A Case for Radical Pragmatic Leaders and Personalised Learning Schools A Case for Radical Pragmatic Leaders and Personalised Learning Schools : Risky Public Policy Business By Andrew Bills A Case for Radical Pragmatic Leaders and Personalised Learning Schools: Risky Public Policy Business By Andrew Bills This book first published 2020 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Bills All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-4867-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-4867-1 CONTENTS The Author ................................................................................................ ix Acronyms .................................................................................................. xi Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Part 1: Risky Public Policy Business Chapter 1 .................................................................................................. 10 Neoliberalism’s Contribution to ‘Falling through the Cracks’ The 2008 Global Financial Crisis ..................................................... 12 Trickle-Down Economics and Struggle Street ................................. 13 The SA youth employment and education landscape ....................... 15 School retention ............................................................................... 17 High School completion ................................................................... 18 The development of the New SACE ................................................ 19 SACE data incongruity .................................................................... 21 The politics of data ........................................................................... 26 PISA data and disadvantaged students ............................................. 28 Federal policy interventions in schooling ........................................ 29 Neoliberal public policy and schooling ............................................ 31 The beginning of the SA Social Inclusion agenda ........................... 33 Chapter 2 .................................................................................................. 37 Why Going from ‘Good to Great’ may not be so ‘Good’ nor ‘Great’ The demise of ‘social justice’ in education ...................................... 38 School reviews in South Australia ................................................... 41 Enter Partnerships 21 ....................................................................... 43 Enter ‘Partnerships’ .......................................................................... 47 Partnerships and NPM ..................................................................... 50 Enter ‘Going from Good to Great’ ................................................... 52 Gaps in dominant school improvement measures ............................ 56 The 2018 DfE School Improvement Handbook ............................... 59 Conclusion ....................................................................................... 63 vi Contents Chapter 3 .................................................................................................. 66 The ‘Tug of War’ between ‘Schooling’ and ‘Education’ School disenfranchisement ............................................................... 66 Public education and educational disadvantage ............................... 67 Disadvantaged students and ESL ..................................................... 68 Schools in context ............................................................................ 68 Scholarly critique of neoliberal policy in education......................... 70 Neoliberal public policy and leaders/teachers’ work ....................... 74 Experiencing schooling injustice ..................................................... 74 What about personalised learning schools? ...................................... 75 Chapter 4 .................................................................................................. 79 Tinkering towards Inclusion, whilst Teetering towards Exclusion Disengaged or disenfranchised? ....................................................... 81 Results from the 2016 Wellbeing and Engagement Survey ............. 83 Discussion of the Wellbeing and Engagement Survey Data ............ 85 Implications of an emotional wellbeing focus for STAR ................. 91 Understandings of risk and ICAN-FLO referrals ............................. 92 What’s missing in DfE STAR interventions? .................................. 97 Chapter 5 ................................................................................................ 100 Something ‘Wicked’ this Way Comes Enter the SA ICAN-FLO policy intervention ................................ 101 The schooling ‘alternatives’ nationally .......................................... 102 WPR methodology ......................................................................... 103 ICAN-FLO ..................................................................................... 105 Part 2: A Case for Radical Pragmatic Leaders and Personalised Learning Schools Chapter 6 ................................................................................................ 126 Negotiating Schooling using Action Research in Neoliberal Times Action Research Story 1................................................................. 126 Action Research Story 2................................................................. 139 Chapter 7 ................................................................................................ 151 Contextual School Improvement rather than the ‘Standard’ Recipe Background .................................................................................... 151 Understandings of Professional Development for New Teachers .... 152 What is ‘taken for granted’ in professional development practices? .................................................................................. 154 A Case for Radical Pragmatic Leaders and Personalised Learning Schools: vii Risky Public Policy Business What do the stories elicited from early career teachers at Intrepid Primary reveal about ‘Being In’ and ‘Feeling Seen’ in professional development? ....................................................... 157 Discussion ...................................................................................... 163 What might these stories mean for how teachers are “In” professional development? ....................................................... 164 What forms of professional development? ..................................... 