educational
and professional. Contemporary social and policy trends demand the full
range of Principal practices, but emphasise and recognise some more than
others. Policy reforms rely on a rich set of Principal knowledge and skills,
habits and dispositions while offering an incoherent learning and career
pathway and a minimalist approach to classification and remuneration.
Section B argues that the Principal's work
does not occur within an impermeable black box called a school. It is influenced
and shaped by global trends:
- the decline of tradition and authority
- the rise of global communications
- the further internationalisation of the
economy
- changes in work organisations
- changes in identity and
- the emergence of the risk society
These all appear in the work of schools and
Principals, and in the values, cultures and behaviours of the students
who enter our classrooms. This places new demands on schools and their
Principals, who are increasingly left to resolve significant social issues
and tensions, by themselves, at the local level, unsupported
by policy.
Principals work is also significantly shaped
by the actions of governments and their bureaucracies. Section C details
the ways in which federal and state governments have placed economic concerns
at the centre of decision making in response to globalisation, and how
the recent reform of school education, best understood as a process of
institutional re-regulation, has changed the work of teachers, parents
and students. In addition, changes in the management of the public sector
impact particularly on the work of Principals as they become subject to
a common framework of corporate performativity and accounting. In a climate
of increased criticism of the public education system, significant expansion
of the private school sector and an increasingly market driven approach
to enrolment and curriculum, further pressure is placed on Principals to
put what time and space they do have available into efforts to keep their
school, and the public education system, viable and in good public esteem.
Educational research strongly suggests that
reform and innovation require not only resources but some loosening of
controls. Successful reform is driven by locally developed and centrally
supported educational and curriculum change. The literature suggests that
schools and their Principals are not merely implementers of policies and
that it is counter productive to see them as such. They cannot accommodate
competing policy demands, each of which acts as if no other exists and
as if the school is a blank page waiting to be written. The emphasis in
the research on student learning and professional involvement in participatory
processes speak strongly for a Principal who is focussed on educational
issues as the 'prime mover' of her/his practices. At present, the Principal's
capacity to move in research supported reform directions is hampered by
the top down and bureaucratic approach of current education and public
sector policy.
Section D argues that there is considerable
evidence to suggest that school administration is getting harder, that
Principals work longer hours, in a climate that is more uncertain than
ever before. This is entirely congruent with social, organisational and
work trends across the world. Principals are currently faced with:
- Leading and managing a school in a context
of paradoxes and tensions
- A significant increase in managerial work
- Working in a readjusted hierarchy
- Working in the context of scarcity
- A complexity of reform tasks
- An hierarchical approach to reform
- A lack of recognition of difference, and
- Working in a high pressure context.
But public policy rhetoric, rather than reflecting
this complexity, tends to simplify, to narrow down the agendas to something
that appears to be manageable and is easily saleable to an imaginary public.
Unfortunately, society, young people, neighbourhoods and the task of schooling
are not amenable to such reductionism. This policy failure leaves school
Principals and staffs largely unsupported in their attempts to find more
holistic responses. Political and bureaucratic attempts to allocate and
specify costs and responsibilities in minute detail, to minimise risks
from litigation and poor publicity, and to present an image of rational
management create a only superficial neatness. The current lived reality
for Principals is one of patchy communication, inefficient delivery of
the necessities to deliver policy promises, isolation and a climate of
performativity, where coercion, blame and punishment form an organisational
dark side that rarely occurs, but is always possible.
Because the current political and organisational
approaches lack the ability to 'see' what the Principal's work entails,
current industrial arrangements fail to build in and reward all that school
leadership and management now demands. There is an inherent paradox in
working for policy change and arguing for remuneration of the current work
arrangements. Section E suggests that this is a challenge that SASPA must
meet both pragmatically and politically.
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