Introduction

Principal: We have to make decisions on a daily basis about which students we’re really going to make progress with versus others. Others get left behind. Recently they [the school] did a whole lot of work with a young boy who wasn’t attending… with no success. So, that takes up a lot of time and resources when you could be working with students here who’s acting out, who’s not coming every day. It’s not unprofessional of me to say this, but because of the system and the lack of resources, you do have to let some go and say: “Well, I don’t think I am going to have success with getting that boy to school. I can’t drop by and pass every day and drive them to school, and then follow him around all day and make sure he goes to every class!” So, we’ll leave that one and concentrate on these others. You know, it’s just a fact of life!

I use the above quote as a point of entry into a discussion about some of the paradoxical tensions that school principals grapple with in doing equity work with limited resources while striving to meet performative criteria by which their leadership is evaluated. Using interview data collected from a principal as part of an ethnographic study of school disengagement among marginalised students (Dadvand, 2017), I tease out how the principal worked simultaneously within and against the grain of resource constraints and performativity regimes to do equity work. The analysis presented in this paper focus on the less clearly delineated processes in responding to contradictions in equity work within educational spaces. The aim is to provide a more nuanced understanding of how individuals create ‘lines of flight’ in ‘striated spaces’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983) in face of inadequate resourcing and when dealing with education policy agendas that prioritise performativity and outcomes.

Using the notion of paradox, I examine how the school principal responded to the challenges of resource allocation for equity work while navigating performative expectations. I will chart forms of compliance and compromise that emerged as a result. The notion of paradox can act as a powerful analytical tool to explore issues of continuity and change, sense-making processes in dealing with ambiguities, and capacity for action in the face of conflicting options. Management and organisational studies have researched paradoxical tensions to offer insights into contradictions and complex relationships (Lewis, 2000; Smith & Lewis, 2022). Unlike the notion of dilemma that denotes duality and binary opposites in clearly delineated and linear fashions, as Storey and Salaman (2010, p. xiv) maintain, paradoxes exist “when seemingly divergent principles or pulls co-exist—that is, they are held in tension simultaneously.” It is at these moments when one is tethered between divergent imperatives that we can better understand what constrains and enables transformative action.

Examining the tensions housed within paradoxes gives insights into the untidy and complex work of school leaders in dealing with contradictory agendas surrounding their decision-making and provides a window of opportunity to explore how social transformation (can) occurs. By framing the problem as ‘the paradox of equity versus excellence’, I intend to bring into sharper focus the limits of discursive subjectification and to demonstrate the nonlinear ways in which a school principal worked in compliance with and against normative managerial expectations to provide more equitable educational opportunities for a group of so-called ‘disadvantaged’ students in his school. I maintain that while the framework of discursive subjectivation can be beneficial in capturing the ideational and the material conditions that surround and give meaning to school leadership practices, such a framework renders invisible the agonistic practices that can unsettle, albeit provisionally, the dominant order.

Performativity and school leadership

Over the past few decades, the politico-economic rationality of neoliberalism has driven post-welfarist education reforms worldwide at various scales and intensities (Ball, 2012). Policies driven by the neoliberal reason emphasise performativity, choice and marketisation as processes that can yield greater accountability, efficiency, improved outcomes, and higher productivity levels in various spheres of life. In education, these measures have acted as ‘technologies of governance’ aiming to improve ‘social efficiency’ by steering the work of teachers and school leaders from a distance (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). The implication of this for schools in the context of liberal economies such as Australia has been heavier reliance on measures such as high-stake testing, reporting procedures and benchmarking practices.

Contributing further to the changing organisation of education is a suite of policies that incentivises a system of education provision that functions on the quasi-market principles of choice, competition and school autonomy (Wilkinson et al., 2018). Within this system, data collection, data analytics and reporting standards constitute an assemblage of tools aimed to provide the consumer of education services (namely, students and parents) with useful measures to make ‘informed’ school decisions. This view marks a significant shift in education from ‘outdated’ images of professionalism towards new forms of managerialism informed by what Brown (2015, p. 10) refers to as a vision of the individual as homo-economicus, namely “an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues.”

