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Issues in Educational Research, 23(1), 2013 19
Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in
Western Australia
Brad Gobby
Curtin University
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 paper argues that IPS can be understood as an
instance of ‘advanced liberal government’. It then explores the enactment of IPS in a
Western Australian high school. This paper suggests that while IPS was designed to
empower principals from the constraints of the Department of Education, and principals
are taking up the flexibilities offered by the program, some principals may be
experiencing a lack of support and resources that imposes constraints in their capacity to
innovate and problem-solve.
Introduction
This paper explores the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative developed in Western
Australia in 2009. IPS is promoted as a program that cuts the “unnecessary red tape”
(Liberal Party of WA) of bureaucratic decision-making by devolving decision-making
closer to the people who know most about the local context and those affected by it –
principals, parents of students and the local community. IPS involves a mix of local
responsibility and central regulation. Schools selected for the program assume the
authority to make decisions related to curriculum, student support, human resources,
recruitment and selection, payroll, financial management and building and facilities, while
centralisation largely remains in such areas as policy and strategic direction, performance
monitoring and measurement, and curriculum. Since the launch of the IPS program in
WA in 2009, similar policies are now being developed and implemented in Queensland,
New South Wales and at the national level by the Federal Government.
Like other Western liberal democracies, school autonomy and devolution have been a
fixture of education reform in Australia over the past few decades, however until recently
it has been ad hoc and highly provisional, not constituting for the most part a coherent
reform program, save for the Kennett government’s Schools of the Future (Directorate of
School Education, 1993) program in Victoria. Nevertheless, the educational case for
school autonomy is mixed. Decentralisation and school autonomy has been variously
characterised as an attempt to drive efficiencies and reform teachers’ industrial platform
(Gavrielatos, 2011), a positive innovation that will improve student learning, and as a
political-economic reform that disadvantages the already disadvantaged (Whitty, Power, &
Halpin, 1998). In Western Australia (WA) the IPS program has been implemented largely
free of research or the sober judgments of evaluation and the WA government has
expressed its intention to expand the program to as many public schools as possible. It is
20 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
the purpose of this paper to provide some insights into the IPS program and its
enactment in WA schools.
This paper argues that the IPS program can be understood as an attempt to reconfigure
the organisation and management of the WA Education System according to the
rationalities of advanced liberal government, as described in the neo-Foucauldian research
of Rose (1999) and Dean (1999). In particular, the program conforms to other self-
managing trends insofar as it encourages principals to become problem-solving
professionals who can innovate in response to local conditions (Popkewitz, 1996). This
paper explores the enactment of the IPS initiative through two interviews conducted with
a principal of an IPS school, with the goal being to understand how the IPS policy is
“translated from text to action” (Ball, MacGuire & Braun, 2012, p. 3). The interviews
reveal that IPS fosters problem-solving at the local level, however this capacity in some
instances is limited by the added responsibilities of IPS and the effects of a district
restructure. These, I argue, interact with the enactment of IPS in ways that may frustrate
the program’s goals of added flexibility and autonomy.
The expert case for school autonomy
What is the ‘expert’ case for decentralisation and school autonomy? That is to say, what is
the case made by those with authority to speak on matters of school governance? School
autonomy is the corollary of the idea proposed for a number of decades that devolving
responsibilities from large bureaucratic organisations to smaller entities variously produces
efficient, effective and democratic organisations and outcomes. The source of these
arguments is varied. With the growth of identity politics and its associated discursive shift
from representational to participatory democracy from the 1960s, feminist and progressive
critiques laboured on the failure of public bureaucracies in Western liberal democracies to
deliver on participatory ideals in a world increasingly populated by an active, empowered
citizenry (Dean, 1999; Gough, 1979). At the same time that these critiques were made,
studies in bureaucracy and management construed public bureaucracies as comprising
structures and processes that agitated against achieving their objectives effectively and
efficiently (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992; Peters & Waterman, 1982). Such criticisms
resonated with the economic analyses of public choice theorists who pointed to the public
bureaucracy’s economic and political shortcomings (Buchanan & Wagner, 1977). Official
reports from the 1970s into the management of the public sector ushered in an era of
reform shaped by these criticisms under the banner of New Public Management (Hood,
1991).
