This paper draws on research by Australians on Australian education to explore the tension between being critical and being marginalised. In it, I examine how research is positioned in the changing field of education in relation to government, society and the economy in the context of the rise of edu-capitalism globally. I then explore the policy shifts framing the cultural and gender politics of the research/policy problematic in Australia from the perspective of policy critique, policy service and policy advocacy. I consider how the global reconfiguring and reframing of higher education is impacting on the nature and institutional base of educational research, and it’s gendered implications. Finally, I argue that critical educational research is what makes educational research distinctive and also ‘makes a difference’ within a democratic society.

Being critical

I am acutely aware as to the dangers of naming anything as either feminist or critical. The past four years in Australian politics, with the attacks on our first female Prime Minister, has indicated the relevance of feminism and of feminist theory to contemporary times. This is despite, if not because of, the gender deniers assertions that feminism is past its use by date, rejected by Gen Y women, creating false divisions or ‘gender wars’, and/or largely left to raging old feminists like myself. My focus is, as a feminist scholar, also about being critical. Being critical is more than just doing critique, as social change that leads to equity also requires informing policy and practice through advocacy and activism (Yeatman 1990).

Nancy Fraser argued in 1997, eight years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the rise of fast global capitalism, post–communism, and before 9/11 and the global financial crisis, that we are at ‘the horizon of contemporary theorising’ (Fraser 1997, p. 3).

The post socialist condition is characterised by first: an absence of a credible overarching emancipatory project despite the proliferation of fronts of struggle, a general decoupling of the cultural politics of recognition from the social politics of redistribution, and a decentering of claims for equality in the face of aggressive marketization and sharply rising material inequality…What constitutes a critical stance in this context? (Fraser 1997, p. 3).

So what does criticality mean in education and educational research in the globalised context of edu-capitalism? Edu-capitalism is driven by a hegemonic policy logic based on gender- and race-neutral human capital theory and neoliberal strategies of managerialism and marketisation (Connell 2013; Rowlands and Rawolle 2013). The neoliberal policy orthodoxy advocates reduced government expenditure, privatisation of educational provision and the mobilisation of individual choice based on the false promise of optimising individual and national outcomes. Organisational relations are becoming more contractualised as markets become the primary mechanism of allocation and distribution of educational goods and services, and educational work is outsourced with less sense of who has obligations for equity (Rawolle 2013). Edu-capitalism is when managerialism aligns teachers and researchers with the corporate logic of economism and entrepreneurialism (Blackmore and Sachs 2007). It means research that has short-term use value is privileged (Yates 2004), and research is done not within a gift economy but exchanged as a commercial product (Kenway et al. 2006). Multinational corporations such as Pearson (http://www.pearson.com.au), now offer the ‘full deal’ from teacher and leadership training through to building schools, curriculum and assessment packages and technology infrastructure (Ball 2012; Mansell 2012). Within the context of rampant neoliberalism and edu-capitalism, Helen Gunter comments from the field of educational administration and leadership.

Using the ‘Critical’ word is becoming increasingly difficult in the English context, and as such people like us are increasingly positioned as a ‘hoodie’ research gang. At best I am seen as a necessary eccentric who is listened to politely but then ignored, and at worst my work is missing from official government websites that recommend reading for practitioners, and/or harassed as dangerously feral by neo-liberal knowledge workers. Being critical and doing critical work, is not new or dangerous or necessarily oppositional, but it is vitally important in these neo-liberal hard new times (Gunter 2009, p. 94).

Academics routinely experience similar instances when in government tendered projects—what constitutes policy service- our publications have been deleted as ‘too critical’ (of policy) or ‘not relevant’ (to practitioners).

Bourdieu’s ‘theory of practice’, synthesized here by Grenfell (2010), is also one premised upon criticality and

the necessity to interrogate categories of thought; the need to ‘beware of words’ for the way they (mis)represent the world; the preoccupation to look at the true generating processes of social systems and not to accept them in their own terms; and the idea that there must be another place to stand with regard to social phenomena, which can offer a clearer view of what exists and how (Grenfell 2010, p. 88).

Bourdieu agrees with feminists that ‘everything is essentially political’. We are seeking ‘not just political emancipation but emancipation from thinking and seeing the world in a certain way’ (Grenfell 2010, p. 86). Feminist critical policy analysis (Bacchi 1999), for example, involves:

  • Identifying and critiquing the embedded assumptions of any theory or methodology.

  • Questioning any policy by asking what is the problem here why is it defined this way and why at this time?

  • Seeking theories that have strong explanatory power about social change.

  • Focusing on who benefits, who decides and with what effect (which can often mean focusing on race-, gender- and class-based privilege more than disadvantage).

Gunter and Grenfell warn that ‘being critical’ often means being marginalised in terms of policy and practice.

A ‘critical’ perspective can lead to a kind of ‘ghetto-isation’ which neutralises the potential for this approach to effect changes; often by creating a kind of critical meta-language which isolates and marginalises the substantive insights arising from policy research in this area (Grenfell 2010, p. 85).

But does being critical necessarily mean being marginalised?