The impacts of policy priorities on school principals’ choices and decisions, including how the performative culture and the new modes of managerialism affect their capacity to do equity work, have been an area of interest in critical policy studies, which seek to unlock the relatively narrow parameters of technocratic approaches to explore how various individuals, groups and populations are positioned, governed and disciplined through policy expectations (Clarke & Bainton, 2015). In this line of research, Niesche (2015, p. 138), for instance, argues that school principals today are constructed less like “the individual that occupies the traditional enclosure of the principal’s office or the administration block but more the ‘dividual’ that through a range of discursive practices and accountabilities must be constantly vigilant to promote their school in the most positive light for public scrutiny and be seen to perform.”

Other studies have cautioned against reductive tendencies that narrow school leaders’ role to compliance and enforcement of performative and managerial agendas. Instead, there has been growing attention to both the impact of discursive and material conditions on principals alongside the liminal spaces in which they (can) engage in the process of critique and adaptation. Dolan’s (2020) work, for example, uses Foucault to address the power relations within which school leaders’ work and lives are situated and the opportunities that they create for exercising agency and authority based upon the premises of critique and agonistic counter-conduct. Similarly, Ward et al. (2015) demonstrate how, despite the dominance of neoliberalism as a distinct mode of reason underpinning school improvement agendas, school leaders create ‘openings’ for speaking up against the macro-political discourses.

Central to the above-mentioned body of research is the presence of ambivalence, uncertainty and tensions as fixtures within contemporary education. In their conceptual-critical essay, Yurkofsky and Peurach (2023) discuss how schools today must navigate the demands for ‘equity and excellence’ and the tensions that this work can create for educators and school leaders. Drawing on organisational theory, Yurkofsky and Peurach (2023) highlight the productive power of encounters with 'paradoxical tensions in education as a way to spur reflection, learning and change. Paradoxical tensions, the authors maintain, can help us transcend the either/or perspectives on uncertainty and instead examine the complexities involved in simultaneously leveraging and mitigating uncertainties.

Living with the paradox

It is simplistic to assume that education policy expectations trickle down into schools and classrooms. Instead, they are negotiated, contested, and compromised in ways contingent upon their individual, institutional and contextual factors. As Hardy (2015) notes, policy enactment is a contested process and requires decision-making that involves receiving, making sense of, translating, and narrating what policy stipulates. Policy ideas and expectations are rarely taken up as intended, and their implementation becomes conditional upon the resources and opportunities within schools. Therefore, despite measures to limit ‘drift in policy implementation’, what school leaders and principals deem feasible and/or desirable reflects not only what the policy articulates but also their personal-professional sense-making in relation to the material realities of their local conditions (Heffernan, 2018).

To better understand how policy expectations and requirements become the subject of interpretation, we must depart from deterministic accounts of sovereignty and instead pay attention to nomadic forms of agency that react to conditions of social control (Yar, 2003). This, in turn, highlights the untidy ways in which social actors, through everyday micro-actions, engage in an active process of noticing, framing and making sense of the material conditions, and wider requirements in ways that are closely entwined with their personal-professional biographies (Spillane, 2009). As Maguire et al., (2015, p. 486) argue, policies “rarely tell you exactly what to do, they rarely dictate or determine practice, but some more than others narrow the range for imaginative responses.”

Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of ‘striated (versus smooth) spaces’ and ‘lines of flight’ are powerful conceptual constructs that can help tease out how individual agency interacts with wider discourses, material conditions, institutional arrangements, social norms, and expectations. Smooth and striated spaces are physical, material, and discursive territories that house the possibilities for being and becoming. Striated spaces “are hierarchical, rule-intensive, strictly bounded and confining, whereas smooth spaces are open, dynamic and allow for transformations to occur” (Tamboukou, 2008, p. 360). Within these spaces, an assemblage of forces mediates the capacities of individuals for acting and being acted upon and, in so doing, contributes to maintaining or creating ‘lines of flight’ from the territorial confines of the status quo. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988, p. 500) explain, striation and smoothing remain in an ongoing and dynamic state of (re)invention and co-exist at any given time:

… in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. Even the most striated city gives rise to smooth spaces: to live in the city as a nomad, or as a cave dweller. Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space.