Unsurprisingly, the anti-bureaucracy discourse was brought into the remit of education
systems. The case against centralised education systems was made by a wide variety of
researchers in the areas of critical and cultural analysis (Rizvi, 1994; Smyth, 1993),
education organisation research (Sergiovanni & Carver, 1973), education management
research (Caldwell & Spinks, 1988; 1992), and the school effectiveness research, which has
had a long tradition of arguing for the benefits of school autonomy (Reynolds et al., 1976;
Sammons, 1999). There should be no doubt that decentralisation was construed through
Gobby 21
the discursive limits of each expertise where the case for decentralising reform was
mounted. The case for decentralisation was sometimes based on psychology, and was at
other times overtly ideological (Chubb & Moe, 1990). Those like Rizvi viewed devolution
as a means to realising a social democratic ideal of empowered, self-governing
communities, while Rutter, Maughhan, Mortimore & Ouston (1979) emphasised the
power of ‘school effect’ against what they viewed as the tide of social determinism in the
work of cultural education theorists. While the cases for decentralisation were wide and
varied, there was nevertheless a common target. Fostered by the putative self-evidence of
the problem of bureaucracy, the common goal was to facilitate change in the government
of education by reducing the influence of the education bureaucracy and ‘empowering’
those who work in schools.
More recently, the case for greater school autonomy has been advocated strongly by
political actors operating at the international level, notably the OECD (Lingard & Rizvi,
2006). Quantitative research conducted by the OECD supports the growing trend of
decentralisation and the fostering of education markets. Comparing education systems
around the world, the OECD concludes that decentralised school systems perform better
than centralised ones (OECD, 2004). The OECD also conducted an analysis of the 2006
PISA science knowledge and skills results. Researchers conducted interviews with
principals from over 57 countries who reported on their level of autonomy across a range
of matters. Comparing students’ test results and the reports of principals, the OECD
concluded that school systems with high autonomy, that give schools power over course
content and budgets, perform better regardless of whether the schools which the children
attend have high degrees of autonomy or not (OECD, 2007). In short, system level
decentralisation appears to be correlated with high student performance. The benefits of
system decentralisation were confirmed by subsequent analysis of the PISA results, which
also found that local control over the hiring of staff was associated with high performance
(Schütz, West & Wöbmann, 2007). It is also claimed “there is not a single case where a
policy designed to introduce accountability, autonomy, or choice into schools benefits
high-SES [socio-economic status] students to the detriment of low-SES students” (Schütz,
West & Wöbmann, 2007, pp. 34-35). Finland, with its decentralised system of schooling
that fosters innovation and collaboration, is viewed as a model of a high performing
system (Schleicher, 2011).
However, the case for school self-governance is not beyond doubt. Research including the
meta-analysis of data into decentralisation conducted in the 1990s failed to demonstrate
any significant direct link between school self-management and improved learning
outcomes (Malen, Ogawa & Kranz, 1990; Summers & Johnson, 1996). A study conducted
in Victoria, Australia, following self-managing reforms in that state found no direct cause
and effect between the decentralisation of decision-making in planning and resource
allocation, and improved learning outcomes for students (Caldwell & Spinks, 1998).
Caldwell (2012) suggests, however, that a new wave of research, more attentive to the link
between decentralisation and learning outcomes than previous research, has emerged that
supports the case for decentralisation. In that research, improved learning outcomes can
be achieved in particular circumstances involving local decision-making. Improved
learning outcomes are registered in decentralised systems where local control of budgets is
22 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
accompanied by certain accountability mechanisms, such as external exams (Wöbmann et
al., 2007), and where purposeful links are made between self-management capacities and
improving the teaching and learning in classrooms (Bullock & Thomas, 1997; Caldwell &
Spinks, 1998; Levacic, 1995). The case increasingly being recommended to political
authorities, at least at an international level, is that decentralisation in itself does not
improve system or school improvement. However, decentralisation can improve school
performance if attention is also paid to addressing certain features of a school’s
‘ecosystem’, which include instruments of accountability, the social and cultural capital of
schools (Caldwell & Spinks, 2008), the quality of teaching, and the effectiveness of school
leadership (Hargreaves, 2010).