Criticality and marginality

Geographic marginality

Connell (2007) argues in Southern Theory that Australia’s cultural, geographical and economic location makes Australian educational research of ‘national and international significance…Social thought happens in particular places’ (Connell 2007, p. ix). Connell refers to what is distinctive about Southern theory, a term which ‘indicates the centre-periphery relationship …and emphasises relations of authority, exclusion and inclusion, hegemony, partnership, sponsorship, appropriation-between intellectuals and institutions in the metropole and those in the world periphery’(Connell 2007, pp. viii–ix). She also argues, further justifying the importance of building capacity in indigenous and post-colonial educational research in Australia, that

social science is, at best, ambiguously democratic. The dominant genres picture the world as seen by men, by capitalists, by the educated and affluent. Most important, their picture of the world is seen from the rich capital-exploiting countries of Europe and North America—the global metropole. To ground knowledge of society in other experiences remains a fragile project (Connell 2007, p. ix).

In arguing the case for Southern theory, Connell (2007) cites examples in sociology and anthropology from Southern cultures, and how these bring different ontological and epistemological understandings of who and why we are. Connell argues that the objectivism vs subjectivism debates in the social sciences are a particularly North-centric view of the world which excludes references of ‘the other’, feminist theory, colonisation, the colonised and leads to the erasure of history and culture.

With regard to my primary disciplinary area, that of educational administration and leadership, for example, the major critique of the hegemony of US-centric structural functionalism and behaviouralist psychology emerged from the geographical periphery of Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the late 1980s (Blackmore 2009). The normative centre of positivism claimed universal androcentric theories premised upon a false fact/value distinction, a faith in statistics and a reified notion of ‘the’ scientific method. The critique drew from Young’s new sociology of knowledge around power/knowledge relations (Bates 1980), Habermasian critical theory and emancipatory praxis in action research (Kemmis and McTaggart 1982) and feminist theory critiquing the androcentricism of policy, management and leadership theory (Kenway 1990; Blackmore 1991). These once critical perspectives, while not mainstream, have influenced the field significantly in both theory and practice, even ‘domesticated’.

Australia, Connell (2007) argues, had by the 1970s moved from being a site of data mining by the Northern centre with a focus on difference and the indigenous to one of a focus on similarity and mainstream society as an extension of modernisation. Australian social scientists adopted all the ‘metropolitan’ analytical tools and categories of class, gender and ethnicity. But Australian researchers in a settler-colonising nation state also read research both from the centre and the periphery. Reading from the centre means we relate to existing literature and identify how we are filling ‘a gap’ in the centre. Thus in order to be ‘international’, Australian academics read and know the American, UK, and those European, Scandinavian and Asian literatures published in English.

The push for internationalisation has not altered centre-periphery relations. As English has become the lingua franca of academic publishing, the Australian Educational Researcher, as other English language journals, receives numerous submissions from Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and China. While some make passing reference to the Australian literature, the authors use predominantly American references and a western (North-centric) genre:- quantitative or mixed methods. The structure is formulaic: research problem, literature review, method, findings and discussion, with little if any theory. This approach is only one of the multiplicity of genres of Australian educational research publications, although it signals an overall trend toward mixed methods, big data-bases, and multiple authors. Connell argues that Australia’s location relative to Asia provides us with a capacity to be distinctive in our research, an issue raised at least rhetorically in the Asia Century report (Connell 2013). But as Halse et al. (2013) in the recent report on Building capacity of teacher workforce with regard to Asia literacy and capabilities argues, this will require significant government investment.

Epistemic marginality

Epistenic marginality is necessarily critical. New theory often emerges from the experience of the marginalised. As in any unequal power relationship, the margins have to know the centre whereas the centre can be indifferent to, even unknowing about, the margins. From the margins, feminist theorisation, for example, in the field of educational administration and policy, has been about working on and over mainstream (male-dominated) social theory. Feminists challenge mainstream theories universalistic claims that are androcentric and that fail to recognise gender, racial or cultural difference on the one hand, or that ignores, appropriates or misrepresents feminist theory and research on the other. A feminist critical analysis, for example, of the current fetish with the notion of emotional intelligence in educational administration and pedagogy illustrates how this recognition of the emotional work of leading and teaching originated with the fields of management and psychology (Blackmore 2011a, b). Emotions have become the focus of management because they are the last resource left for managers to increase productivity. Yet management theorists have suddenly discovered emotions, ignoring 50 years of feminist theoretical work critiquing the false binary between emotionality/rationality that has dominated the field of management. Likewise, critical organisational and post-colonial theory (e.g. Aaltio and Mills 2002) illustrating how emotional economies are gendered and racialised are not cited. Instead, the therapeutic turn in educational administration has individualised and de-politicised emotions. Ironically, emotions are no longer a feminine pathology that excluded women from leadership in the last century. Emotional intelligence is now a desirable competency to be learnt as a twentyfirst century leader, re-positioning men as capable of emotionally intelligent leadership (e.g. Leithwood and Beatty 2008).

