
Brad GobbyEdith Cowan University | ECU · School of Education
Brad Gobby
Doctor of Philosophy
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41
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (41)
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employ...
The Australian Federal and state governments have been introducing neoliberal reforms to the governance of their education systems for a number of decades. One of the most recent programs of reform is the Western Australian Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative. Similar to decentralizing reforms around the world, the IPS program seeks greater...
This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this pa...
In this chapter we adopt the analytic of “assemblage” (Anderson and McFarlane, 2011) to document how New Public Management (NPM) has been mobilized and recontextualized within different nation states over time through the unique combination of discrete yet tangled and globally diffuse political movements and configurations. To make sense of these i...
Devolved governance, school autonomy and marketisation impact the employment practices of schools and the working conditions of teachers. However, the employment-related effects on school services staff are under-researched. This study draws on data from interviews with staff at one public high school to analyse school services staff experience of...
Introduction
A key focus of this chapter is the different kinds of joining up work that make possible the assembling and recontextualization of New Public Management (NPM) within different national and subnational policy spaces. This means documenting how NPM takes hold, endures or becomes disrupted within different national policy spaces as a resu...
In this chapter we adopt the analytic of ‘assemblage’ (Anderson & McFarlane 2011) to document how New Public Management (NPM) has been mobilised and recontextualised within different nation states over time through the unique combination of discrete yet tangled and globally diffuse political movements and configurations. To make sense of these issu...
This paper analyses the composition, distribution, and history of school funding in Australia through a spatial lens (Soja 2010). We explore multi-scalar school funding policy through three layers of economic maldistribution. We sketch the funding disparities between the three school sectors (public, Catholic, and independent) exposing a spatial in...
News coverage of the Thunberg-inspired student climate strikes in Australia in 2019 and 2020 framed school leaders ‘in conversation’ with politicians, education system spokespeople, political pundits, the public and student activists. While previous scholarly interest has mainly focused on the student protestors, we examine the intertextual framing...
Onrushing ecological precarity and collapse disproportionately affects particular humans and their common worlds. This article proposes that in the face of the myriad crises the Earth is experiencing, and the uneven distribution of their effects, extending conceptions of justice in education beyond the human is crucial. This, however, requires honi...
Across the globe school autonomy reforms have been criticised for opening up public assets to various dangers or risks, from misappropriation of public monies by private sponsors to secretive governance structures maintained by homophilic groups. While these risks are not the exclusive product of school autonomy reforms, they are an endemic feature...
In response to the diverse deployments of ‘school autonomy’ in interviews with education stakeholders, we use material semiotics and the concept of ontological politics to theorize school autonomy as ontologically multiple. We analyze interviews conducted in Australia with forty-two school education stakeholders drawn from principal, parent and tea...
A persuasive solution for governments and systemic authorities seeking to improve the quality and equity of outcomes for students has been the localized management of schools. Believed to provide opportunities for context-sensitive decision-making, what remains unclear is how does shifting increasing management to the school-level generate the type...
Neoliberal policies promoting school autonomy reform in Australia and internationally have, over three decades, appropriated earlier social democratic discourses of parental participation and partnership in school governance. Recent school autonomy reforms have repositioned school council/boards within a narrow frame of accountability and managemen...
This article explores ways pre-service teachers learn to work upon their positive emotional conduct during an initial teacher education course. The article argues that education practice today promotes the acting out of positive emotions, creating conditions within which pre-service teachers ethically shape their emotional conduct. Utilising Foucau...
Education Policy Futures (EPF) is a non-affiliated, independent, global forum dedicated to fostering knowledge exchange and collaboration among educators and researchers interested in the geopolitics of education policy futures.
EPF is critical of accounts that either overestimate the coherence of political programmes or reduce change to a residu...
This paper examines principals’ perceptions of school autonomy and leadership as part of a 3-year research project looking at the implications of school autonomy on social justice across four states of Australia (Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Queensland). Drawing on interviews with principals and representatives from principal st...
This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing inst...
This chapter critically analyses the relationship between educational leadership and governance through an examination of key trends in global education reform. Through adopting two perspectives of governance as ‘instrumental-rational’ and ‘agonistic-political’, we demonstrate how governance can be used to enrich studies of educational leadership,...
The Earth is in the midst of a recent acceleration in the rate of species extinction and the unravelling of ecological communities. The authors think with the emerging field of Extinction Studies to explore educational approaches to ecological endangerment and extinction. Using a notion of visiting as ‘curious practice’, we story encounters between...
There remains strong political support for school autonomy reform
within Australian public education despite evidence linking this
reform to exacerbating school and systemic inequities. This paper
presents interview data from key education stakeholders gathered
from a broader study that is investigating the social justice
implications of school aut...
The current COVID19 pandemic has forced major adjustments, often at short notice, on schools and schooling. Educators have been working in a constantly changing environment to continue to deliver for students, families and communities all the while maintaining the necessary supports for themselves and colleagues. In Australia this has led to debate...
School autonomy policies have circulated through various modes of educational governance internationally, endorsing the view that more autonomy will improve schools and their systems. When subject to the discourses and practices of marketization, however, school ‘autonomy’ has been mobilized in ways that generate injustice. These injustices are the...
The impact of neoliberal reforms of education systems on the work of teachers and school leaders, particularly in relation to high-stakes accountability frameworks, has been extensively studied in recent decades. One significant aspect of neoliberal schooling is the emergence of quasi-autonomous public schools (such as Academies in England, Charter...
The public education systems of many countries have undergone governance reforms involving administrative decentralisation, corporatisation and community ‘empowerment’. In this paper, we examine the significance of local participation and partnerships in the context of public school autonomy and their corporatisation. Focusing specifically on the u...
The influence of New Public Management (NPM) on public sector organisation is nowhere more evident or pervasive than in the field of school governance where political actors, school leaders and governors are called upon to make the internal operation of the school more transparent and accountable to others through the explicitness of performance in...
This paper examines conceptions of governance and freedom embedded within a new school autonomy policy in Queensland (Australia). Drawing on interview data from case study research, it foregrounds the practices of two school leaders from a secondary school in regional Queensland. It considers how such conceptions foster an entrepreneurial leadershi...
Discourses promoting the benefits of school autonomy have floated freely internationally since moves in the 1980s to greater devolution in the UK, New Zealand, the USA, Australia and Sweden. The most recent Australian version, Independent Public Schools (IPS), grants school leaders more latitude over aspects of their work. But this autonomy is cons...
In 2009, the Australian states and territories signed an agreement to provide 15 hours per week of universal access to quality early education to all children in Australia in the year before they enter school. Taking on board the international evidence about the importance of early education, the Commonwealth government made a considerable investme...
The Independent Public Schools (IPS) program began to be implemented in some Western Australian schools in 2010. The IPS program devolves a number of responsibilities to principals and is part of the political objective of removing the constraints of the education bureaucracy by fostering school level decision-making, problem-solving and innovation...
This study investigates the current influence of conservative political, social and economic forces in structuring the perspectives of five pre-service teachers on the education of boys. I argue that these perspectives are constituted by a conservative assemblage of essentialist discourses of sexuality and neoliberal capitalism and these largely ex...