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Teacher education is broadly seen as a policy problem in that it has failed to produce sufficient 'classroom ready' teachers. One accountability measure that has been introduced in Australia to address this purported problem is the capstone teacher performance assessments (TPAs). All Australian pre-service teachers must pass this hurdle assessment to be eligible for teacher registration, and all teacher education providers must provide evidence of the effectiveness of their programmes in producing classroom ready teachers to maintain accreditation. The research presented in this article investigated the experiences of a consortium of teacher educators from four Australian universities that implemented a nationally endorsed TPA known as the quality TPA (QTPA). Intelligent professional responsibility was used to consider the experiences and possibilities for educators working in a policy context characterised by increasing accountabilities. Our findings suggest that the introduction of the TPA in Australia created momentum for building collaborative national teacher education partnerships with a focus on improving programme quality and graduate readiness to teach. Our data illustrate how the introduction of a TPA policy mandate in Australia created an external accountability context that allowed for teacher educators to bolster the quality of teacher education programmes from within.

Texts such as curriculum and policy documents work in complex ways to coordinate teachers' work and approaches to diverse genders and sexualities. Although it might be assumed that official, mandated curricula determine teachers' curriculum choices, little is known about the extent of textual influences on how teachers represent genders and sexualities in primary schooling. This institutional ethnographic study investigated how the Australian national curriculum coordinated teachers' curriculum decisions in one Australian primary school. Drawing on the work of Dorothy E. Smith, we found that teachers and school leaders use "multiple" institutional texts to guide curriculum choices. Although diverse genders and sexualities are visible in the Australian Curriculum (minimally so), we found curriculum and related policy texts were shaped by an ideological code that conceals diverse sexualities and genders. We argue that dominant hetero-cis-normative practices embedded in chains of texts remain powerful, shaping representations of genders and sexualities in primary schooling.

Bhutan is in the preliminary stages of training teachers to support inclusive education. This study investigated teachers' views on preparation for inclusive teaching using a case study that was conducted with twelve pre-service and twenty beginning teachers in six schools. Data were drawn from focus-group interviews and open-ended questionnaires. The application of Vygotsky's social cultural theory and Bandura's self-efficacy theory was appropriate and acknowledged the social systems surrounding learning. Socio-cultural theorisation was used to consider where people lived, and social and cultural factors; while self-efficacy theory enabled an exploration of teachers' willingness to implement inclusiveness. Findings are presented in four key areas: education for all, barriers, policy and attitudes towards inclusion. This study contributes to inclusive education research in South-West Asia and policy goals and practice in Bhutan.

Internationally, changes to university funding arrangements have put pressure on the workloads of tenured academic staff and increased the reliance on casual academics to backfill teaching and research positions. Limited research has focused on the effects of casualisation on research academics and the institutions in which they work. This paper draws on interviews with 26 contract researchers, who have worked in the US, UK, and Australia. Drawing on the construct of 'Othering', identified in our interviews we explore the work of academics employed casually or on contract. Using a Foucauldian lens to make visible and disrupt regimes of truth about academic work, we found that there are numerous ways in which institutional discourses and practices marginalise casual academics and conceal the challenges they face. We argue that the disruption of dominant discourses about academic work is one way of supporting academics whose employment is insecure.

Australia has recently implemented Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs) as a national accreditation requirement to assess final year preservice teachers' classroom readiness. In 2019, an Australian university developed a TPA to meet this requirement, comprising three written components and one oral component. This exploratory study investigated 18 TPA assessors' perceptions of the oral component. Focus group data revealed that both explicit and latent assessment criteria influenced assessors' professional judgments of the oral component. A discourse competence framework was used to analyse the data, illustrating how preservice teachers' personal experience and their professional and institutional discourse competence are evident in their orals. Thematic analysis revealed that benefits and issues of fairness and equity contributed to assessors' perspectives about the value of the oral component.

Despite the diversity of entry points into academia, little research exists examining the experiences and impact of precarious employment at different life stages. Drawing on interviews with 19 academics employed casually or on fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, this paper illustrates how precarious employment is experienced at different life and career stages. Using Foucauldian understandings of power and discourse alongside a life-course sociological approach, we explore how parenthood, relationships and life decisions are shaped by precarious employment in the academy. Discourses around academic 'pipelines' and 'early careers' obscure the experiences of those entering academia as a second-career; and those in long-term precarious employment. These employment structures have deep personal, professional and financial impacts. By identifying the intersection between precarious employment and life stages, we argue that an understanding of the effects of precarious employment requires further, urgent attention to support the diverse needs of academics.

