ORCID Profile
0000-0003-0129-0823
Current Organisation
University of South Australia
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Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-02-2017
Abstract: In this article, we interrogate the policy assumptions underlying a significant South Australian public education re-engagement initiative called Flexible Learning Options, formulated within South Australia’s social inclusion policy agenda, beginning in 2006. To this end, we applied Baachi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ policy analysis framework to a historical range of departmental Flexible Learning Options policy documents and evaluations to uncover how Flexible Learning Options (1) understands the problem of early school leaving, (2) defines the notion of being an ‘at risk’ young person and (3) interprets and enacts the intervention process for young people identified as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving. Our policy analysis indicates re-engagement in learning – as measured by improved retention – to be the key Flexible Learning Options policy driver, with schools ‘silently’ positioned as a significant part of the retention in learning problem. The Flexible Learning Options engagement in learning intervention directed at ‘high-risk’ students’ works to remove them from schools into places where personalised support and an alternative curriculum are made available. ‘Lower risk’ students are given a combination of in-school and off-school learning options. Our What’s the Problem Represented to be? analysis also reveals that (1) the notion of ‘risk’ is embodied within the young person and is presented as the predominant cause of early school leaving (2) how the educational marketplace could work to promote Flexible Learning Options enrolment growth has not been considered (3) schools are sidelined as first choice engagement options for ‘high-risk’ young people, (4) secondary school redesign and family intervention as alternative reengagement strategies have largely been ignored and (5) through withdrawal from conventional schooling, the access of many Flexible Learning Options to students to an expansive curriculum delivered by teachers within well-resourced school learning architectures has been constrained.
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2023
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2023
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 30-09-2020
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 2021
Abstract: This paper employs critical policy historiography of South Australian public education as a contextual backdrop that speaks to a hermeneutic phenomenological study of the lived experiences of two former public-school principals, who describe how their ongoing social justice schooling agendas in public education met with considerable departmental resistance. Both resigned at the peak of their public education careers to pursue their schooling vision in the federally funded independent school system which traditionally catered for the wealthy, elite schools and forms the third tier of the complex funding arrangements of education in Australia that has festered for years under the label “the funding wars” (Ashenden, 2016). Changes to funding arrangements opened up the system and gave the opportunity for our two principals to pursue a public vision in the independent schooling sector, free from what they described as the “shackles” of bureaucratic command and control. The phenomenological essence of their journeyed leadership narratives reveals the courage to care , driving their narrative reflections. They perceived that increasing demands of departmental compliance took them away from being able to pursue a socially just vision with autonomy and freedom. Stepping into the uncertainty of their new independent schooling aspirations, the principals felt professional relief and found real autonomy. We conclude with an exploration of the phenomenological notion of “the courage to care.”
No related grants have been discovered for Nigel Howard.