Principals and the careless erosion of employment standards in the context of school autonomy and marketisation: a case study of school support staff

Abstract

Devolved governance, school autonomy and marketisation impact the employment practices of schools and the working conditions of teachers. However, the employment-related effects on school services staff are under-researched. This study draws on data from interviews with staff at one public high school to analyse school services staff experience of school autonomy and the employment practices of principals in the context of competitive education markets. This case study illustrates how a principal's management of employment and labour relations in a school experiencing declining enrolments and reduced resources impacted the labour and working conditions of school services staff. We argue that the principal applies a calculation of utility-maximisation and entrepreneurship to the non-teaching staff's employment and carelessness to their employment conditions, thereby producing flexploitation that relies on the unpaid time and emotional commitment of their staff to do the best for the students. We recommend systemwide policies and practices that effectively train and support principals to protect the employment rights of all school staff should accompany decentralisation policies where responsibility for staffing is devolved to principals.

Introduction

With processes of devolved governance and marketisation transforming school systems across the world over the past few decades (MacDonald et al., 2023; Salokangas and Ainscow, 2018), the effects on the labour relations and working conditions of public school staff have come under research scrutiny (McGrath-Champs et al., 2019; Peruzzo et al., 2023; Thompson et al., 2022). School autonomy policies in the context of neoliberalism have increased the authority of the principal, intensified teachers’ work, encouraged the use of temporary employment contracts to maximise staffing flexibility, and increased employment insecurity (Charteris et al., 2017; Gavin and Stacey, 2023; Stacey et al., 2022). At the same time, studies indicate schools are dependent on the unpaid time and emotional commitment of staff to do the best for the students (Heffernan and Pierpoint, 2020). This echoes research on the effects of the carelessness of fast capitalism and new public management on de-professionalising teachers’ work over decades, a form of proletarianization and technical disempowerment (Tsang and Qin, 2020).

While principals’ and teachers’ experiences of school autonomy and marketising policies have been widely investigated, scant attention has been paid to the labour and employment relations of school services staff. That is despite these staff being implicated in education policies and their work being essential to schools’ operations. As with many countries around the world, a large proportion of school staff in Australia are school services staff (36%, or n = 191,048) (ACARA, 2022), and includes gardeners, office administrators, business managers and cleaners. School services staff are critical to the effective functioning of schools yet typically exercise ‘little power’ in school decision-making (Thomson et al., 2007: 150), although corporatisation with its focus on markets and financial management means school business managers have become an exception (Starr, 2021). Of the few studies into the work of school services staff in Australia, there is evidence of significant unpaid work, working outside of formal working hours and unmanageable workloads (CSA/CPSU, 2018; Weldon and Invargson, 2016).

That said, the employment-related effects of school autonomy on school services staff are not well-known, perhaps because dominant discourses classify most of this work as ‘non-core’ (Gerrard and Barron, 2020: 10), with their ‘forms of labour undertaken in the shadow of the work of teaching and learning’ (Gerrard and Barron, 2020: 16). While some school services staff are visible to the community and parents, such as front of house office staff, too often their labour and skills go unrecognised and this results in reduced opportunities, work intensification and poor remuneration (Thomson et al., 2007). Unlike teachers, the effects of education policies on school services staff are rarely considered by policy makers or investigated by researchers. We correct this absence by examining the employment-related experiences of school services staff in an Australian school labouring in a policy context of autonomy and marketisation.

This paper reports on an issue that emerged from a research project examining public school autonomy in Australia. It has wider relevance given the globalised educational discourse, policy mobility and policy convergence across nation-states due to neoliberal policy circulation informing school autonomy reform (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). The project did not specifically aim to examine the employment-related effects on school services staff. However, interviews with a small number of staff at one school about how decisions were made regarding work practices and funding furnished rich insights into how a principal enacted their key responsibilities around employment, staffing and budgeting. Using research into how principals engage with marketised systems of school education, we argue using the framing concept of the micropolitics of organisations that the principal's utility-maximising conduct exploits the labour of school services staff and in this instance is indifferent to their employment entitlements. This insight signals a need for greater care and attention to be paid to the employment rights and working conditions of school service staff as well as teaching staff.

Our paper examines issues surrounding the labour and employment relations of school services staff in this context of increased principal discretion over staffing and resource allocation resulting from school autonomy reforms and increased market competition in Australia as the context of the micropolitics of everyday principal/staff relations. Focusing on one case study school, we show how the principal's manner of engagement with school resources and staffing impacted on the employment expectations and rights of school services staff. Though our focus is on one school, Fitzgerald et al. (2018) argue that the interplay between policy and local context matters to how the effects of school autonomy play out through the micropolitics of school organisation. At the same time, local dynamics mediate wider working conditions in professional contexts, a local focus can illuminate specific issues that have wider implications (Parding et al., 2021). We suggest the analysis of this paper has implications for understanding the industrial relations and employment-related effects of marketisation and school and principal autonomy.