School improvement reforms aimed at achieving improved student learning remain high on the agenda for leaders across the globe. The purpose of this paper is to understand the leadership attributes that enable school leaders to bring about positive change. This qualitative study is based on interviews with school leaders (school principals and their deputy principals) and focus groups of six teachers in two case study schools. A realist approach is used to understand how leadership attributes spark related social mechanisms that lead to improved outcomes. Data analysis generated four leadership attributes: (1) valuing diversity, (2) support for staff, (3) collaborative leadership style, and (4) valuing teachers' professional learning. Each of these was found to have influenced decision-making and sentiment, which generated positive school improvement outcomes in the two case study schools. These findings have the potential to contribute to professional learning which can improve understanding of how leadership attributes in context bring about school improvement.

In Australia, policy makers demand school leaders focus on raising student achievement levels when planning and implementing a school improvement (SI) plan. This paper explores the SI process for two Australian primary schools deemed to be underperforming and underwent a priority school support review (PSSR). In this study, 2 principals and members of their leadership team and 10 teachers across 2 schools were interviewed to explore how they experienced the PSSR process at different stages of the review process. Two assistant regional directors assigned to supporting the two schools during the PSSR process were also interviewed. The findings suggested that initially, school principals wondered how a PSSR would impact the morale of teaching staff already working hard to support student outcomes. However, as the schools progressed through the process, the principals' perspectives shifted to see the PSSR as a valuable process for building leadership and teacher capacity and improving student outcomes.

Neoliberal reform of the university sector has resulted in increasing numbers of academics employed on casual or fixed-term contracts. While there is an emergent body of literature on issues of precarity in the academy, relatively little attention has been paid to the roles and responsibilities of those tenured academics who employ and "manage" non-tenured researchers. The work involved in hiring and managing a contract researcher is rarely acknowledged or supported, and managers receive little to no training. In this paper, we draw on Dorothy Smith's feminist sociological approach to analyse interviews with 22 non-tenured researchers to examine how managerial relationships shape the employment experiences of those working precariously. We argue that tenured academics have ethical responsibilities to provide a working environment that is fair, supports the ongoing development and wellbeing of non-tenured staff, and challenges dominant discourses of precarious academics as 'other'.

This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophisticated knowledge base about the influences, constraints and diverse experiences of boys as readers in society today. Drawing on interviews (n = 30) with Year 4 (8 to 9-year-old) boys at six schools, we consider their personal recounts of their enjoyment in reading, their preferred reading choices and narratives related to their experiences as readers at school. Analysis highlights boys' emerging reading interests, sophisticated and specific reading preferences, and changes in reading identities over time. Boys' preferences for particular fiction authors, novel series and genres dispute the common assumption in educational contexts that boys prefer to engage with non-fiction books. This finding is significant, as negative gendered stereotypes can impact on boys' reading self-concepts. It is also critical given Jerrim and Moss's recent research highlighting the importance of fiction in the development of reading skills. We consider implications for pedagogical practices that broaden reading experiences for the diversity of emerging masculine reading identities in nations such as Australia, where there is an absence of reading for pleasure in education policies.

How feedback is understood and enacted has shifted from the traditional practice of providing individual feedback on summative tasks at key points to a more ongoing series of dialogues between the teacher and students during the teaching period. This paper reports on the experiences of designing faster feedback through weekly dialogic feedback loops to enhance students' personal connection to their learning while providing teachers with faster, actionable feedback data to inform learning design. A pragmatic inquiry considered how benefits might potentially be amplified through the use of digital technologies. Data included student reflections collected via the GoingOK web application, interviews and focus groups. The findings identify and theorise four types of digitally mediated feedback loops: students in computer-mediated dialogue with themselves; students and teachers in dialogue with each other; the reflection on how feedback informed learning; and the sociotechnical dialogue informing ongoing technical design. Three design dilemmas that were experienced by teachers as they enacted digitally mediated dialogic feedback loops are articulated, alongside the principles that enabled responsive design. Understanding these design elements is fundamental if automation of some parts of the feedback loop through reflective writing analytics is to be considered both feasible and desirable. Implications for practice or policy: (1) Digitally mediated feedback loops can facilitate faster feedback, enabling students to reflect on their learning and providing teachers with access to new insights about diverse learners; (2) Feedback technology can challenge existing ideas about feedback; (3) Faster feedback can save teachers time, but efficiencies are likely to depend on an increased human workload in the short term as automation technologies can be slower to develop; and (4) Sociotechnical innovation requires collective dialogue between educators and digital developers, across asynchronous timelines.