Lines of flight from striated spaces invoke resistance to codification. By drawing attention to complex interactions, Deleuze and Guattari’s work allows tracing the operation of multiple affective forces within social formations (Youdell, 2015). In doing so, it brings attention to the nexus of the individual, social, material, and institutional forces involved in creating striated spaces for action and the opportunities that emerge as individuals break away from existing Doxa, subvert the dominant order and disrupt established orthodoxies (captured in the analogy of the nomad and nomadic actions). When used to understand school leaders’ decisions and practices, a conceptual framework informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of stritation and lines of flight accommodates for an understanding that prioritises flexibility, uncertainty and proccessuality over all-encompassing explanations (Baker & McGuirk, 2017).

This is the topic that I will turn to in the remainder of this paper. I explore how performative and outcome-driven education policy conditions implicate the equity practices of school leaders. Using an ethnographic sensibility that focuses on dynamism captured through paradoxes, I examine how a school principal in a high-performing and academically-oriented government secondary school located in a low socio-economic suburb in Victoria navigated the tensions that he faced between what Ciulla (2009) calls ‘being ethical and being effective’. My analysis and discussions will address the less clearly delineated and defined processes that underpin making sense of and responding to paradoxical circumstances involved in doing equity work under performative policy conditions in schools.

The study

The data for this research was collected as part of an ethnographic study of school disengagement among a group of students identified as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving in a government secondary school in a low Socio-Economic Status (SES) suburb in Melbourne, Australia (Dadvand, 2017). Despite being in a low SES neighbourhood, the school mainly attracted students from ‘middle-class’ families. The area surrounding the school had seen a recent surge in gentrification as parents relocated to the school neighbourhood zone to enrol their children in the school. The 2020 school demographic data from My School WebsiteFootnote 1 showed that the school’s Index of Community Socio-Educational Advantage (ICSEA)Footnote 2 was above average and that about 90% of the school students were in the middle and top distribution quarters of the Socio-Educational Advantage (SEA). Despite its mostly middle-class student demographic, the school also catered for a small cohort of students (of about 10%) at the bottom quarter of the SEA distribution.

According to the principal, a key part of the school’s appeal to its parents’ community was its reputation as a high-performing government secondary school. The school’s post-secondary destination data from the My School Website reflected its academic orientation, with about two-thirds of students who completed Year 12 in 2019 entering universities or institutions of higher education. The school offered a strong academic curriculum with a wide range of Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE)Footnote 3 studies, including English, Mathematics, Science, Technology, Languages other than English, Health and Physical Education, the Arts, and Humanities. The school website showcased its high academic performance on its homepage by highlighting its ‘exemplary’ Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR)Footnote 4 scores. The school’s website also promoted its wide-ranging outside classroom opportunities for students, including its student leadership programs, extra-curricular activities such as excursions, aerobics, and rowing clubs, as well as international trips and expeditions.

Due to the limits of scope and purpose, I only present and discuss the data collected through a semi-structured interview that I conducted with the school principal. The principal had been in the leadership position in the school for ten years prior to the interview. I conducted the interview face-to-face after spending about eight months collecting data from the school-based alternative education program designed to re-connect the ‘disengaged students’ to the mainstream school. The interview lasted about 70 min. The interview touched on a range of issues relating to the way the principal perceived ‘the mission of the school’, the importance of academic achievement and student performance in NAPLAN,Footnote 5 the impact of testing and performance-driven practices on the priorities and management of the school, funding issues, and the school efforts to cater for the more complex needs and circumstances of the students who were identified as ‘disengaged’ and ‘at risk’ of early school dropout.