Emergent knowledge systems challenge dominant epistemologies and ontologies—whether feminist, post colonial or indigenous—by promoting alternative ways of knowing theoretically and methodologically (See Moreton-Robinson 2000; Tuhiwa Smith 1999). Building alternative knowledge bases relies on different ways of knowing and researching, as theory is derived from and through experience. Early feminist research on leadership focused on women’s narratives and auto- ethnographies (MacConaghy 2000). Indigenous knowledge claims confront normative models of doing research (Hickling-Hudson 2005). Auld (Auld 2002), for example, balanced this precarious relationship between dominant and marginal epistemological approaches in his doctoral research on literacy and identity, co-producing knowledge with the Muddikang people. Glenn produced multi-modal narratives for different audiences to whom he felt responsible as a member of multiple communities: his local community, his family and his academic community. His work was about recognition of cultural identity through language and ‘Talking Books’ which are now used in the community as a form of theory in practice (Auld 2002). Such research may seem marginal to the push for ‘big data’. But it is about cultural recognition of language and literacy practices that inform teaching and learning in that community. Building a knowledge base for and from the margins as educational researchers requires working simultaneously within/against and both inside/outside dominant knowledge regimes including research assessment and university promotion schemes while maintaining trust and ethical relationships with those with whom you are researching.

Political marginality

Educational research is often considered to be marginal to policy despite education becoming increasingly politicised. The litany of complaints against educational research is that it is not presented in the style or on a scale that is desired by policy makers, that it is not relevant to contemporary policy problems, and offers complexity rather than simplicity (Yates 2004). Equally the fragility of the research—policy relationship can be attributed to power/knowledge relationships of the field of politics at particular times, where policy is informed by ideology not evidence. Brown et al. (2011) argue that the new sociology of education, and later policy sociology, had a strong tone of criticality that did not fit with policymaker requirements. Policy makers have particular agendas for which they selectively seek justification, often post hoc, as much as ‘evidence’ or look for simple solutions to complex problems, as indicated in the examples following.

Example 1: The school effectiveness and improvement movement

The school effectiveness and improvement (SEI) movement has influenced policy over two decades because it often readily aligns with the political and methodological mindset of government, and in particular conservative governments pushing neoliberal agendas dismantling public education systems. This can be attributed to the SEI focus on the self-managing school as a discrete unit and not as part of wider network of relationships and responsibilities within systems and government; on leadership as the solution to ‘underperforming schools’ in the 1990s; on teachers as the solution to educational underachievement in the 2000s (Hattie 2008); and on how ‘effective schools’ have the same characteristics, and therefore can be treated as ‘like’ schools and readily compared as in MySchool regardless of context and the school population (Thomson 2002). SEI de-politicises educational administration and leadership by referring to context as ‘challenging circumstances’ (e.g. Reynolds et al. 2006) rather than recognising the intersections and multiplier effects between spatial injustice, poverty, community lack of infrastructure and jobs, social exclusion due to race, class, gender differences and culture. This focus on the individual school and outcomes is readily incorporated into neoliberal marketisation and privatisation agendas. It underpins moves towards Charter schools in USA and Canada, Free Schools in Sweden and UK, Academies in the UK and now Independent Public Schools in Australia. Such policies are being mobilised by global policy actors in the OECD, IMF, and World Bank; management consultancies such as KPMG and Boston Consulting; and educational philanthropic organisations such as the Gates Foundation and Clinton sponsored GEMS Education (http://www.gemseducation.com). Research, policy, politics and edu-capitalism are closely intertwined.

Example 2: What about the boys?

Education policy is also informed by wider social movements, lobby groups (religious, independent school sector, unions), consultants and media commentators depending on the political context. Such is the case of gender equity reform. The DETYA (2000) report of the Impact of Educational Research on Policy and Practice identified gender equity reform being informed by feminist research with significant outcomes. But after 1996, the Howard government nurtured feminist and multiculturalist backlash politics. Feminism and multiculturalism became easy targets for socially conservative but economically radical governments backed by media generated attacks by the Murdoch press on teachers and teacher educators.

Pro-feminist academics developing the new sociology of masculinity during the 1990s (Mills 2001; Lingard and Douglas 1999), were ignored during the ‘what about the boys’ crisis mobilised in the press and policy arenas. PISA results were mis/used to foreground gender rather than class and race differences by a small group of commentators, activists and academics who focused on how feminism was to blame and positioned men and boys as victims. These perspectives treated gender as a fixed and unitary category without addressing how different masculinities and femininities are produced in terms of the wider unequal social relations of gender and power. More in-depth analytical reports such as that of Collins et al. (2000) provided evidence that the question was more about which boys and which girls in relation to the intersectionality of class, rurality, indigeneity and gender. In 2013, PISA now shows that Australia is high quality and low equity- with social economic background (often a proxy for indigeneity and rurality) as the greatest predictors of educational outcomes, more than any other OECD country. At the same time, the national gender equity policy infrastructure built up over the 1980s and 1990s was dismantled after 1996. Gender equity policy at national level for women and girls has become symbolic, signalling the demise of what was considered internationally to be a model of gender equity policy and practice utilised in the EU known as gender mainstreaming; that is, integrating equity into all policies.

While these are examples of the politicisation of the research-policy relationship, I would argue that education progressivism in practice and research continues to have a strong history and future.