In an era when evidence-informed decision-making is mooted as a means of achieving equity, data are now being used to revive the in-school stratification of students, despite sustained concerns around the long-term negative consequences of these practices. This institutional ethnography explores how teachers use data in their everyday work, and how evidence-informed decision-making supports the logic of grouping students by ability. Research data are drawn from two Australian schools where achievement data were used to group students, in response to requirements to use evidence-informed practices. This had implications for enacted curriculum and pedagogies, as teachers used grouping to differentiate instruction. Although there were no formal directives to group by ability, a cascade of performance management policies was implicated in the rise of these practices. This use of data was normalised, and ability grouping practices were evident from the early years of schooling onwards.

The global neoliberal context and the emergence of new forms of 'governance by numbers' is now recognized as a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. In this context, large-scale assessments such as are used to justify marketised ideals of education that rely on comparison by numbers. In Australia, one of the key arguments for large scale standardised testing is that it increases transparency and provides parents and policy makers with important data; and that it ultimately drives student achievement. Although standardised assessments purport to improve transparency, limited attention is given to how the quantification of education changes the nature of teachers' work. This institutional ethnographic study investigated how student achievement data on standardised tests served to reorient the work of teachers in six Australian schools. As educators increased their efforts to 'improve their data' these efforts limited alternative curriculum and pedagogic possibilities, such as fostering student creativity in the teaching of writing.

This article is an extract from a longer research article originally published in the journal "English in Education." It describes a parallel situation in Australia where high-stakes assessment led to stereotyped writing, endless test practice and widespread student disengagement.

Purpose: The central argument in this paper is that ethical school leadership is imperative in a context of increasing performance-driven accountability. The purpose of this paper is to focus on school principals' perceptions of how they understand ethical leadership and how they lead the ethical use of data. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study utilises semi-structured interviews with six state school principals (one primary and six secondary) to explore their perceptions of ethical leadership practices; and how they balance current competing accountabilities in a context of performance-driven accountability. Findings: There were four key findings. First, principals used data to inform and direct their practices and their conversations with teachers. Second, while ethics was a central consideration in how principals' led, practising in an ethical manner was identified as complex and challenging in the current context. Third, Starratt's (1996) ethical framework proved to be relevant for interpreting principals' practices. Finally, all of the principals referred to dilemmas they faced as a result of competing priorities and all used a variety of strategies to deal with these dilemmas. Originality/Value: While there is a small body of research that explores school leaders' understandings of ethical tensions and dilemmas, there is little research that has focused on school leaders' understandings of the ethical use of data. This study, then, contributes to this area as it provides a discussion on school principals' leadership practices in the current climate driven by data use.

Australia has recently implemented Teaching Performance Assessments (TPAs) as a national accreditation requirement to assess final year preservice teachers' classroom readiness. In 2019, an Australian university developed a TPA to meet this requirement, comprising three written components and one oral component. This exploratory study investigated 18 TPA assessors' perceptions of the oral component. Focus group data revealed that both explicit and latent assessment criteria influenced assessors' professional judgments of the oral component. A discourse competence framework was used to analyse the data, illustrating how preservice teachers' personal experience and their professional and institutional discourse competence are evident in their orals. Thematic analysis revealed that benefits and issues of fairness and equity contributed to assessors' perspectives about the value of the oral component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Texts such as curriculum and policy documents work in complex ways to coordinate teachers' work and approaches to diverse genders and sexualities. Although it might be assumed that official, mandated curricula determine teachers' curriculum choices, little is known about the extent of textual influences on how teachers represent genders and sexualities in primary schooling. This institutional ethnographic study investigated how the Australian national curriculum coordinated teachers' curriculum decisions in one Australian primary school. Drawing on the work of Dorothy E. Smith, we found that teachers and school leaders use multiple institutional texts to guide curriculum choices. Although diverse genders and sexualities are visible in the Australian Curriculum (minimally so), we found curriculum and related policy texts were shaped by an ideological code that conceals diverse sexualities and genders. We argue that dominant hetero-cis-normative practices embedded in chains of texts remain powerful, shaping representations of genders and sexualities in primary schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]