Power, Control and Resistance in the Labour Process of School Leaders: The Case of the NSW Public Education System

Abstract

‘Power, Control and Resistance in the Labour Process of School Leaders: The Case of the New South Wales Education System’ is an employment relations thesis that combines an understanding of neoliberal public policy with labour process theory to examine the work of public school leaders. Since 2011, the New South Wales public education system has undergone extensive state-driven change, with ‘new public management’ reform aiming to introduce claimed private-sector efficiencies through the devolution of managerial responsibilities to the local level of the school. Initial reforms failed to improve educational outcomes, and led to system-wide intensification of workloads for staff in schools. As a corrective response, the ‘School Success Model’ was implemented in 2020: a second suite of reforms that claimed to reintroduce centralised support while emphasising shared, rather than local, responsibility.

This research investigates the impact of the School Success Model on school leaders’ work, recognising their position at the nexus of this public policy and its workplace enactment. It adopts a qualitative methodology, including semi-structured interviews with principals, deputy principals, and key stakeholders in public education, to first understand the key challenges in their work during this policy period. It then conducts a labour process analysis of work under new public management to investigate the outcomes of the reform, and identify control mechanisms in the work of school leaders. Further, articulating the constant tensions present in their work, it presents evidence of resistance to these control mechanisms. Its findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of the labour process of school leaders as ‘pseudo-managers’ in the public sector for whom work is increasingly controlled, despite policy rhetoric around either the expansion of local autonomy or increases in centralised system support.