Critical traditions in Australian education

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the first wave of university based education graduates entered the profession. We were informed by the new sociology of knowledge and the critical pedagogy of Freire (1970) in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Illich’s (1971) Deschooling and Germaine Greer’s(1971) The Female Eunuch. Education was for many of us teaching in public schools overflowing with students the ‘new religion’. For us education had a redemptive if not an evangelical mission. The 1970s was a period in Victoria and SA particularly, during which general studies emerged in the secondary curriculum. Integrated interdisciplinary project-based pedagogies were taught in ‘schools within schools’ or mini-schools, specialist schools focusing on media studies, in work annexes and community schools.

The 1980s saw a strong discourse of participative decision-making in these states involving all stakeholder groups: parents and students as well as unions. This was premised upon deliberative democratic principles rather than the now popular notion of distributed leadership. The latter is arguably more about devolving managerial risk and responsibility down to individual teachers and researchers without the resources. Innovation in curriculum and assessment was driven in most instances by teachers and from the ground up under the umbrella of a relatively benign and distant centralised male dominated bureaucracy and school leadership. Teacher unions were active not about pay but about registration of teachers, curriculum and assessment, even boycotting the Higher School Certificate in Victoria (Blackmore 1991).

This critical professionalism emerged from links between teacher union activism, and the multicultural and women’s movements (Yeatman 1999). The focus was inclusion and equity in the core work of curriculum and assessment. It was informed by teachers theorising their work : Hannan et al. ‘s (1974) Manifesto for a Democratic Curriculum and Carr and Kemmis’s (1983) Becoming Socially Critical. Garth Boomer and Jean Blackburn’s influence was evident in South Australian and Victorian curriculum reforms as well as in Federal Labor’s Schools Commission 1973–1974. Under Joan Kirner’s Premiership, Labor’s Education Department in the 1980s installed representatives from parent, teacher, women’s and multiculturalist movements inside the bureaucracy. Teacher and parent organisations worked together in school-based participatory decision making (teachers were first elected onto school councils). Equal Opportunity positions were mandated in all Victorian schools (Blackmore 1991).

The strength of educational progressivism lay not only in schools or in the academy but in a wider sense of faith in education as an emancipatory project which benefits all as a public good. How education was considered to be central to a democratic and civil society became evident in Victoria with the emergence of the Purple Sage movement in the 1990s in opposition to the neoliberal reforms instigated by the Kennett government. Purple Sage was a coalition of educators, public servants, students, church groups, and community organisations in multiculturalism, health and the unions. Its research identified that local communities considered neoliberal reforms such as school closures as an attack on democracy and community, particularly in the rural areas where the unequal effects Kennett’s neoliberalism lost him government in 1999.

Furthermore, what has been distinctive about Australian curriculum reform, and what might be lost with the national curriculum, has been how state- based curriculum development facilitated innovation in Australia. Yates et al. (Yates et al. 2011) in mapping the state histories of curriculum development in Australian Curriculum Dilemmas, argued that state based diversity of curriculum encouraged the transferral of ideas and innovation nationally, e.g. Queensland’s school based assessment, New Basics, and Essential Learning. Australian state systems have a strong history of progressive curriculum development that draws on the expertise and collaborative work of educators within the state curriculum authorities, teachers and academics drawing on current theory, research and professional knowledge. These are not the communists, socialists or ideologues as portrayed in The Australian by commentators such as Kevin Donnelly, a former consultant to Kennett, Howard and now Abbott conservative governments, and one of two appointees undertaking the Teacher Education Review in 2014.

Australian education research has also informed practice. If we were to repeat the 2000 DEST study of the Impact of Australian research on educational policy and practice in 2013 by backtracking how research informed policy and practice we would find the New London Group’s (1996) notion of multiliteracies embedded in curriculum texts, school curriculum design and teacher practice together with notions of ‘productive pedagogies’ and ‘rich tasks’ from Luke et al. (Luke et al. 2002) Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study. Powerful work has been done on rurality (Green et al. 2010) and literacy (Comber and Nixon 2013). Likewise, science education in many school systems has undertaken a paradigm shift through the constructivist perspectives (Tytler 2012). Academics continue to inform the national curriculum in areas of health and wellbeing and issues pertaining to sexuality. Australian teachers have a reputation for and are recruited in international schools because of their capacity to adapt and innovate, clearly indicative of the quality of Australian teacher education (Arber et al. 2014).

Our next generation of educational researchers also maintain a strong ‘critical edge’. Social justice is central to the Special Interest Groups and the Australian Educational Researcher. Studies focus on the impact of NAPLAN and MySchool (Yates 2011); on the intersections of culture, class, disability and gender; on issues in indigenous education and refugees (Comber and Nixon 2013) all with a mind to policy advocacy. Many of us also undertake policy service for government and NGOs. Recent reports on the teacher and academic workforce include The impact of teacher education on beginning teachers (Mayer et al. 2013), Australia Education Foundation’s report on Asia literacy (Halse et al. 2013), and Mapping the field of STEM for the Australian Council of Learned Academies (Marginson et al. 2013). These have the capacity to inform policy.

But as policy sociologists show, there is no linear, transparent or apolitical nexus between educational research, policy and practice (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). Research and policy interact within complex political frames, are contingent upon particular government ideologies, cultural attitudes to education, traditions and modes of governance (centralised/decentralised), adherence to dominant educational discourses circulating locally and globally, the state of national economies and a range of demographic factors. Policy is also adopted, adapted and ignored in schools and classrooms, as teachers negotiate the complexity of managing multiple and diverse student aspirations and needs while working within multiple often contradictory policy frames—some enabling and others disabling (MacBeath 2008).