Background: neoliberal education policies and the shift to devolved school governance

Situated within state-political relations, school autonomy and the so-called ‘freedom to manage’ have been central to the neoliberal transformation of the state and the education sector through the interrelated policy technologies of markets, managerialism and measuring performance outcomes imposed since the 1980s (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010). New public administration theory argued marketisation and autonomy would rectify the supposed inefficiencies, excessive power and unaccountability of public bureaucracies by promoting competition, managerial know-how and ‘realigning bureau-professionalism into a more subordinated place in the new order’ and thereby reducing professional autonomy (Clarke and Newman, 1997: 82). Teachers were positioned as capturing education policy and devolution would allow consumers of education greater say. The aim was to reconfigure the public service provision by: (a) making decision-making the prerogative of managers, (b) setting agendas based on organisational objectives, performance and resources and (c) foregrounding ‘the calculus of “efficiency” and “performance” as the frame of reference for organisational action’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997: 64). For schools, this has meant ‘all aspects of organizational life can and should be managed according to rational structures, procedures, and modes of accountability in the pursuit of goals defined by policymakers and senior managers’ (Wallace and Pocklington, 2002: 68).

Within this neoliberal framing, government policies to increase school-level decision-making of public schools were initiated in the United Kingdom, Sweden, the USA, New Zealand and Australia (Rizvi and Lingard, 2010; Salokangas and Ainscow, 2018). In the context of marketisation and managerialism, school autonomy reform devolved risk and responsibility to individual schools enabling greater principal discretion and school communities (represented by School Councils or Boards in some instances) to make decisions within predetermined central policy frameworks and procedures. Devolution, policymakers claimed, would ameliorate the so-called problems of centralised education bureaucracies managing schools at a distance, supported by research that school leadership was central to school improvement (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007). Public school autonomy programs in Australia, Europe, the UK and the USA have consequently increased the administrative responsibilities of school principals and/or governing boards for strategic and business planning, day-to-day management, resource allocation and the recruitment, employment and management of staff (Fitzgerald and Rainnie, 2012). School leaders who positively receive these reforms as empowering are drawn into the agendas of political authorities as crucial local agents and mediators of top-down policies (Gunter, 2011), while others struggle to negotiate the tensions between responding to imposed policies and doing the best for their students and for their staff (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007).

Across multiple national contexts and jurisdictions, including in English Academy schools and US Charter schools, products of school autonomy and marketisation policies, teachers report overwork, diminished control over their work, work intensification, erosion of professional autonomy and judgement, and increased insecurity caused by the use of casual and fixed-term contracts (Mathou et al., 2022; Thompson et al., 2022). These effects not only result from external policy impositions but also from principals engaging in ‘flexploitation’ (Charteris et al., 2017: 105) due to constrained resources, reductions in external support and the downsizing and reorganisation of central departments of education. In this context, Mockler et al. (2023: 15) argue, ‘the need to ensure school survival in a saturated market actually gives rise to risk aversion’ and utility-maximising forms of conduct in schools, as well as market-shaping entrepreneurialism.

As a federated nation, Australia's federal government is responsible for funding the Catholic Education and Independent Schools sectors. Australia's eight states and territories have constitutional responsibility for each of their public school systems with federal funding negotiated through agreements collectively with each state government or gained through specific federal policies or programs. Australia's first move to devolution was Victoria's Schools of the Future policy in 1993 which devolved control to principals of one-line budgets based on student numbers to fund all aspects of school organisation. The effects were competition for students within the public system, intensification of principals’ and teachers’ work, ramped up casualisation of the school workforce to gain flexibility, and reduced employment security (Blackmore, 2004).

The most recent iteration of school autonomy reform in Australia, the Independent Public School (IPS) program was partly funded by a conservative federal government offering financial incentives to government schools. Promoted as offering flexibility to schools and the ability for school communities to control their own destiny, IPS gives principals decision-making authority over their school's strategic daily management. The IPS program was introduced in 2010 in Western Australia (WA) following years of partial and ad hoc attempts at decentralisation. IPS was tried and halted in Queensland because it encouraged competition between public schools. In New South Wales (NSW), Stacey et al. (2022) found the Local Schools Local Decisions policy of 2012 (not IPS) led principals to maximise workforce flexibility and reduce costs by using fixed-term and temporary teaching contracts to gain responsiveness to policy and market shifts. This ‘internal flexibilisation’ (Mathou et al., 2022: 3) has increased employment insecurity and the exploitation of non-permanent and early career teachers (Gallant and Riley, 2014). Devolved governance has also created teachers’ unmanageable workloads, as it is inevitably accompanied by increased accountability and a tsunami of paperwork (Fitzgerald et al., 2019; See et al., 2022; Weldon and Invargson, 2016). Frequent systemwide and principal led curriculum and policy changes leave teachers feeling exhausted, overworked and demoralised (Fitzgerald et al., 2018).

