The application of market principles to educational provision continues to attract governments across the globe, despite an international body of literature suggesting that marketisation can exacerbate inequalities. In light of a renewed policy push in Australia towards accountability via a market model, this paper analyses the impact of existing…

In the increasingly research and innovation-driven landscape of higher education, the Federal Government's Teaching and Learning Fund is supposed to redress the balance. Leesa Wheelehan is unconvinced. She argues the fund simply encourages game-playing between institutions in manipulating their teaching outcomes, and rewards good teaching on…

The vocational education and training (VET) sector has a long tradition of measuring and reporting outcomes. The public face of this is the "Annual National Report of the Australian Vocational Education and Training System" published (and tabled in the Commonwealth Parliament) since 1994. The reporting framework has undergone a number of…

Over the past decade in Australia, a neo-liberal political climate has delivered to universities and schools increasing expectations concerning accountability and conformity within professional standards frameworks. This has contributed to growing pressure around Professional Experience programs within teacher education. In light of such…

This article will argue that diverse national, regional and local contexts leave different rooms for manoeuvre for school principals. The social technologies applied by the authorities (like accountability systems) can be "tight" or "loose" and so leave little or much room for principals' interpretations of what a good school…

This article reveals how educational policies and policy contexts in Sweden, Norway, Finland and Australia establish the circumstances which enable and constrain individual and collective teacher professional development as praxis. We provide insights into existing partnerships between universities and schools, and, municipalities and the state as…

This article reports a case study of academics' perceptions of how the conditions under which they worked, at one campus of a multi-site regional Australian university, influenced their teaching practices. The data comprise transcripts of periodic meetings of a group of seven education academics, as they reflected upon the nature of their teaching…

Mandatory numeracy tests have become commonplace in many countries, heralding a new era in school assessment. New forms of accountability and an increased emphasis on national and international standards (and benchmarks) have the potential to reshape mathematics curricula. It is noteworthy that the mathematics items used in these tests are rich in…

The paper offers a retrospective evaluation of recent evaluative studies of bilingual programs in the Australian state of Victoria, in an attempt to determine how successfully the evaluation process met the dual criteria of external accountability and development. The programs in question were located in primary or secondary government schools and…

The promise, embraced by governments around the world, is that the knowledge economy will provide knowledge workers with a degree of autonomy and permission to think which enables them to be creative and to attract high incomes. What credence should we give to this promise? The current economic crisis is provoking a reappraisal of both economic…

Universities in many western nations are experiencing increasing performance measures for academic accountability. This paper maps the pitted pathway that has led Australian universities from mentoring to monitoring and from performance enhancement to performance evaluation, and reviews implications for teaching and learning in higher education.…

It's become a truism that Australian higher education nowadays is in a state of perpetual change. The next round of changes to research and teaching funding, however, will permanently alter the face of the sector. We asked five of Australia's most prominent Vice-Chancellors to anticipate the future face of higher education. NTEU's Carolyn Allport…

In his examination of successful innovation and change in education in many settings, Fullan (2001) identifies the three broad options for effecting change that public authorities have at their disposal. They can seek to bring about change through imposing accountability (system-wide or targeted), or through providing incentives (either…

This paper summarises current ideas about the place of academic development in the twenty-first century university. It focuses on aligning the leadership and management of academic development work with the "ownership" of such work by its key stakeholders--teaching academics, university management and the wider academic development…

Academic developers are very often disciplinary migrants, performing hybrid, liminal roles at the "fault lines" between teachers and learners, between academics and managers, and between teaching and research. As a result, their identities as scholars can be described as "unhomely." While this in-between space is uncomfortable…