Fundamental shifts in policy framing the field of education

But the fragility of education progressivism is made evident with a fundamental shift in economic, social and political context and rise of edu-capitalism accompanied by a shift from a social democratic to a neo-liberal framing of the relationship between the nation, individual and the state in education (Rizvi and Lingard 2010). This impacts on education as a social field. Twentieth century education was a state-centred project of nation building. Twenty first century education is now a trans-national project in which education has become big business and a source of income for both government and global edu-capitalism. Australia stands out for its relative decline of investment in education and training relative to other OECD and Asian countries despite the discourse of knowledge economies.

Educational governance has shifted from one of provision of educational services to one of coordination (national curriculum, standardised testing, professional standards) and regulation of an increasing number of public and private providers. While facilitating multiple pathways for lifelong learning of students, there is a push for seamlessness between sectors making educational institutions more porous, positioned as nodes in networks due to multiple university-school partnerships, TAFE–university integration, and university-industry partnerships. The new regulative frameworks of higher education—the Australian Qualifications Framework and Excellence in Research in Australia—impose normative models of what constitutes professional curriculum, professional standards, graduate employability, what counts as quality research and who is a researcher. As the AARE report (Harrison and Seddon 2013) and our colleague, the late Alison Lee argued, education is a diffuse and boundaryless field. Only 55 % of educational research is done by academics located in education faculties.

Now education has increasingly been treated as an individual positional good and not a collective public good. Australia has one of the highest levels of privatisation of costs of education in the OECD (Musset 2012). McIntyre (2010) in The Poor Relation refers to an Australian cultural disposition towards vocationalism and an instrumentalist view of education, tinged by anti-intellectualism. Universities are seen to be more about preparing graduates for the professions since the 1950s than knowledge production. Research only became a dominant feature in the 1980s. Bacon (2011) similarly comments on Australian’s cynicism towards ‘science’ as evident in the receptiveness of Australians to global warming denial where the scientific evidence suggests otherwise. She also attributes this anti-intellectualism mobilised by the concentration of media print ownership by the conservative and populist Murdoch press in Australia..

In education, Rawolle (2010) and others refer to the mediatisation of education policy. The media is critical to the processes of policy production, definition and resolution. Windle (2009) in researching the promotion and reception of MySchool documented how the Murdoch press pressured for greater transparency on school outcomes. Individual conservative commentators are given significant column space in the Murdoch outlets, but also the Fairfax media on the grounds of ‘balance’, for opinion pieces on phonics, standards, history and the gender wars. This is during a period in which the field of journalism is itself undergoing radical reconfiguration as investigative journalism gives way to opinion pieces in a cash strapped print media confronted with polyphonic outlets of social media.

And of course, ‘feminism has always been, and at least in part a media matter’(Lillburn et al. 2000, p. 335). Debates raging around Julia Gillard as our first female Prime Minister for her gender as much as her policies put gender back onto the front pages. The devastating, cruel and vindictive gender politics of the last 3 years has revitalised feminist activism (Summers 2013; Gillard 2004). Feminists have sought to counter the undue attention paid to the conveyors of anti-female masculine anxiety and deep seated misogyny of Oz shock jocks, encouraged by the anonymity of the social media and implicit acceptance by conservative politicians. Yet reverberating messages are sent and received to the next generation of women leaders and girls about what happens to women in positions of power and leadership, particularly given Abbott government has only one female Minister (Wilkinson 2005). The problem lies not with the failure of feminism, but more the refusal of hegemonic masculinities to accommodate any change in the social relations of gender that reduces male advantage. Discourses of gender are inextricably tied up with nationalism, citizenship and identity, and particularly around leadership with all its symbolism.

Education has therefore become in the context of destabilisation of national and cultural identity and economic volatility a site of what Raymond Williams’ (1975) refers to as ‘structures of feeling’, one characterised by generalised anxiety (Blackmore et al. 2010). Market values of competitive individualism fuel rights-based claims based on individual choice rather than needs-based claims premised upon collective interests. Neoliberal discourses of parental choice have been readily able to reposition parents not as participants and partners but as consumers and choosers. Parents seek guarantees of future security for their children through education while increasingly education is unable to fulfill all its promise of employment as the value of credentials falls with the massification of higher education and globalisation of professional workforces (Brown et al. 2011).

How policy frames practice

Schools experience rapid shifts in how policy frames their possibilities of practice, with some policy frames more enabling than others. Devolution during the 1990s promised greater school autonomy but actually introduced stronger forms of accountability focusing on outcomes while schools, leaders and teachers were left to do more with less (Blackmore 1995). The Brack’s Labor government, after the Connors (2000) review of public education and the Kirby (2001) Review of post compulsory education, found that the notion of a public system had been lost due to the radical restructuring and devolution (Lamb and Keating 2004). Self-managing schools were set up in competition with each other due to de-zoning and funding dependent on enrolments. PISA results, the Vinson Reports (2007) and Lamb (2007) and Lamb and Keating (2004) now show that Australia has significant areas of locational disadvantage; that is, where educational underachievement coincide with severe under or unemployment, poor health and well being, inadequate community infrastructure and a lack of jobs, with high crime rates. School choice has led to increased segregation between rich and poor students, schools and communities (Musset 2012), symptomatic of more devolved systems of school premised upon markets in the USA, UK, Mexico and Australia and Sweden (Raffo et al. 2010).