The interview was audio-recorded with the prior knowledge and the consent of the principal. Following Baker and McGuirk’s (2017) methodological suggestions in doing critical policy research (using Deleuze and Guitari’s assemblage thinking), I provide qualitative analyses that prioritise the interactive configuration among various actors within the specific material and spatial context of the school and highlight the less visible labour involved in doing equity work in the current policy landscape. The analysis involved identifying the paradoxical tensions the principal recounted in doing equity work. These paradoxical tensions were then further probed as a way to better understand the enablers and barriers to school leadership work for equity, and the caveats and opportunities in such work. In doing so, I follow a bottom-up approach to the study of paradoxical tensions as a product of interactions among various discourses, policies, practices, and organisational activities, rather than the product of individual cognition or a residue of organisational structures (see Putnam et al., 2016).

Excellence, equity and the students on the margins

The notion of ‘excellence’ emerged as a recurring theme and a priority area for the school during my interview with the principal. Excellence was primarily defined in relation to a school improvement strategy focused on academic achievement. This articulation of excellence corresponded, by and large, with a performative care ethics that pursued instrumental agendas relating to improved (measurable) learning outcomes and test results for students and the school ranking more broadly (Dadvand & Cuervo, 2019, 2020). In response to a question about what constituted ‘the vision and mission’ of the school, the principal talked about the school’s commitment to support students to ‘be their best’ and receive the highest possible ATAR score. This was deemed to be a pre-requisite to future success as it helped students to transition into universities once they complete their secondary school qualifications:

Well, our main objective is to support every student to successfully proceed through their six years of schooling, right through to year 12, and then to get, in our case, the best possible ATAR they can achieve for most students. Some of our students won’t be working towards an ATAR score, but for all our students, regardless of where they are or aren’t, our priority then is to ensure that they’re supported to go into further learning. Now, for most of our students, that would be university.

As a discourse and a social practice, excellence can be defined in varied ways. For the principal, however, the definition of excellence revolved predominantly around what the school could achieve in line with its four-year strategic plan to improve students’ academic achievement and learning outcomes. As the principal went on to explain, students’ academic achievement provided evidence about how the school was faring compared to other schools. This pursuit of excellence went hand-in-hand with what Krejsler (2018, p. 393) describes as ‘a fear of falling behind regime’ characterised by a reliance on indicators, ranking and league tables. Once constructed along such lines, an expectation to excel acted as an affective force holding together a school improvement strategy within which data became the prime instrument in identifying areas ‘in need of growth’ and providing insights into ‘what works’:

We look at NAPLAN results to inform teaching practice, particularly in English and Mathematics, to try and improve instructional practices and the weaknesses that are appearing in the data, to try and then teach better in the classroom, more successfully, I guess, and to improve the acquisition of those particular numeracy skills and literacy skills which the NAPLAN is suggesting is out there. […] In terms of disadvantaged students, the NAPLAN data is not going to be that helpful, really, because for most of those students, we know where they are at in their learning. They stand out; we worry about them. We know they are not achieving; we don’t need NAPLAN to tell them that!

The above comment from the principal shows how data-driven and performative inclinations cohabited, at times rather uncomfortably, with a desire to do equity work for a group of students identified as ‘at risk’ of early school leaving. The principal explained how many such students, who had ‘the whole box and dice’ of problems, were ‘behind the eight ball’ in their literacy and numeracy skills. As a result, NAPLAN did not provide any significant information beyond what the school knew about these students. This supports the findings of other Australian studies that confirm the challenges that schools face in making sense of high-stakes testing data from their so-called ‘disadvantaged students’, which often confirms what these schools may already know about their least advantaged students (Cormack & Comber, 2013).