Even if decentralisation is pursued with policies that address schools’ eco-systems,
questions still surround the unintended consequences of devolution and the deregulatory
policies associated with it. There is evidence that as administrative tasks are devolved to
schools, schools experience an excessive administrative burden (Blackmore, Bigum,
Hodgens & Laskey, 1996; Starr, 1998; Whitty et al., 1998), and the work of principals
becomes less about driving educational improvement and more about managing risks
(Thomson, 2009), managing the business of schools (Gewirtz, 2002; Gewirtz, Ball &
Bowe, 1995) and being entrepreneurial (Grace, 1995). Further to this, the deregulation of
school choice that often accompanies decentralisation has been documented to produce
unfair student selection practices in some schools (Gillborn & Youdell, 2000), to
advantage privileged students more than students from low SES background when
measured against student test results (Schütz et al., 2007), and in some cases to “intensify
the gaps between schools serving the rich and those serving the poor, gaps marked by
growing differences in school size, student intake, resources and achievement” (Lamb,
2007, p. 29). Whitty et al. observed that “for those schools ill-placed to capitalize on their
market position, the devolution of responsibility can lead to the devolution of blame”
onto parents, teachers and students (Whitty et al., 1998, p. 113). This produces unintended
consequences that cost the system as a whole, particularly for students and families who
lack the cultural and financial capital of their peers. There is even concern about this
expressed in the research supporting decentralisation. Schütz, West and Wöbmann (2007)
concluded that while students perform better where private schools operate, the evidence
is less clear as to whether choice among public schools has a significant positive effect on
student achievement.
It is not the purpose of this paper to validate or debunk the findings of these experts in
management, organisations and education in order to support or invalidate
decentralisation as a policy objective. What the above description attempts to do,
however, is to map out some of the key ideas and findings of experts that provide the
context and intellectual resources for the pursuit of policies of decentralisation. Of
particular interest is that there appears to be a political commitment to decentralisation
and school autonomy despite the mixed findings about its efficacy and effects. It is this
political commitment that arguably continues to maintain decentralisation as an object of
investigation by the various ‘expertises’ of education and agents of education policy. This
may explain the more recent research that construes school autonomy as a means to
facilitate transformations in certain features of the ecosystem of schools that other
Gobby 23
researchers have established are so crucial to improving educational outcomes, such as
quality teaching. Whether these transformations could be pursued within centralised
education systems is a moot point. Clearly the political tide is in favour of school
autonomy.
Advanced liberal government
How, then, can we understand decentralisation as a political objective? And what role has
political thinking and action played in the emergence of school autonomy? A fruitful way
to understand and examine school autonomy and IPS in particular is by using the insights
of Foucauldian research on government. There are three points I wish to make in relation
to this. First, IPS can be understood as an instance of a broader shift in how political and
government authorities are rationalising and enacting government. Second, government
and programs of government, like IPS, can be studied at the level of the individual and his
or her practices. Third, the activity of government is a complex, provisional and
congenitally failing enterprise. Let me describe these in turn.
Advanced liberal rule
There has been a transformation over the past half-century in how government is
rationalised and enacted in many Western liberal democracies. This shift has been termed
advanced liberalism. The term ‘advanced liberalism’ developed out of the Foucauldian
studies in government (Foucault, 2007; 2008), notably the work of Rose (1999) and Dean
(1999). It refers to the emergence of particular kinds of rationalities and modalities of
governing in the late 20th century in many Western liberal democracies. Encompassing
what is commonly known as neo-liberalism, advanced liberalism signals a wider field of
governmental rationalities and technologies that emerged in the post World War Two
period. Forming out of a critique of social liberal rationalities and modalities of governing,
those commonly linked to the ‘welfare state’, advanced liberalism conceptualises the
wellbeing of individuals and nations in terms of the capacity of individuals to seek
personal self-fulfillment and empowerment through industriousness and enterprise, and to
exercise their freedom to better themselves particularly through the facility of choice
making (Rose, 1999). For political authorities it has increasingly became a matter of moral
obligation and patriotic duty for individuals to take responsibility for themselves and their
future, rather than expect the state to secure them from need and risk. Here the individual
is assumed to be, and is constituted as, an entrepreneur, an enterprise, a problem-solver, a
consumer, an autonomous chooser, and an empowered and an active citizen. This
reconceptualisation of the subject of government has also brought about a re-thinking of
how the public sector and political authorities and their instruments should operate. In the
late 20th Century political authorities and governmental agents have increasingly been
tasked with setting and optimising the conditions that enable responsible self-regulation in
the form of enterprise, personal independence, productivity, and the exercise of choice.