To restore a sense of a public system in Victoria, one suite of policies focused on schools working in clusters, Local Learning and Employment networks to support students ‘at risk’ of dropping out as they transitioned from school into work or further education, new curriculum initiatives such as Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning to retain students ‘at risk’, and On Track data of students exiting schools. A second suite of policies also intensified focus on stronger accountability of ‘underperforming’ schools and on literacy and numeracy, in part due to federal moves towards NAPLAN and MySchool. Another suite of policies—the Blueprint mark 1 and 2—invested significantly in leadership capacity building at all levels through school based research activities, a professional learning and leadership framework developed through consultation with academics and principals, and new buildings and innovative learning environments.

In research on Innovative Learning Environments undertaken by Deakin colleagues and myself for the DEECD and the OECD (Istance 2013), we identified from 12 Victorian case studies that a key enabling policy conducive to innovation was the Leading Schools Fund. This policy required schools within a locality to examine the provision of schooling and to link the design of new buildings or renovations to their pedagogical purpose. Principals and teachers were encouraged to travel, innovate and plan. Multiple re-configurations of schooling emerged out of quite difficult and prolonged amalgamations: k-12 schools, multi-campus schools with senior and junior campuses; University-school partnerships, annexes for students unable to work within mainstream secondary schooling. Some innovative learning environments were programmatic initiatives (e.g. at a year level only) and others whole of school approaches. Some schools were part of Neighbourhood Renewal Programs within a wider community capacity building policy strategy. All involved redesigning the built environment to create more flexible learning spaces integrating ICT.

Take the case of Yulle Park Community College. Yulle Park is located in Wendouree West, a disadvantaged region on the outskirts of Ballarat with high levels of intergenerational poverty. The school is now part of the Wendouree West Community Learning Hub, which includes education, health and community facilities in one location arising from a Neighbourhood Renewal Program. This Hub hosts Childrens’ Services providing occasional care for children, kindergarten, maternal and child health services; a Youth Centre; a dental clinic and a Well-Being clinic. The school is listed as ‘low’ in the Government Schools Performance Summary 2009. ICSEA rates 78 % of students for the bottom middle and 16 % for the least-advantaged quartile.

Yulle Park emerged from an amalgamation, opposed by many parents, of two primary schools. Here, as in the other ILE case studies, the participatory redesign process was dependent on teachers and community agreeing that something significantly different had to happen and that this required a high level of commitment to renewal (Thomson and Blackmore 2006). The physical buildings, school operations and curriculum were redesigned. The principal positioned himself as at the centre of a team within a flat leadership structure, premised on shared decision making, team teaching and planning with community. These were principles of deliberative democracy rather than distributed leadership. The three open-space multi-age learning pods facilitated this leadership approach. The planning, design, building, transitioning and implementation took over 7 years. Current staff do not expect to see immediate learning outcomes. They will not be moving up the NAPLAN ranking, as all schools were improving. So they, as many ‘like’ schools, focus on the needs of each group of students measured against their own advancement.

These 12 case studies provided clear lessons for government. Participatory redesign led to the seamless cohesion between the vision, architecture, school social environment and pedagogical approaches. Community consultation and generative design provided new opportunities for teachers and leaders to create new partnerships and imagine new pedagogical possibilities. But system wide and whole school investment in professional learning was critical. Changing and supporting teacher practices preceded changes in student learning. Regional input was essential in terms of providing additional resources in the form of leadership support and literacy and numeracy coaches. Success was measured not in NAPLAN scores but also in the community response, with increased voluntarism and engagement with the school and the learning hub, community pride and care with building and higher payment of levies. The community felt valued because their needs and interests were recognised and valued by government and they reciprocated. The school provided a place and sense of belonging as a social centre of community, a key theme of place-based education (Comber and Nixon 2013; Somerville et al. 2011). This was about community capacity building in and by civil society (Blackmore et al. 2011).

As a body of Australian research on school reform shows:

  • Systemic support (financial, personnel etc.) is critical for all schools, but that some schools need more due to locational disadvantage (Reid 2013; Teese and Lamb 2007).

  • ‘Best practices’ are not transferrable and ‘like’ schools do not exist because context matters more (Thomson 2002).

  • Internal accountability through peer review and systematic inquiry is more likely to improve outcomes than strong external accountabilities such as standardised tests which tend to be counterproductive to learning over time (Lingard 2012; Baird 2011).

  • Failure and experimentation rather than compliance are most likely to lead to improving student learning understood broadly (Lingard et al. 2005).

  • Teachers and principals use multiple forms of evidence and definitions of success to inform practice including but not only NAPLAN (Hayes et al. 2006; Windle 2009).

  • Leadership is important in terms of supporting teachers, allocating resources (time, space, money), encouraging risk-taking and innovation, synthesising, encouraging an organisational focus on learning (Mulford and Silins 2003; Gronn 2003).