Reconciling the demands of equitable leadership with performative priorities produces paradoxical tensions within a schema that pursued a simultaneous commitment to a redistributive social justice agenda and outcome-driven practices. These paradoxical tensions are part and parcel of what Savage (2011) has referred to as a social capitalist political-educational imagination. This political-educational imagination is premised on the assumption “that social governance is capable of pursuing and achieving the social democratic ideals of equity and social justice, within the architecture of an increasingly globalising and competitive capitalist economy” (Savage, 2011, p. 34). Within this architecture, mechanisms of choice, competition and school autonomy are used to hold school leaders to account in fiscal and administrative matters while steering their work from a distance.

Responding to paradoxical tensions arising from meeting an excellence agenda while serving an equity imperative, the principal funded an on-campus alternative education program for ‘disadvantaged’ students. The school employed two teachers at 0.5 Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) each to lead the alternative education program, while a philanthropic organisation provided the remaining 0.5 FTE funds for the program's staffing. The program actively liaised with well-being staff, school coordinators and teachers in student referrals. The work involved identifying the learning needs and behavioural problems to address them in a more relational setting with a staff-to-student ratio of about 1 to 5. The program aimed, as the principal explained, to ‘keep the students in the school while teaching them hands-on skills’ so that they can ‘reconnect with the school’ and their education:

Really, that should be the job of education to make it more of a level playing field, so the disadvantaged people have the same opportunities as children from affluent families and children from loving families to be successful in life, and you and I know they don’t have that opportunity. […] In a busy school day, they [disadvantaged students] are not necessarily provided with the opportunity [for one-on-one support]. That’s related to resourcing. We need more people to be available to work with those students because they just need more care than students, who are coming from pretty much normal, average homes where there aren’t huge amounts of problems occurring.

School principals such as the one reported in this study are often charged with the difficult task of navigating a complex and often contradictory policy landscape that promotes school autonomy while adhering to centralised forms of compliance. Dealing with these expectations and requirements, as Keddie and Holloway (2020) argue, produces mixed effects for social justice. Inadequate funding combined with stringent forms of reporting based on performative criteria tends to ‘striate' the space (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988) for equitable practices in school leadership. As I demonstrate and discuss in the next section, the productive power of managerial imperatives, funding arrangements, performative pressures, and outcome-driven priorities, while not foreclosing all openings, can significantly narrow what principals and school leaders perceive as feasible, desirable, and sustainable in their work.

The paradox of equity versus excellence

The Federal government review of school funding, commonly referred to as the Gonski Report, provided a backdrop for the principal’s reference to the tensions that he experienced in catering for the needs of ‘disadvantaged students’ in his school. Since its release in 2011, the Gonski Report had re-invigorated policy debates and generated considerable public and political attention about the need for a fairer funding framework for Australian schools (Gonski et al., 2011). Despite the much-needed attention and the momentum that the Report had helped generate, reforming the intractable funding inequities remains an ongoing challenge for the least advantaged schools in Australia. This is reflected in the principal’s comment about the constrained material space in which he had to do equity work, which left provision for the most marginalised students to be ‘tokenistic and insufficient’. This predicament, he went on to explain, was emblematic of what many school leaders in his position had to deal with:

I suppose you would hope with the Gonski Report, it has really brought ‘disadvantage’ to our attention much more recently […] So, I think disadvantage is certainly on the agenda, but I guess… I think it is really important to say I had a meeting with all the principals on the network recently, and we were discussing what additional literacy and numeracy support we are able to provide our students, and it ranged between nothing, because the school could not afford it, and these are schools, some of them have way more disadvantage than we do, to tokenistic sort of programs for disengaged students. So, we have lower class numbers, which again costs money in an attempt to help this sort of students, and then tutorial work is on helping them with their homework, getting them organised and things like that. To me, it’s tokenistic and not significant enough.