This has led to political authorities seeking to create market mechanisms for competition
and choice in areas of public provision such as health and education. Dean (1999)
describes advanced liberalism as ‘reflexive government’ because the ends of government
are being folded back upon the instruments of government.
24 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
Dean’s description aptly fits with the contours of recent school reform. As a
governmental technology, schooling and its bureaucratic organisation has been
problematised according to the advanced liberal governmentalities of flexibility,
autonomy, choice and empowerment. Accordingly, the problem with school systems is
conceptualised in terms of the regulatory constraint imposed on it by education
bureaucracies, the delimitation of choice and organisational flexibility, the failure to
empower principals and school communities, and the failure of school systems to be
responsive to the needs and interests of citizens, which include local communities. The
Federal Government describes this in terms of the need for education systems to be
subject to “improved market design – so that we work to create the conditions in which
markets serve the public interest through vigorous competition, transparent information,
greater choice and becoming more responsive to the needs of service users” (Gillard,
2010, p. 5). These goals are to be folded back upon the school system, as an instrument of
government. This involves rendering school systems more effective, responsive, flexible,
enterprising and innovative through devolving decision-making authority to schools,
whilst encompassing these school in a range of decentralised and centralised regulatory
techniques, knowledges and practices, which include the discourses of management,
market mechanisms, performance management techniques and policy frameworks that
steer schools at a distance. These enable schools to become relatively autonomous entities.
Government as the practices of the self
Importantly, advanced liberal government, like any activity of government, works not by
the ideological infiltration of people’s minds but by linking political and governmental
rationalities to individual practices and conduct. It was Foucault’s contention that
government in liberal societies functions not by dominating people’s minds and bodies
but by shaping how individuals exercise their freedom. Knowledges, techniques, practices
and strategies in which individuals are implicated, such as those derived from the
expertises of the social and human, shape the thoughts, conduct, beliefs and desires of
individuals. These constitute ‘technologies of the self’ insofar as they are employed in the
practices of self-formation and individuals’ own self-government. Liberal government
relies upon developing individuals’ capacities to govern themselves responsibly, within
certain defined parameters.
In relation to our present discussion, then, advanced liberal rule can be understood in
terms of the employment of knowledges, techniques and practices that shape the exercise
of principals’ freedom in the direction of enterprise, choice, innovation and problem-
solving. Popkewitz conceptualises this as changing patterns of governance by cultivating
‘problem-solving’ capacities of teachers in decentralisation reforms. In effect, political
rationalities shape the “modes of action that act upon the dispositions, sensitivities and
awareness that enable individuals to be productive and self-autonomous actors”
(Popkewitz, 1996, p. 29). Hence, the cultivation of the innovating, decision-making and
problem-solving principal reflects the modes for the exercise of political power across the
educational field. By shaping principals’ personhood, principals and the field of education
are rendered governable to ends specified by political and governmental authorities.