  • Resilient students rely on schools being social centres within wider networks of interagency collaboration to support students, schools, families (McLeod and Yates 2006; Blackmore et al. 2010).

  • Place and a sense of belonging matters, often preceding learning or place-based education (Somerville et al. 2011; Gulson and Symes 2010; Reid 2013),

  • Quasi- education markets do not lead to equitable systems or socially just outcomes (Morgan and Blackmore 2012).

The policy issue is not about scaling up innovation or the bottom-line of efficiency or effectiveness in the short term but about building local capacity for schools to undertake sustainable reform facilitated by systemic and systematic support.

But within a globalised context, education is now located within a political environment in which education systems are compared cross-nationally as well as individual schools being compared within nation states. New governments sweep-clean websites and eradicate knowledge bases built up over time by bureaucrats, teachers and researchers. Too often governments practice policy amnesia (i.e. nothing good happened before us) or redirect funds away from research (e.g. from research to evaluation). Once again, with a conservative government in Victoria there is the policy shift back to ‘independent public’ schools and greater ‘school’ autonomy and associated moves away from system and regional support. In Victoria, literacy and numeracy coaches and regional network leaders have been abolished despite research indicating their effectiveness (van Leent and Exley 2013). Federally, despite a national consensus for the Gonski reform of school funding, the agenda is more about, winding back previous reform. For schools, one wave of reform cascades down upon another before the impact of previous reforms are evaluated or researched.

Reform churn and the shifting policy environment for educational research

University-school relationships also alter with national policy shifts. We see the end of National Partnerships Program and potentially the Higher Education Participation Program, policies that have enriched and funded university-school partnerships as did the Disadvantaged Schools and Participation and Equity Programs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Educational researchers also work within a rapidly changing policy mix that informs what we research, who we do research with, and how we do research. The institutional base, as well as the nature of the field of educational research, is also being radically transformed. Every discussion as to the future of educational research focuses on the changing and ambiguous role of the university in the twentyfirst century. Self-interested management experts (Ernst and Young 2012) warn universities that they have no future unless they move towards edu-capitalism (cf. Observatory on Borderless Higher Education 2013). Multiple reports warn of the crisis in academic workforce due to ageing, lack of research capacity building and intergenerational change, and disenchantment with academic work and university leadership (Bexley et al. 2011; Coates et al. 2010). The rules of the game of educational research are constantly changing with both greater regulation (e.g. Excellence in Research in Australia) and deregulation (reduced government funding and uncapped places). Universities have become transnational corporations with multiple campuses, partnerships, joint courses, collaborative research, and offshore activities competing with new contenders in international education from Asia and Brazil as well as old contenders in Europe and the US (Marginson 2008).

Universities themselves are confronted by the privatisation of research, reflected in the media, with the rising influence of consultancies (KPMG, Boston Consulting) and think tanks such as the IPA, Grattan Institute on policy (Reid 2013). The university is now only one site of knowledge production, dissemination and innovation, with most educational research done outside universities without the same ethical constraints. As education has become a global business academics have experienced, as teachers, the processes of corporatisation with the penetration of market and managerial discourses and practices (Zipin and Brennan 2003). This constant reform churn impacts on the work conditions of academics, as well as what they research, how they research, with whom and with what ‘impact’ on policy, practice and the field. Academics are stressed out—overworked, overwhelmed and feeling undervalued as education is ratcheted up to become a global enterprise (Blackmore and Sachs 2007). Massification and internationalisation have put greater demands on teaching. External accountabilities such as ERA and quality assurance are now driving the internal logics through processes of standardisation of research and teaching while new management technologies facilitate downloading the administrative work and responsibility for outcomes onto individual academics (Blackmore et al. 2010). Constant upskilling is required for blended learning (Bliuc et al 2012). Such pressures consume time and distract from the core work of teaching and research.

A number of disturbing trends for the social sciences and educational research are emerging due to the recent policy mix.

First, there is greater differentiation between universities (research intensive, research and teaching, teaching intensive) as universities seek to distinguish themselves through compacts, branding and specialisation. Differentiation between universities has led many to focus on sources of income in technology and the biological, material and medical sciences, more available than in the humanities and social sciences (also responding to the skewing in ARC funding move to applied industry partnerships and big science). This puts the notion of the liberal comprehensive university at threat. McIntyre (2010, p. 5) argues in The Poor Relation about the fragility of the social sciences as they have been ‘denied the academic standing enjoyed by scientists… [as] ….Real research is done in laboratories, by experiment and discovery rather than in the interpretation of social practice. T he notion of the liberal university in which the social sciences and humanities played a key role has never been strong in Australia. This cultural disposition has intensified with the driving force of economism as the market, the economy and the state have been brought into tight alignment. Innovation is equated discursively with science and technology in the public media and policy.

Second, ERA and enterprise bargaining is pushing towards the unbundling of academic work- into research-only and teaching-only, both increasingly casualised, while the core of university work of teaching and research positions, while more secure, is shrinking (Coates et al. 2009). At the same time, there is the emergence of the third space of new professionals in e-learning, instructional design, marketing, legal unit and research management. While allowing for specialisation, the trend is the casualisation and feminisation of academic labour.