Principals' work has also increased with staff recruitment including teachers, administrative, cleaners and after-hours school programs, requiring the appointment of human resource managers as well as financial managers (Heffernan and Pierpoint, 2020). Stacey et al. (2022: 56) found NSW has ‘constituted a devolved employment settlement for Department employees, with greater decision-making regarding individuals’ employment in the hands of local principal “managers” rather than the state’. Given the variance among state jurisdictions, working conditions therefore vary considerably between schools within state-run public school systems (Parding et al., 2021). These working conditions are mediated by organisational and contextual factors including the principal, school location, socio-economic status and school type (Fitzgerald et al., 2019). Crucially, principals are often insufficiently trained for the new management responsibilities expected of them (Gavin and McGrath-Champ, 2017; McGrath-Champs et al., 2019), such as managing staff and working conditions. Principals often cannot explain, and struggle to develop, desirable working conditions, some of which can be out of their control (McGrath-Champs et al., 2019). Teachers are concerned about opacity around resource allocation decisions (Gavin and Stacey, 2023). Hence, the ‘right to manage’ mantra of new public management has not always been matched by ‘the responsibility to manage well’ (Plimmer et al., 2017: 22).

In respect to school services staff's labour, it is often invisible to school leaders and can result in poor employment conditions depending on individual schools and principals (Thomson et al., 2007). Gerrard and Barron (2020) argue that school services maintenance staff (in their case cleaners) are positioned as providing peripheral services and this positioning enables the invisible erosion of their employment conditions (e.g. through privatisation). Of the few reports undertaken, Weldon and Invargson (2016) found in Victoria, the first Australian public system to be devolved, that administration/operations staff were predominantly women, with only 37% on average able to complete work during formal work hours, over 77% undertaking additional duties beyond their position description, and 20% working beyond paid attendance hours two to three times a week, with 3.6 h a week on average worked at school outside paid attendance hours in a typical week.

Consequently, set ‘over and against the older policy technologies of professionalism and bureaucracy’ (Ball, 2003: 216), corporatised discourses of school management and leadership steer principals’ work towards strategic planning, budgeting and performance management, resulting in a refashioning of and struggle over the work and professional identities of principals and teachers. Principals’ engagement with marketisation and managerialism is complicated and not necessarily the ‘easily recognisable “entrepreneurial principal”’ portrayed by neoliberal ideologies and critique (Mockler et al., 2023: 4). Rather, principal leadership of and for the organisation reflects a spectrum of conduct, from entrepreneurship to utility-maximisation, and is therefore in practice irreducible to an ideal-type (Anderson and Cohen, 2018; Blackmore and Sachs 2007; Gobby, 2013; Mockler et al., 2023).

Moreover, strengthening the authority of school leaders recasts the power relationship between management and employees, with school staff increasingly subordinated to and disciplined by external policies but also the particularity of school leaders’ expectations, practices and judgments (Ball, 2003; 2016; Clarke, 2023; Courtney, 2015; Courtney and Gunter, 2015). As found in the larger project investigating school autonomy reform from which this data emerged, principal autonomy does not necessarily lead to the professional autonomy of teachers (Keddie et al., 2023). We argue that a hidden aspect of the micropolitics of school organisation is the often ignored power relationship between the principal and school service staff.

The micropolitics of schools

While the larger study contributed to theorisations of autonomy's multiple notions and provided evidence of the differential enactments of school autonomy impacting on teacher professionalism and parental involvement (Gobby et al., 2022), the micropolitics of industrial relations emerged as a critical factor in one case study school (see also Ball, 1987). Altricher (2001) refers to micropolitics depicted in organisational theory as the interactions and activities which use power and resources to achieve preferred outcomes:

The micropolitical perspective of organizations is built on a specific image of organizations characterized by diverse goals and unclear areas of influence, a specific image of action and actors who typically pursue their own interests and try to protect or widen their room for maneuver, a special attention to organizational interaction interpreted as strategic and conflictual struggle about definition, structure, and resources of the organization. (Altrichter, 2001: 13594)

Industrial awards within the wider system are based on establishing and protecting workers’ rights and safety and it is the responsibility of the employer to adhere to the awards. Micropolitics affect the industrial relations in schools as school leaders’ navigate system expectations, demands and resourcing in relation to their perception of school interests, pressures, needs and rewards. We find in the case study school analysed below that employment practices become a site of micropolitical contestation as disputes arise among staff to settle the fairness of employment-related decisions and practices. As the case below shows, this assigns the school principal increased status and power around employment, industrial relations and resource-related decision-making, along with the perception of principals as holding employing power, despite legislation, the employment awards and agreements and all contracts stipulating the Director General of the Department of Education is the employer.