Gobby 25
The messy actualities of governing
Although we can identify this wider transformation of government, this perspective needs
to be accompanied by an analytical approach that is sensitive to what Larner (2000)
describes as the “messy actualities” (p. 247) of governing. The concern here is not to
assume that government policy and programs unproblematically realise certain ideologies
and policy frameworks. Rather, studies in governmentality often examine the complex,
pragmatic and contingent nature of governing. For instance, Rose & Miller (1992, p. 190)
describe the pragmatic nature of government in terms of how a “sublime image of a
perfect regulatory machine is internal to the mind of programmers”, yet, “the world is not
itself programmed”. Their point is that programs of government and the political
rationalities and ambitions they embody are limited in their capacity to territorialise a
governable field because: they are made operable through mundane and often technically
limited techniques and technologies; they depend upon the activities of people across
disparate departments and sectors of society not necessarily subject to centralised
coordination; they are deployed in domains that comprise individuals and groups that
exert their resistances and pressures; they embody and co-exist with heterogeneous and
often rivalrous discourses and rationalities and technologies of government; and because
programs of government cannot absolutely anticipate people’s responses they often
produce unexpected problems. In short, the ‘will to govern’ is not matched by the capacity
to govern absolutely. Consequently, “the aspiration to govern is accompanied by a
constant registration of failure, where ambitions do not meet outcome and the need to do
better next time” (Rose & Miller, 1992, p. 191).
Given the above points, while we may locate school autonomy within a broad trend in the
rationalisation and enactment of government, the enactment of policies and programs of
government on the bodies and in the minds of individuals is provisional, contextually
shaped, and rife with conflicts and contradictions (Ball et al., 2012). They are, in a sense,
experimentations with the organisation of reality, activity and being. It is the purpose of
the following section to examine the IPS program as experimentations with governing, by
paying attention to how the programs of government enacting advanced liberal
rationalities are themselves being received, adopted and enacted.
The Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
In WA, successive government policies related to the public sector and education have
produced a partially decentralised education system. Until 2011, schools were aligned with
fourteen regional education offices that steered schools in their local district through local
area planning. Principals had responsibility for creating and reporting to the local office on
school improvement and development plans. Until more recently, the central Department
of Education managed large parts of school budgets, procurement, school enrolment,
recruitment and employment. Over the past decade there has been a loosening of
Departmental regulations. Some principals have been given authority to opt out of the
central placement process and to recruit and employ staff on merit. The School Education
Act 1999 more recently provided greater school-based decision-making, a greater role for
school councils in procuring local sponsorship, allowing some schools to offer specialist
26 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
programs, and some deregulation of school enrolments to enable some students to attend
schools outside of their catchment.
It was not until 2009 that a coherent program of reform to the governance of education
emerged. In the lead-up to the 2008 state election, the Liberal Party announced its
Empowering School Communities policy (Liberal Party of WA, 2008). This document outlined
a vision of public education that involved creating a framework for a system of public
schools where policy and budgets are determined for implementation locally, for schools
equipped to do so. The document takes the position that the strength of the public
education system is frustrated by the incapacity of principals to participate in decision-
making and innovation in response to their local conditions. Following the election, a
Liberal-National coalition was formed and the newly appointed Education Minister, Dr
Elizabeth Constable, was made responsible for implementing the Empowering School
Communities policy. It was determined in mid 2009 that under the IPS program, schools
would have a range of ‘flexibilities’ that include:
• the flexibility to recruit and appoint student support staff and have the discretion to
determine how special needs funding is spent;
• the flexibility to determine a school’s staffing profile by being exempt from central
placement process and having authority to directly recruit and appoint staff, make
early offer of employment to pre-service teachers, and create job designs and
positions;
• the flexibility to manage staff and contingencies through a one-line budget, to
establish a range of reserve accounts, and to use the accounting and financial
procedures and practices they see fit;
• the flexibility to manage facilities (electricity, water, gas, waste) and retain savings;
• creating policy, a business plan and entering into a Delivery and Performance
Agreement with the director general (Department of Education, 2010a).
Principals and the community, with the exception of the opposition Labor Party and the
State School Teachers Union (WA) warmly welcomed the IPS initiative, with one in eight
schools expressing interest in the first round of applications. The following year, the
Department announced the implementation of a further element of the Empowering School
Communities policy. A review of the district office structure determined that from 2011 the
14 education districts were to be reduced to 8 education regions, and the creation of 75
school networks (each with approximately 20 schools). A principal would manage each
network, with that principal released from their school to assist other schools in their
network. The goal of the networks according to the Minister was to move school support
services from district education offices into schools, with the objective of giving principals
and staff power over how these services are delivered and used, thereby enhancing
support to schools (Department of Education, 2010b).