Third, executive power is being increasingly wielded to manage research priorities to align individual researchers with university and national priorities, assuming research priorities are predictable. Internationalisation has seen the expansion of executive echelons to manage teaching and research better. The power (and salaries) of executive has radically increased in an inverse relation to the power of Academic Boards (Rowlands 2011). Each VC ‘restructures’ and ‘re-brands’, with a trend towards larger executive faculties. This reduces the diversity of academic and disciplinary voices at the executive level.

Fourth, the ongoing gender restructuring of academic work is underway. While women are now the majority of students across most disciplines (excluding IT and engineering), their educational overachievement is not rewarded equally in the workplace. Women are fast becoming the majority of academics in a more tenuous and gendered division of labour (Blackmore 2014). Numerous reports indicate that the triple shift of work/family/community is increasingly in conflict with the intensification of academic work and its blurring into home life through technology (Pocock 2011). Flexibility and mobility are increasingly key attributes of being a successful academic, and a precondition for academic and managerial leadership, favouring men who are less connected to the routines of household and family. Women are more likely to stay in casual positions, have less mobility, and are more likely to follow partners (Blackmore 2014; Coates et al. 2009). Escalating expectations for quality of teaching and research and partnerships mean that female ECRs are vulnerable to being tracked into teaching only positions early in their career as academic work is unbundled. At the same time, most DVCs Research are male and with a background in the sciences. So research leadership is characterised by a lack of diversity of thinking as well as gender and ethnicity as to what counts as valued research and research method (Bell 2010).

Finally, while there is a rhetorical focus on interdisciplinarity, education as a multidisciplinary field has a tenuous institutional base, informed by new knowledges and a proliferation of method and theoretical perspectives. Furlong and Lawn (2011) in Disciplines in Education: their role in the future of educational research argue that UK has a weaker sense of ‘discipline’ than Europe. Biesta (2011) lamented ‘What is virtually absent in the Anglo-American enactment of the field is the idea of education as a separate academic discipline with its own forms of theorising’ (2011, p. 191). Thus education is more policy sensitive, informed by external interests, and a community of scholars based on ‘sociality and pragmatism under pressure’ (Furlong and Lawn 2011, p. 4), opening it to a ‘practical turn’ and push for evidence based practice, the equation of education faculties with teacher education, and the structural demise of education faculties due to research assessment and restructuring. Against this is the rise of scienticism with No Child Left Behind and in Australia the ARC Centre for Science of Learning underpinned by four major projects informed by brain science, psychology, technology and one on pedagogy. The focus is the individual learner or classroom, with little or no suggestion of context understood broadly in terms of policy, governance and equity. The trend is for big data, big science and big research teams.

Purposeful research in the university in the twenty first century

Seddon et al. reminds us in Living in a 2.2 World that ERA focuses not on the content or purpose or practice of educational research but on output narrowly defined in terms of impact on academic field. The same report indicates that the three research priorities identified by respondents were related to advancing knowledge, personal intellectual stimulation, and making a difference for practitioners. Educational research continues to struggle over the compromises required to contribute both intellectually and practically to the field at the same time that external influences continue to redefine what constitutes intellectual and practical value. We can make a difference in terms of our research as an intellectual and critical practice even while undertaking policy advocacy as well as policy service and policy critique.

Criticality requires negotiating tensions between the particular/universal, working with and working over dominant orthodoxies while providing alternative ways of doing and seeing the world, about working within and on the rules of the game. Being on the edge—geographically, epistemologically and politically—also means being constantly vigilant as to how one is positioned, the embedded assumptions and relationships of power, while necessarily being aware of the dangers and possibilities of co-option and co-operation when becoming involved in the policy game. It can mean using particular language and methods required when undertaking policy service, but reserving the right to undertake critical analysis. Knowing the dominant does not necessarily mean adhering to its position, but it is necessary to playing the game.

We can and will continue to work on and through the research-policy-practice problematic despite disabling policy regimes even if we do not seem to be informing policy. As Fraser would argue, we need to begin with the micro practices of the everyday relations of working within our epistemic communities while retaining a sense of obligation to the public good. Fraser argues for ‘good enough deliberation’ (Fraser 2008, p. 45) to legitimate social reforms however modest so as to lead to further rounds of reform—thus relying on ‘democracy’s reflexive capacity’. This is a ‘practical politics’ of getting things done while deferring the wider issues until there are conditions of possibility to act—undertaking affirmative action while seeking to achieve transformative action. We need to beware that academic corporatisation raises the risk of performative work distracting us from the real work of educational research (Blackmore and Sachs 2007). When universities (and academics) lose that sense of obligation to and for the public and the commitment to ethical and rigorous research, we have lost the only thing that distinguishes universities from any other educational provider and academics from market researchers. We need to confront the danger that education research may be reduced to method while working to retain the notion of educational research as emancipatory praxis.

Fraser, from an America-centric perspective, considered that feminist’s seduction by post-structuralism and the politics of recognition of difference (race, gender and culture) distracted feminists from recognizing the global redistribution of wealth and power upwards This redistribution impacted particularly on women and children, both North and South, who now constitute the majority of the global poor. Fraser set herself the task of providing a unitary framework of social justice that served as an analytical tool and principles of practice around the concepts of redistribution, recognition and representation to underpin that emancipatory project (Blackmore 2014).