Ball (1987) defines the micropolitics of schools as the principals’ leadership approach, key influential actors, how decisions were made, who supported or opposed the principal, the conduct of meetings, promotion processes and the distribution of resources. He cited themes of conflict, goal diversity, participation and power, issues that are heightened by marketising and managerial reforms that challenge the public good orientation of schooling, create mission and values drift, devolve to schools and principals increased decision-making authority over resources and management, and incentivise entrepreneurial and utility maximising conduct (such as flexploitation) (Gewirtz, 2001). Often conflict occurs because of discrepancy between job descriptions and actual work done and the assumptions embedded in the organisational culture leading to role ambiguity and unrealistic expectations. That is, between the ‘organization as it aspires to be in mission statements or organizational charts, but the organization-in-action’ (Altrichter, 2001: 13595).

This earlier work on micropolitics did not address how schools as organisations are gendered in terms of the ongoing gender division of labour and what subjects are taught, at what level as well as who leads schools or how women staff - both teachers and support staff - are expected to do the ‘care’ work of a school (Blackmore, 2011). Furthermore, a school's micropolitics operates within an affective economy of the school and cultural context. Zembylas (2022: 511) argues:

Affect is generally understood as a visceral force that encompasses and exceeds more individualized conceptions of emotion… in this sense, affect is associated with the production of specific orientations toward particular social, moral, and political ends.

Arguably, the 21st century is an era of intensified parental anxiety. The promise of education addresses their fears about the future for their children. In this context, Zembylas (2022) argues that particular policies have collective affect. Neoliberal policies promising greater say to parents in both choosing schools and being on school boards/councils in a more devolved system has significant appeal. Principals also manage the affective economy of the market through their entrepreneurial activity in terms of how the school portrays itself. Principals also manage the affective economy within their school in terms of gaining cooperation and support for privileging ‘caring for’ students over caring for staff (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007).

While most often micropolitics is considered to be the dark side of organisational life as often undermining organisational cohesion and aims, we take a view that micropolitics is because conflict in schools remains hidden and, instead of subverting organisational aims, disagreement is suppressed by principals’ appealing to collective goodwill in order for the school to survive and prioritise caring for the students. We show this relationship to utility maximisation, when a school leader pursues organisational efficiencies and optimisation at the expense of upholding employment rights and working conditions.

We contribute to earlier theorisations of the micropolitics of schools by addressing the context of industrial relations and workplace regulation within a system of devolved governance of schooling and a focus on school service employees rarely studied. We also consider how the micropolitics is informed by gender within the wider gendered division of the teacher labour market and teaching as a ‘caring profession’ and the role of collective affect both within the school and within the education market. Power was subtly exercised by mobilising discourses of ‘for the students’, the lack of resources in a disadvantaged school, and being professional, leading to a form of emotional co-option of staff by effectively exploiting their goodwill to conform to implicit expectations about what working in a public school requires.

Researching the case study school

The research reported on in this paper emerges from a project into the history, experience and effects of school autonomy reforms in Australia, with a focus on their social justice implications (https://www.schoolautonomyandsocialjustice.org/). Five case study schools from three Australian states were selected to investigate the enactments of school autonomy, with interviews conducted with school leaders, teachers, school services staff as well as principal and parent organisations and policymakers. This paper is based on the case study (Flybjerg, 2006) of a regionally located secondary school (pseudonymously named Eastfell High) in the state of WA. IPS schools cannot opt-out of the state-mandated curriculum, national testing or reporting requirements and the Department of Education controls systemic strategic directions, the monitoring of school performance, and compliance to central policies and procedures (Gobby, 2014). By 2022, 80% of WA's 800 public schools were IPS schools yet the Department had also reduced its central, regional and district support to schools.