Gobby 27
Enacting the IPS program
This paper relates to a study involving interviews conducted with Education Department
staff and principals of two IPS schools. This paper reports on a case study of one
Independent Public School in the south metropolitan area of Perth and two interviews
conducted with the Principal of this school. Principals are an important group for study
because, as Blackmore (2004) observes, they are often the point of convergence for
policies and their conflicts, ambiguities and tensions. Interviews were conducted with the
Principal in her school’s first year of the program, and then again in the school’s second
year. The purpose of the interviews was to better understand how the Principal received
and enacted the policy, and to identify any challenges that the program presented.
Sunshine High School
Sunshine High School has approximately 900 students from years 8 to 12. It services a
community with a socio-economic index below the national mean, with student
achievement below the national average. The school has many discipline issues but it also
has a strong pastoral care program and a good attendance record. Bridgette has been a
principal for more than a decade, with half of that time at Sunshine High School.
Bridgette fully endorsed the IPS initiative. She was keen to assume the role of manager of
her school’s business affairs including taking on responsibilities for staffing, managing
budgets and maintenance, creating a business plan, and promoting the school to the wider
community. She felt that she was better placed than the Department to make decisions for
her school based upon its local needs and context. She also described how her experiences
with the Department had constrained her attempts to act in the best interests of the
school. She recalled how she had struggled unsuccessfully for years to convince the
Department to replace a damaged water pump, who instead chose to spend money fixing
it numerous times. But being an IPS school enabled her to finally find a solution to the
problem. She was able to consult directly with the executive directors responsible for the
IPS program and they supported her decision to buy a new water pump. Bridgette valued
this everyday decision-making, observing, “… getting rid of some of the red tape was seen
as something that may make the school’s executive life a little easier”.
But principals like Bridgette have not just embraced this capacity to run the everyday
affairs of their school. Like many of the principals who have publicly supported IPS, one
of the key features welcomed by Bridgette was the capacity to employ staff. Under a
centralised system, teachers were allocated to schools without regard to whether there was
a fit between the school and the teacher. For Bridgette, this limited her capacity to
improve the quality of teaching at her school and therefore to lead her school to improved
student engagement and outcomes. But through the authority to employ her own staff
Bridgette reasoned that she could make a big difference to the school and the learning
experiences of her students:
28 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
I guess it comes back to a lot of the research base that indicates that quality
teachers make the biggest difference to the educational outcomes of students. In
an area where every school is trying to improve the outcomes of their students,
maintaining quality teachers in the school is our priority. We’ve experienced
substandard teachers in the past and we know the impact that has on the
students and the culture of the school, so the biggest factor which was up there
as a beacon was ensuring we maintain the quality of teachers within the school.
IPS gave Bridgette the authority not only to advertise positions and select candidates, but
to also subject candidates to a ‘creative’ assessment, where candidates conduct a short
demonstration class for the selection panel. By doing so, Bridgette was able to assess each
candidate’s teaching abilities, and in particular determine if they could develop a rapport
with the school’s students, which she believes is important.
There have been criticisms that school autonomy encourages principals to be
entrepreneurial and competitive, and by implication pursue interests that are not
necessarily education-related (Gewirtz, 2002). Bridgette observed that this has happened
in some IPS schools, but she believed this was occurring in schools in higher socio-
economic communities where those schools could compete with private schools based on
academic ability. In contrast, Bridgette appeared to resist becoming entrepreneurial. She
expressed “a vision of being an effective, efficient school that uses its resources carefully
and gets the best educational outcomes from the kids”, but she did not “have a vision of
being enterprising and entrepreneurial”. While she was an innovator and problem-solver,
she described her managerial style as cooperative. She described how she had refused to
use her school’s first year of IPS to remove teachers who did not fit her vision for the
school, and she did not attempt to take students from state schools in the area. Instead,
she described the collaborative network of public schools that she was a part of and that
she wished to strengthen:
We do things as a group to enable education for students, so I can still be an
Independent Public School within a collaboration, and the two things don’t
create tension because as an Independent Public School I’m not trying to break
those (other) schools and marginalise them. I value them and we need to work
together to provide the best quality education for the kids within this
community. Very different rationale to the other principals in IPS, and many of
them are very competitive because they are working at the high end of the socio-
economic scale… we’re below it, the second half. So, they’re very competitive
because to maintain their market they have to compete against the private
schools.
