Educational Leadership and Policy: Precarity and Precariousness

Abstract

This special issue brings a range of perspectives to explore questions of the connections between notions of precarity and education. Authors in this issue explore the myriad ways precarity affects educational leaders and how precarity and education policy are intertwined broadly. The issue was first conceptualised in 2019 in response to ongoing concerns about precarious employment in education casualised academia in higher education, increasing reports of short-term teaching contracts, and performance-based contracts for school leaders. Education systems and sectors around the globe are functioning in increasingly casualised workforce environments, which has implications for leadership in schools and in higher education institutions. Precarity also holds serious implications for policymakers and for the leaders and educators who have to enact those policies. We know, for example, that the work of school improvement takes time. Developing a highly-skilled and confident teaching workforce requires a long-term investment and commitment. Schools in vulnerable communities face higher rates of turnover and difficulty in staffing. Tackling the big issues in education – inequity, opportunity gaps, democracy and cohesion – also takes time. How are precarious leaders, or leaders in precarious organisations, able to make long-term plans to address these challenges? The rise of the gig economy also holds significant implications for young people today, and how education is preparing them for an uncertain future. This is not new by any means and Lee and Kofman (2012, 389) describe precarious employment as ‘not just the outcome of an inexorable, almost mechanical, pendulum swing from “security” to “flexibility” but a core part of the state’s strategy of development’. While precarious employment and working conditions are not a new development, Millar (2017) suggests that the question may be asked “for whom is precarity new?” Alberti et al. (2018, 3) note that “precarity is [the] consequence of an unequal distribution of protection within society, which leaves some groups more exposed to precariousness than others”. However, they also caution against underestimating the “scope of change in the world of work and employment: it is not only ‘the precariat’ that has to deal with increasing precarity”. Indeed, one of the papers in this special issue (Stacey et al. 2021) deals with the working conditions of a profession that was once considered stable and secure. These