Eastfell was chosen because there has been limited research on regional IPS schools. In 2021, Eastfell had an enrolment of 630 students and employed 54 full-time equivalent teaching staff and 26 full-time equivalent non-teaching staff. Four research team members in pairs conducted hour-long interviews with 11 staff members over two days in 2021 – this was the maximum possible to interview over a 2-day period agreed with the principal. The participants were selected by the principal, a Department of Education condition to access the school. As requested by the researchers to get a breadth of perspectives from the various categories of employment, the principal's selection represented a mix of staff roles and included the principal, two deputy principals, the manager of corporate services, five teachers from different curriculum areas, the student services coordinator and the human resources manager. We do not know the reasons informing the principal's participant selection - there may have been selection bias for the purpose of limiting the breadth of perspective and potentially limiting negative depictions of the school and its leadership, a heightened concern in marketised school systems that emphasise branding, reputation and impression management. That said, the interview data does not suggest interviewees refrained from criticising or providing a frank assessment of the school, their work or its leadership, some of which is included below. Moreover, recurring topics and themes surfaced among interviewees, corroborating the information provided and enhancing the credibility of the shared insights. Participant availability also played a crucial role in the selection process, as some interviewees who had been scheduled weeks in advance had to be substituted on the day of their interview due to their absence. The substitute was selected based on their availability and having a comparable role to that of the originally selected participant. The one-on-one semi-structured interviews were organised around a series of open-ended questions that covered: their perception of autonomy and its enactment in the school, what concerns and pressures the school and its leadership were facing, how the school was navigating competition with local schools, and how issues of equity and social justice were manifested and responded to. The audio-recorded responses were transcribed and coded using NVivo software to identify key themes, and at Eastfell, issues raised about the school's context, employment practices and working conditions of non-school service staff.

WA public schools continue to be regulated by department and public sector employment standards and policies including legally binding industrial awards and agreements. Awards specify the minimum conditions of employment. An agreement, which can prevail over the awards apart from the ‘preserved provisions’ in the awards, is negotiated between unions and employers every three years through enterprise bargaining and establishes further conditions and entitlements for employees that perform the work covered in the agreement. At the time of writing, principals and teaching staff are covered by the Teachers Award (1993) and the School Education Act Employees’ (Teachers and Administrators) General Agreement 2019 (https://www.education.wa.edu.au/awards-and-agreements). In the 2020–2021 period, teachers made up 57.2% (23,802) of the department of education staff (https://www.education.wa.edu.au/web/annual-report/staff), with 2108 principals and deputy principals. There are an additional fourteen occupational groups in schools with their own awards and agreements covering the remaining 42.8% of staff. There are eight waged occupational groups, which include cleaners and education assistants, and six salaried occupational groups, which include school support staff (managers of corporate services, school officers, library assistants) and public services officers (central and regional office staff). The non-teaching staff referred to in this paper are covered by either the School Support Officers Award and its related School Support Officers CSA Agreement (2019), or the Public Service Award 1992 and its related Public Sector CSA General Agreement 2019.

IPS principals can recruit and appoint staff and allocate their work. However, they have no control over awards and agreements, although the central office places some staff. Individual employment contracts protected by agreements are centrally administered. Each school has a mix of employee groups and multiple awards and agreements to which line managers in decision-making that impacts on the working conditions of employees must adhere. Disputes are arbitrated by the WA Industrial Relations Commission if a resolution is not achieved through other means. Within a school, teachers report to the principal, while school services staff typically report to the manager of corporate services (school business manager), who reports to the principal. The manager of corporate services manages schools’ financial and physical resources, and the human resources manager, and works closely with the principal. One significant effect of increased school-based decision-making in devolved systems was the recent professionalisation of school business managers in Australia focusing schools on financial and business priorities (Starr, 2021). The following case focuses mainly on small sections of the interview responses of the principal, the manager of corporate services (hereafter MSC) and the manager of human resources (hereafter MHR), where tensions and conflicts related to the school's employment practices were briefly raised.

Understanding the micropolitics of Eastfell

Eastfell was built in the mid-1960s as one of the major secondary schools of the Forrest Hills region, situated in a long-established working class suburb that is in the second quintile of disadvantage (national comparison). An IPS school for several years, it competes with surrounding public and private schools, which have proliferated over the past couple of decades with the region's population growth and changes to federal government policy and funding encouraging a shift to non-government schools which has exacerbated educational inequality across Australia within and between the three education sectors (MacDonald et al., 2023). The principal describes the impact of competition on the school as ‘huge’, with a significant decline in enrolments from a peak of around 1000 students over a decade ago due to competition from newer private schools, changes to catchments zones, and the aggressive marketing and specialist programs of the nearby public schools, all of which enable enrolments from outside their geographical zone. The competitive attitude amongst local public schools is, according to the principal, ‘everybody just get out there for themselves’. At one point in the past decade, the enrolments were so dire that the school community mounted a campaign to save the school from closure or being downgraded to a grade 7–10 school.