Bridgette believes that IPS provides sufficient flexibility for principals to run their schools
as they decide. In the case of Sunshine High, this meant building relationships with other
schools and working on a shared vision for the area. This did not mean Bridgette did not
prioritise building the strength of her school. She sought to optimise how Sunshine High
School functioned by professionally ‘growing’ her staff, pursuing a strategic direction for
Gobby 29
the school, and improving the learning experience of her students. These goals were
supported by her engagement with surrounding schools.
Challenges
A number of factors were impinging upon Bridgette’s capacity to be a problem-solving
innovator. After 18 months of being in the IPS program, Bridgette identified limits to her
school’s capacity to fully benefit from the IPS program. Of considerable concern was the
extra administrative burden and responsibility related to recruitment, finances and staff
inductions, an experience not uncommon for self-governing schools (Starr, 1998; Whitty
et al., 1998):
The biggest change that has happened is the amount of responsibility now
placed on principals’ shoulders. So, yes you’re autonomous, but now you’re
responsible for this, this and this. A classic example of that is to do with
recruitment. The Department used to do all of the screening for candidates in
terms of WACOT [now the Teacher Registration Board of Western Australia],
Working with Children check, all those sorts of things, national police check,
we’re now responsible for checking all of these things.
This administrative burden had intensified since the one-off financial grant for IPS
transition had been spent, leaving her without the necessary financial resources to employ
administrative staff that she still required. Bridgette also felt that support from the
Department had been withdrawn, particularly from the Schools Innovation and Reform
Unit, which was established in the Department to support the autonomy of principals of
IP schools:
… So we had a hierarchical system with schools underneath. The system was to
support principals. They’re now slashing all of this and now saying ‘You’re
responsible for that’… The support structures have been reduced, which is quite
interesting. So we used to have the Innovations Unit which supported two
rounds of IPS schools with four directors in there. We now have four rounds of
IPS schools and three directors, so it’s very much that the support has been
withdrawn. But when you think of the model of autonomy you’ve got to say is
that, it wasn’t made clear at the beginning that that was going to happen, it was
like ‘Now you’re autonomous you make all the decisions da da da da… you
won’t need all of that support’
For Bridgette, the capacity to innovate and enterprise was being circumscribed by external
factors that left her “tied to her office”. This was exacerbated by the district re-structure
that began in 2011. This had blurred the lines of responsibility and access to information,
and removed a valuable resource for Bridgette. In her first interview, Bridgette spoke
positively about her relationship with her district director and its invaluable support for
her as a principal, but she was unaware that this support was going to be removed. With
the district restructure, however, that director was no longer available to her and the new
30 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
director became responsible for approximately 240 schools. Bridgette expressed
disappointment about the reduced support and the loss of a valued mentor:
As you go through the system you always had a performance manager who you
could actually have a conversation with in a regular way to say ‘Look, I’ve been
thinking about doing this what do you think?’ Or ‘Blah, blah, blah, what do you
think?’ As a principal now I have no one because the director general is my
performance manager. So it’s very crucial that you have a network of principals
to work with and to discuss professional issues and generate and consolidate,
‘Yeah, yeah, I’m on the right track here’. That mentoring role has completely
been lost from the system. So, yes, you’re autonomous, but on your own
professional journey. I could be an IPS principal for 15 years; ‘Yes, I’m
responsible for my own professional learning’, but that mentoring and that
discussion component has been lost and that used to be there from a
directorship or from a superintendent as I’ve moved through the system. And
that’s a key role as for every member of our staff, but as a principal I feel we
have been very much left in the cold under this banner of autonomy. So how will
the system continue to grow the IPS principals to make them better principals?
For Bridgette, the district restructure inhibited her capacity to innovate and problem-
solve, the very things that IPS was established in order to achieve. It appears, therefore,
that associated reforms were interacting with the flexibilities offered by the IPS program,
and this was impacting on Bridgette’s capacity to be the kind of principal expected of her.