165 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 166 Chapter 8 ................................................................................................ 169 Appreciative Inquiry for Student Voice and Personalised Learning School reviews ............................................................................... 169 Why position students as pivotal to school review processes? ...... 169 Research approach ......................................................................... 170 Research questions ......................................................................... 171 Data analysis .................................................................................. 172 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 179 Chapter 9 ................................................................................................ 182 Liberating Cleverness and Hope through Research and Inquiry The ‘Grammars’ of Schooling........................................................ 185 Context and methodology .............................................................. 187 Data gathering ................................................................................ 187 The research findings ..................................................................... 189 The personalised nature of the RHH interdisciplinary curriculum ... 191 The personalised nature of the RHH open learning ICT rich learning environment ................................................................ 195 The personalised nature of the RHH ‘contributive leadership’ approach ................................................................................... 198 Discussion of the Findings ............................................................. 201 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 206 Chapter 10 .............................................................................................. 208 Leading Against the Regulatory Grain for Student Learning The public education leadership challenge .................................... 210 Organisational storylines as ideological positions ......................... 212 Context ........................................................................................... 212 Data gathering ................................................................................ 214 Data analysis .................................................................................. 215 Findings .......................................................................................... 215 Discussion of the findings .............................................................. 225 viii Contents Policy recommendations ................................................................ 228 The radical and pragmatic leadership challenge ahead .................. 228 Conclusion ..................................................................................... 230 Conclusion .............................................................................................. 233 A Case for Radical Pragmatic Leaders and Personalised Learning Schools: Risky Public Policy Business The state of public education in SA ............................................... 234 The canary in the mine ................................................................... 235 The ‘wicked problem’ of school inclusion ..................................... 236 Political and bureaucratic risk aversion practices .......................... 237 What then must we do? .................................................................. 241 Wicked public policy problems as opportunities ........................... 242 What Principals can do? ................................................................. 243 Radical and pragmatic hope ........................................................... 245 Appendices ............................................................................................. 250 South Australia public education news stories by Advertiser Education Reporter, Tim Williams (2016-2019) Glossary .................................................................................................. 267 Acknowledgements ................................................................................ 273 References .............................................................................................. 276 Index ....................................................................................................... 311 THE AUTHOR I worked for twenty years as a special education teacher and school career counsellor in disadvantaged public secondary schools attempting to make learning more meaningful and inclusive for young people who experienced it as alienating. I began working with special education students and then took my work into the realm of ‘alternative’ schooling, designing personalised learning programs that kept young people who wanted ‘out’ of schools connected to education through other ways. This called into play contextual and flexible forms of teacher labour with colleagues and ongoing negotiation with community stakeholders to better support the ‘disenfranchised with schooling’ young people we sought to help. In an attempt to better address the phenomenon of early school leaving (ESL), I designed and led three ‘alternative’ learning programs/schools over ten years in three South Australian public secondary school communities. Commonly known as ‘alternatives’, ‘second chance schools’ or ‘flexible learning options’ (FLOs), these ‘safety net’ initiatives have become an attractive option for many early school leavers (ESL) in recent times. However, not satisfied with the educational rigour of ‘safety net’ schools, my colleagues and I worked to create aspirational FLOs proffering ‘turnaround pedagogies’ (Comber & Kamler, 2005) within more ‘personalised’ school learning environments. At the time I wondered: Shouldn’t secondary schools be redesigning themselves in more inclusive and personalised ways to better address early school leaving? In 2014, FLOs catered for 74,000 school ‘dropouts’ across Australia indicating a widespread engagement and inclusion problem with mainstream schooling. Add to this number the 50,000 ESL young people who have left formal education completely (Watterston & O’Connell, 2019). This new figure is a national disgrace. ESL and FLOs are the ‘canary in the mine’, highlighting the scale of the schooling engagement problem, most acute in Australian public secondary schools serving disadvantaged communities. They point to problems with the grammars of schooling and problems with education system policy architectures. They also highlight the need for educational leaders to work more closely together in collective forms of