Located in a low socio-economic neighbourhood and subject to competition, Eastfell is experiencing the processes of segregation and residualisation (Lamb et al., 2015). Rowe and Perry (2021) describe how when ‘government policies incentivise and encourage parents to choose, either through the publication of league tables, increasing competition between schools, or increasing the diversity of school choice for parents, this can lead to a hierarchy between ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ schools, or popular and unpopular schools’ (2021: 110). Sitting at the bottom of the socio-economic, parental choice and reputational hierarchies of schools in the region, social segregation through enrolments has resulted in Eastfell's student cohort becoming concentrated with students from low-income households: 88% of its students are in the lower two quartiles in socio-educational advantage, which represents significant disadvantage. Neoliberalism has a racialized dimension that operates through school choice (Gulson, 2010), with Eastfell experiencing a disproportionate increase in enrolments of Indigenous students (23%) in comparison to surrounding schools. The principal castigates the local public high schools for directing Aboriginal students to Eastfell rather than diversifying their student cohort. Nicole (humanities teacher) described the effects of competition as creating ‘an elitist system’ of education in the region within and between the public and non-government school systems.

With an enrolment decline over the past 5 years, the lived reality of students and staff is that Eastfell sits at the bottom of the hierarchy. Eastfell is experiencing declining student enrolments and its academically able students are being poached by competing high schools, which has reduced student numbers and additional equity funding while fixed costs remain; Its level of staffing has dwindled which means it cannot resource and deliver a comprehensive curriculum (e.g. the Arts), especially at the senior school level where student enrolments are in ‘a downward spiral’ according to the Deputy Principal. Eastfell's academic results in national standardised testing have declined; the material wealth of the student population has declined; and teachers are working in a more demanding and behaviourally challenging context, which requires significant investment in student welfare services which diverts funds from offering a more comprehensive curriculum.

Despite the above circumstances, the principal and staff recognise the school's ongoing viability depends on competitive strategies and being distinctive in the market to attract and retain students (Connell, 2013). Approaching the school as a competitive enterprise (Anderson and Cohen, 2018), reflects a ‘change in what counts as institutionally acceptable and fair in implicit rules for social action’ (Erlandson et al., 2020: 416). The principal comments, ‘I know we need to make our school unique, to survive’ and strategic leadership of the school as a competitive enterprise is necessary in this market environment, requiring taking initiative and risks. The principal's survival strategies include building its reputation through branding and social media, lobbying for, and establishing a specialist science centre to appeal and cater to students, establishing clear curriculum pathways from years 7 to 12, procuring new income streams to fund school activities by applying for external grants, and attempts to create a more ‘young adult’ environment for their senior school students. To shore up its finances, the school proactively pursues parents to pay their voluntary school fee contributions, and visits homes of families in the catchment zone to formally enrol their students by census date to ensure the school receives funding.

Adopting a calculative rationality seeking utility-maximisation is a feature of the enterprising subject. Mockler et al. (2023) observe that principals’ utility-maximising conduct is evident in resource-constrained public schools that are navigating a competitive environment whilst complying with system requirements, which inhibit more risk-taking entrepreneurial conduct as well as emotional labour. Public education systems undertake utility maximisation as they rely on significant unpaid overtime of their principals to get their job done (Riley, 2014). We suggest that utility-maximisation cascades through the education system and is evident in Eastfell, including in how the principal manages the employment and work of the teachers and school services staff. Teachers are expected to gift their time and provide resources for the good of the students and survival of the school. School services staff are covered by different agreements to teachers, yet the principal expects them to also gift their labour outside of their conditions of employment and work hours. The services staff organise and deliver the school graduation ceremony in their own time, and even attend excursions so the school does not incur the expense of hiring relief teachers to cover for teachers. The MHR explains that the school typically does not compensate the school services staff for such additional time and the staff members do not expect or request payment.

New managerialism turns rising needs and shrinking resources into ‘a management problem – the production of “more for less”’ (Clarke and Newman, 1997: 148–149). Hence, a flexible yet stretched budget controlled at the local level incentivises the pursuit of financial surplus and efficiency, thereby encouraging principals to, in Rose's words (1999: 152), ‘calculate their actions… by translating them into costs and benefits that can be given an accounting value’. However, schools being ‘cost-centres’ and responsible for a one-line budget can be in tension with meeting employment obligations under the union-negotiated agreements. This is evident with the creation of the MHR position and their responsibility to procure relief for absent staff outside of their working hours stipulated in the agreement. This duty has typically been a responsibility of deputy principals or senior teachers; however, the MHR explains the ‘job basically was created out of the opportunity that IPS offered to schools’ and involves them being responsible for relief management, the day-to-day teacher and other relief, managing budgets associated with relief, leave management, payroll, industrial interpretation, and assisting casual employees. It is a cost-saving to have these roles performed by a school services staff member. This ‘internal flexibilisation’ (Mathou et al., 2022: 4) is increasingly common to schools as principals’ management of budgets and staffing in the context of market forces helps prioritise surplus, efficiency and cost-savings (Kimber and Elrich, 2011). Hence, many IPS schools have delegated the procurement and management of relief staff to school services staff but often without the financial compensation they are entitled to (e.g. for being ‘on-call’) (CPSU/CSA, 2018). The principal expanding roles for staff for which they are not rewarded may be thought of as ‘entrepreneurial flexploitation’.