This problem was exacerbated by her inability to procure the funds needed to build the
facilities needed to employ more staff. Bridgette said:
… the biggest issue is … to take on more responsibility I need more support
staff. To have more support staff I need more facilities. That, I have no control
over. That is always political. So I am stuck. So although I have autonomy to do
some things, I haven’t got the infrastructure to do it.
This problem was also experienced by another IPS principal, Mitchell MacKay, who
received a public rebuke from the Premier for sending a letter to parents advising them
that he was disappointed at the decision not to fund new buildings and renovations to his
school’s aging facilities (West Australian, 2012).
Although still positive about the IPS program, Bridgette’s early experiences had left her a
little disillusioned as she believed that ‘principal autonomy’ had been used as a way to
devolve ever increasing responsibilities to schools without due regard to the capacity of
schools to cope, and without the support schools require to undertake some of these
responsibilities. The problem articulated by Bridgette is not that principals don’t have
enough autonomy, but that innovating and leading is constrained without having access to
the resources and support she needs.
Gobby 31
Conclusion
This paper has suggested that the policy trajectory of increasing school and principal
decision-making power is an instance of transformations in the government of liberal
democracies, termed advanced liberalism. For advanced liberal rationalities of governing,
the welfare of the state and its citizens is to be secured by limiting the reach of formal
political authorities and their instruments, and optimising the capacity of individuals to
exercise choice in response to their needs and local contexts. This also involves giving
individuals greater responsibility over personal and work lives. The Independent Public
Schools program represents an experimentation in advanced liberal governing in the
domain of education. IPS problematises school education in terms of the constraints
imposed by the education bureaucracy on schools, and it consequently seeks to optimise
the decision-making and innovating capacity of principals. As a governmental program,
however, the implementation of IPS must contend with the messy realities of the
education domain. Where it is enacted, IPS produces a range of responses from principals
and it produces unexpected effects.
If the program’s goal is to facilitate greater decision-making at the school level, then the
program is succeeding. The principal reported on here utilised the flexibilities offered by
the IPS program. She relished the freedom to innovatively, efficiently and effectively
manage her school organisations. The exercise of this freedom was shaped by professional
discourses insofar as the principal attempted to utilise the powers granted by the program
to improve teaching and learning. She was attempting this by recruiting teachers she
thought fitted with her school. As can be expected, the IPS program has also produced a
number of tensions and unplanned effects. IPS and the district restructure had presented
some challenges for the principal. While Bridgette welcomed the IPS program, she had
negative experiences related to increased administrative burden, the inability to invest in
the infrastructure that would make employing more staff possible, and a district office
restructure that saw the removal of support. For this principal, there was “another side” to
IPS. The solution to this problem was not more freedom, but more support and resources
from the Department.
This study outlines that IPS is a program that seeks to regulate the modes of conduct of
principals according to the ‘govern-mentalities’ of autonomy, empowerment, innovation
and flexibility. IPS has conceptualised this problem in terms of removing the constraints
imposed by the bureaucracy and devolving to principals the authority to make a range of
decisions related to creating a strategic direction for their school, allocating resources, and
staffing. However, facilitating autonomy and principals’ innovating capacity has produced
its own constraints. In particular, the capacity to innovate and problem-solve has been
constrained by increased administrative responsibilities, the diminution of central and
district office support, and the inability to secure the financial capital required to employ
more staff. It appears that these constraints work against the program’s goals of increasing
principal freedom, innovation, leadership and improving student learning. The question
remains as to whether these effects are being experienced by others outside of the case
study school and whether these challenges threaten the goals of the program, especially if
it leads to principal disillusionment.
32 Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in Western Australia
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Dr Brad Gobby is a Lecturer in the School of Education at Curtin University. His areas
of research interest include governmentality, the genealogy of the social, and the
relationship between school reform and rationalities of government.
Email: brad.gobby@curtin.edu.au
Please cite as: Gobby, B. (2013). Enacting the Independent Public Schools program in
Western Australia. Issues in Educational Research, 23(1), 19-34.
http://www.iier.org.au/iier23/gobby.html