With insufficient funding arrangements available to tackle disadvantages, the principal’s decision to liaise with a philanthropic organisation to jointly fund the alternative education program brings attention to instances of what Deleuze and Guattari (1988) call ‘nomadic deterritorialisation’, i.e., actions that venture a fluid and active escape from within striated spaces. These escapes highlight nonlinear interactions between the productive power of discourses, material conditions, and individual capacity to interrogate, unsettle and disrupt—albeit provisionally—the dominant order. The following quote from the principal demonstrates this very capacity to critique and act creatively, utilising existing opportunities (namely, administrative autonomy in school leadership) and available funding (sought through a philanthropic organisation) to create lines of flight for equity work:

So, every student comes into the school with a dollar amount. So, I think at the moment, it runs about $7.000 […] So, I think I’ve got a budget of about 13 million, something like that, and about 11 million goes into the costs of salaries. So, I have to make up my own mind how I spend that money. […] So, we are in that situation here most of our teachers are in the top salary… so, I can barely staff the school in terms of running classes, you know to pay the salaries of the teachers and then I have got to pay the salaries of librarians, students’ wellbeing coordinators, and things like that. So, I run out of money, and it is up to me to decide whether we employ [names of alternative education program teachers]. But they [the Department of Education] are not saying, “Hey, we’re going to give you an extra eighty thousand to employ [names of alternative education program teachers].” They say, “We are giving you this much money. You decide how you want to spend it.” Most schools are in my situation where you just flat out putting the people you require in front of classes and the office staff you require.

While it is important to acknowledge the principal’s acts to create possibilities for more equitable leadership practices, it should be noted that these acts emerged from within the very discursive and material apparatus in which his school gained its legitimacy as a high-performing middle-class institution. Faced with paradoxical tensions arising from pursuing complex and internally contradictory priorities, the principal had to live in a constant state of strategic calculation as to how he could deploy existing resources (available funds and relative fiscal autonomy of the school) to create lines of flight from within a striated space that limited the opportunities for more enduring and sustainable equity actions. The tensions emanating from reconciling these disparate tendencies positioned the alternative education program, as the principal explained, ‘on the razor edge’ and jeopardised its long-term sustainability:

So, at the moment, we are in deficit. So, I overstaffed the school, theoretically, and that deficit is equivalent to 1.5 teachers. So, I have got to be really careful next year, try and get rid of that by somehow cutting back, even though we have the same enrolment… 1.5 teacher worth. […] I guess you gotta be reasonable too! Running a school is sort of like [running] a business. You cannot just keep asking for more and more money. […] The reality is that you have to make these calls. I guess you’ll always have to…

While some of the principal’s accounts foreground his capacity to exercise agency to resist (for instance, his critique of funding inadequacies and his decision to liaise with a philanthropic organisation and allocate school resources to the alternative education program despite running a deficit), his capacity for ‘breaking away' from the constraints of leadership priorities and expectations remained largely fettered within the complex and fluctuating set of priorities that the school faced (for instance, in terms of improved metrics-based and data-driven performance and need to produce a budget surplus by managing the school like a business). As the following quote helps further demonstrate, the paradoxical tensions that the principal encountered were never fully resolved, but provisionally managed on a year-to-year basis:

We’d love to run it [the alternative education program] with a lot more students, but it costs me. I don’t know the amount now, but a few years ago, it was costing $80,000, which was a lot of money when you are not given money for that program. It’s unfortunate, and [teacher name] and [teacher name] know this. It’s always on the razor edge. If we are going to go into a deficit situation, that’s one of the programs that I have to close down. […] I think, overall, schools are really careful with how they use money, and we’re constantly reviewing and thinking about how to do the best with what we’ve got, so it’s not that we’re squandering the money. It’s just a constant juggling act… I guess. But certainly, disadvantaged students at this school are losing out, but I would argue at every school because there is no significant funding for them.

The above comment allows us to examine what transpires in the in-between space where paradoxical tensions are lived through. These are the striated spaces of school leadership marked with the co-presence of diverse and internally conflicting agendas. Inhabiting one such space, the principal in this study had to remain vigilant between serving an equity imperative despite inadequate funding and improving school-level performance sanctioned through policy regimes. While equity-driven practices demanded a needs-based approach for resource allocation to the most marginalised students, performative requirements incentivised what Gillborn and Youdell (1999) describe as a ‘rationing’ of attention to ‘the middle’ where the school could yield highest performance gains and avoid running into a budget deficit.