Stretched resources with entrepreneurialism and competitive self-enhancement can place a limit on one's ‘caring capacities, practices and imaginations’ (Chatzidakis et al., 2020: 5). Schools tightening their purse strings and then turning a blind eye to staff working without pay treats staff as an expenditure item on a ledger. The MHR suggested that Eastfell's leadership ‘don't believe they should have to pay’ if staff members work and do not ask for compensation, again extending the expectations placed on teachers onto support staff. That staff do not request payment and the principal is not proactive in addressing the issue, we suggest, expresses the inevitable power asymmetries between school services staff and the school leadership (Thomson et al., 2007), which through the latter's actions ‘socializes staff to acquiesce in silent suppression of dispositions toward ethical contestation’ while appealing to their goodwill and commitment to the students and school (Zipin and Brennan, 2004: 356). Here, the school reaps the financial benefits of unpaid work by appealing to the staff's emotional commitment to the students and colleagues. The affective economy of education and of education markets works on the relationships informed by emotions of envy, desire, trust, hope and anxiety related to surviving and/or thriving in the context of competitive relations and unequal conditions of learning and teaching (Blackmore, 2009).

These employment-related issues are not isolated to Eastfell. The Running on Goodwill Report by the CPSU/CSA (2018: 4) highlights similar concerns, finding a ‘normalised culture of working after hours and throughout breaks with no access to TOIL [time off in lieu] or overtime [payment]’ across public schools in WA. Indeed, the failure of public schools to pay ‘on-call’ payments led the CPSU/CSA to successfully push for back pay for staff of over AUD$1 million from the Department (CPSU/CSA, 2018), and the Department paid out AUD$4.9 million to casual school support staff in 2019 for schools’ systemic underpayment of wages. This report and our case raise the concern that the local control of finances and employment relations can disrupt agreed systemic employment standards and go unrecognised (see Fitzgerald et al., 2018; Stacey et al., 2022).

Though employment standards appear fixed, they are more porous and manipulable in practice, as a micropolitical analysis highlights. This is evident in relation to Eastfell's employment of staff under the School Support Officers agreement (Ministerial Officers Award), who are entitled to 11 weeks of annual leave a year, and the Public Sector Service Officer agreement, which entitles a full-time officer only 4 weeks’ annual leave. Although public sector service employees have a higher salary, the per hour rate is less than the Schools Support Officer agreement when paid leave is accounted for. There is therefore an efficiency incentive for schools to employ staff under the public sector service agreement, which the MHR suggested has been increasing in high schools. This was the employment practice at Eastfell. Moreover, this specific agreement is not always appropriate for the duties of the positions.

Awards specify the type of work to be undertaken. Jobs created by the principal include duties not typically allocated to service positions. In one example, the Eastfell principal appointed a non-teacher to a learning support role, a position typically performed by qualified teachers, by creating a job with the title of Student Support Officer, which is covered by a school services award and agreement. The MHR also noted ‘in our front office working side by side, we have school officers that hold the same JDF [job description] pointing to different industrial awards’, and ‘where one is required to work through the school holiday periods and one is not’. Additional responsibilities are also smuggled into positions undertaken by school services staff. When school services staff raised questions about performing duties outside of their job description their concerns were brushed aside by their superiors, told that their supervisors ultimately take responsibility for the duty even though they might not perform it. Pushing the boundaries of employment practices, this opened a micro-political space around workers’ rights as the MHR set about informing staff of their rights, encouraging them to pursue their entitlements with their line managers, and personally raising the issue with line managers, with little impact on employment practices.

As line managers, principals are expected to know and obey the employment rights and entitlements of staff. However, corporatisation and market competition can put school leaders’ priorities in tension with the interests and values of staff; this tension has challenged teacher professional norms (Courtney and Gunter, 2015). At Eastfell, the principal recognises school services staff concerns around employment rights and entitlements, as raised by MHR and MCS, but disputes its characterisation as simply an industrial issue. The principal commented that unlike smaller schools, staff at larger schools like Eastfell work closer to their job descriptions and are ‘union orientated’ yet ‘good people will step above that and just do it’. The implication is that if staff are inflexible and do not undertake unpaid work then they do not care or are viewed as less professional. In so doing, and calling on their professionalism, school autonomy policies privatise the working conditions in schools, shifting the burden of work to teachers’ private realms and construing work intensification as an individual rather than a public issue (Thompson et al., 2022). This pattern is gendered, as women tend to bear the burden of domestic labour including caring work and comprise the majority of service sector employees.

