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In January 2021, the state government of NSW, Australia, announced that all year 9 and 10 elective courses developed by schools will be phased out. This paper offers a brief historical account of school-developed board-endorsed courses (SDBECs) in NSW and a close analysis of the policy to phase them out.

I give an historical account of the meaning and place of SDBECs within the NSW school system, before situating the policy decision to phase them out within the broader historical and political context of curriculum reform in NSW. Finally, I offer an analysis of the discourses and framing of the policy both across curriculum review reports and in the government and public rhetoric, by examining policy documents, government media releases, news and blog articles at the time of the policy change.

This policy change and surrounding discourses are contextualised and analysed to show how the curriculum came to be blamed for a host of educational problems, and how the government arrived at their irrational yet politically expedient policy response by distorting the meaning of one metaphor: the crowded curriculum. I conclude with a reading of the policy as indicative of centralisation and de-legitimisation of teachers’ curriculum development work.

The convergence of state and federal discourse about curriculum as a site of cleaning up, reforming or re-organising should concern educators in Australia especially as authority over education is increasingly centralised and made vulnerable to political whim. Close studies of such minor policy decisions provide a window into how larger processes of centralisation are justified and enacted at the local level.

The importance of socially just leadership has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years as integral for tackling issues of disadvantage and inequality across education and schooling systems. However, there are still remaining questions about what these leadership practices look like in the everyday work of school leaders. This chapter draws on a research project to embed Indigenous perspectives in schools as an example of socially just leadership. The links between Indigenous communities and schools are a key focus area for improving educational outcomes for Indigenous students. This project sought to bring Indigenous community members into classrooms in six schools in New South Wales, Australia. Community members were recruited to work with teachers as co-constructors of learning activities that explicitly value and work with Indigenous perspectives. This chapter outlines the positive outcomes from this project as well as challenges faced by schools, teachers, principals, and community members as part of this culturally responsive work. The practices of community members, teachers, and principals are theorized using the notion of culturally responsive leadership. The chapter argues for an approach to leadership that is grounded in culturally responsive understandings to improve the educational outcomes and opportunities for Indigenous students and the cultural understanding and awareness of non-Indigenous students, to better promote reconciliation. This chapter provides a concrete example of powerful leadership practices that are working towards equity and social justice for their schools and communities. While the cases are specifically from the Australian context, they are relevant for a variety of schooling contexts and leadership practices.

Vocational education and training (VET) in Australia has for some time been driven by an agenda of “reasonable adjustment”, in which practices are modified to ensure equitable access and participation by disadvantaged students. However, the growing marketization of VET has instead encouraged the use of more flexible approaches to attract and retain students from diverse backgrounds. They have thus paralleled and confounded reasonable adjustment practices for inclusive development. This study sought to identify the moral dilemmas experienced by VET teachers arising from implementing reasonable adjustment practices.

This phenomenological research project used in-depth conversational interviews with 19 experienced VET teachers from a diversity of teaching fields to identify moral dilemmas experienced as arising from changes in their workplace contexts.

One of the identified dilemmas was responding flexibly to heightened student diversity, to which study participants largely responded by prioritising the economic imperative over social inclusion. Well-intended actions thus led to unintentionally damaging outcomes, raising important ethical questions about the relative value of economic and social development outcomes and the role of reasonable adjustment in their attainment. The study also highlights the lack of appropriate VET teacher training in managing ethical conflicts to minimise risks to themselves and their employing organizations.

As a case study of inclusive development policies in practice, this research may be seen as a cautionary tale for inclusive development policies in other countries with similarly strong VET economic and socially inclusive development policies for sustainability. The paper thus opens a dialogue for critical reflection on the current problems in a reasonable development approach in the field of comparative and international education. Those two parallel agendas have presented VET teachers and trainers with ethically challenging situations in which the economic and social development imperatives are experienced as being conflict with each other.