Discussion and conclusion

The accounts and the narratives I have reported from the principal in this paper help highlight how school leaders can produce opportunities for equity within and against the performative parameters, managerial discourses, and material realities of everyday schooling. I recognise the limitations of working with case study data and, as such, refrain from generalising the findings to the broader cohort of Australian principals who often work in diverse school sectors, geographical locations, and/or socio-demographic contexts. My intention in this latter section of the paper is to draw upon the analyses that I have presented thus far to extrapolate two points that might provide a context for understanding the experiences of principals and that might bear relevance to the education system-level initiatives that support equitable practices.

First, as the principal’s responses indicated, the macro discourses and the material conditions tend to striate the space and confine possibilities for ways of doing leadership differently in schools. Yet, the data also showed the untidy and complex ways the principal utilised existing opportunities to navigate the discourses and expectations surrounding his work. Attention to these complexities and internal inconsistencies confirms that agonistic practices can cohabitate with a tendency to comply with and be co-opted into the status quo. The principal in this study, for instance, oscillated between resisting and conceding through what can be described as a double movement: a drive for equity led to an inclination to resist codification and create freedoms to act, but not in a pure sense of freedom from codification, but freedom to remain beyond attempts to be co-opted into a striated space (Deuchars, 2011).

To create lines of flight for equity, the principal traversed into a liminal space of compliance (to remain a recognisable subject of performative regimes) while challenging the conditions of such recognition (to focus on ‘the middle’ in resource allocation). In this liminal space, negotiation of differences created what can be described as “a tension peculiar to borderline existences” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 218). Instability within this liminal space (as documented through ambivalence, paradoxical tensions, and the uncertainties about the support provided to ‘disadvantaged’ students and the sustainability of future funding for the alternative education program) is a reminder that policy enactment in schools is always an incomplete process of ‘becoming’ predicated upon the dynamic interactions among various institutional, material and policy priorities, needs and expectations (Maguire et al., 2015).

Second, this latter point highlights the need for a more coherent reform agenda to bring equity into sharper focus within existing educational frameworks. As captured by the analogy of being in ‘a constant juggling act’, the principal’s decisions remained in a state of flux between the care of the self (to stay a successful school leader under performative policy conditions), the care for the reputation of the institution (to manage a high performing academic school and serve its mostly the middle-class cohort of parents/students) and the care for marginalised students (to be given the much-needed support to ‘re-engage’ in learning and stay in the school). Similar to many other Australian school leaders who have to navigate the emotional intensity of leadership under performative conditions (Heffernan et al., 2022), the principal in this study had to exert emotional labour to respond individually to deeply entrenched social and material inequalities and, in doing so, counter the logic of a status quo that limited discursive availabilities about what it means to be an effective principal.

A more coherent reform agenda underpinned by explicit attention to equity issues recognises how the space for more inclusive leadership practices has been striated under current discursive, material and policy regimes that prioritise market-enhancing principles of choice and competition. Such an agenda encourages a positive rather than punitive mode of accountability, one that utilises collected ‘data’ as one piece of evidence about school performance and uses likely evidence of under-performance to provide remedial support for schools (Ravitch, 2016). A shift from punitive to positive accountability can help mitigate uncertainty and paradoxical tensions involved in navigating and responding to contradictions arising from competing visions and priorities within the education system.

By mitigating uncertainty and paradoxical tensions, a more coherent reform agenda driven by an equity imperative encourages school leaders, as Keddie et al., (2020, p. 12) have argued, to interrogate what they do “not from an accountant’s point of view, but from the perspective of how their agenda fits with a broader view of what constitutes a just society.” Such an agenda can help ‘smoothen’ the striated space for equitable leadership practices and create enabling conditions to help sustain individual efforts, giving way to opportunities for doing education differently within spaces that empower. While doing so may not remove all obstacles to inclusion and equity, it can help expose ‘the cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) that marks our social imagination and opens possibilities for ways of doing education differently.