A similar dynamic extends to school services staff, again a feminised sector (Weldon and Invargson, 2016), who are expected to work in their private time and abide by standards set by the utility-maximising principal, rather than follow the collectively agreed standard of the industrial agreement. Eastfell principal's speaking of ‘good people’ casts a managerial judgment of the personal commitment and organisational value of workers who are prepared to cross the work/private life divide, with those who maintain sector-wide employment entitlements viewed as hindering local management's extraction of labour (Lynch, 2022). The principal's management of school services staff's employment relations was an unresolved issue amongst some of the staff and diminished the principals’ leadership, raising issues of trust and care. This employment practice, the MCS commented, challenged the principal's ability to be ‘a fair and equitable sort of leader’, which highlights a little recognised issue of how principal authority over local employment makes employment practices pertinent to school leadership and the perceptions of good school leadership.

Principals are typically insufficiently trained on the additional responsibilities accompanying decentralisation, such as the management of staff and employment-related matters (Gavin and Stacey, 2023; McGrath-Champs et al., 2019). The MCS contends that the promotional practices of the education system can lead to gaps in knowledge about industrial awards, agreements and the work of non-teaching staff. Specifically, as teachers are promoted into leadership positions, they are familiar with the employment conditions and expectations of teachers rather than school services staff, even though approximately 40% of school staff are not teachers. However, a lack of knowledge or skill is not a wholly adequate explanation for local employment practices as it neglects that the wider context of competition, resource constraints and managerial discourse can enjoin a calculative rationality around employment-related decisions. The point is not that all principals submit employment-related decisions to cost-benefit calculations at the expense of worker entitlements and fairness, but rather that maintaining a balanced budget and securing funds for operational and strategic objectives incentivise principals, like Eastfell's, to push the envelope and to become ‘careless’ (Lynch, 2022) about these issues. Indifference is noted by the CPSU/CSA (2018) and is behind Eastfell's MHR's criticism of the department's lack of oversight over employment-related matters. Such carelessness for staff typifies competitive education systems (Lynch, 2022).

Eastfell's principal does not exemplify the enterprising subject seeking financial and competitive advantage at any cost. They do not exemplify the ‘neoliberal subject’ often criticised in scholarly critiques of neoliberalism (Watts, 2022). Rather, our interviews with the principal and staff form a view similarly described by Keddie and Holloway (2020) and Mockler et al. (2023: 15) of a principal committed ‘to the role of public education as a “public good,” and a striving for social justice and equity through their work’ yet circumscribed and conflicted by their navigation of education system policies and marketisation. Eastfell's principal has not internalised market values and business priorities at the expense of publicly oriented priorities; indeed, staff spoke about them as committed to public education and the local community. When speaking about the cost-savings achieved through the principal's employment practices, the MHR commented that what drives the principal's practices is the students: ‘the best outcomes for students are first and foremost, in the mind’. Practices of financial calculation around employment-related matters are ambivalently-related to practices for strengthening the public good benefits of educating the students at Eastfell. While autonomy invites principals to think creatively (i.e. entrepreneurially), we caution against the risks of becoming careless about and complicit in the exploitation of the labour (including emotional labour) of staff to achieve this aim (Blackmore and Sachs, 2007).

Concluding remarks

While the expectation that you do what is needed to get the job done is not new for school staff, principal control over staffing and resources opens school services staff to exploitation, and flexploitation. This paper adds to the evidence of work overload and work intensification in school autonomy programs (Fitzgerald et al., 2019; McGrath-Champs et al., 2019) due to the orchestration of school services staff working without being paid and undertaking work outside their job description. Principals, often with good intentions, and caught between the objectives to have their school survive and to do the best for their students, can become careless about or neglectful of the employment rights and entitlements of school services staff. Lynch (2022) refers to the ‘anti-care culture’ of neoliberal politics and capitalism while at the same time extracting profit by exploiting care for others. We contend that exploitation can result not simply from ignorance to policy and lack of employment-related knowledge (Stacey et al., 2022), but from institutional policies and conditions that enable and incentivise school leaders to construe employment practices as a means to optimise organisational resources and performance, or to meet external demands. Though our case relates to a school in survival mode, the practices are not necessarily confined to, but are arguably intensified by, such schools. Of course, managerial decentralisation does not necessarily result in such conduct, and we do not suggest such practices were absent before marketisation and decentralisation policies. Rather, the principal's authority over employment practices and finances, despite not being technically responsible as an employer but nevertheless exercising power over staffing and resources, opens the labour of school services staff to careless entrepreneurial flexploitation, converting employment standards into an internal matter contained to the organisation and open to being flexible to meet the school's needs. As policies of devolution and its twin strategies of managerialism and marketisation circulate around the world, so too should policies and practices that protect the employment rights of all school staff.