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Originally written in the 1990s but unpublished, the paper is now revised; the purpose of this paper is to examine the context of the formation of the Educational Workers League of NSW in 1931 with particular emphasis on the NSW Crown Employees (Teachers) Conciliation Committee and the enactment of its agreement in the worsening economic conditions of the Depression. The aims, reception and possible influence of the League on Federation policy and practice are addressed.

Primary source material consulted includes the minutes of the Conciliation Committee’s sittings from September 1927 to July 1929; papers relating to the Educational Workers League held in the Teachers Federation Library; and the Teachers Federation journal, Education.

The Conciliation Committee’s proceedings and outcomes had far reaching implications. The resultant salary agreement received a hostile reception from assistant teachers and fuelled distrust between assistants and headmasters. As economic depression deepened, dissatisfaction with the conservative leadership and tactics of the Federation increased. One outcome was the formation of the radical, leftist Educational Workers League by teachers, including Sam Lewis, who would later play key roles within the Federation itself.

While acknowledging the extensive earlier work of Bruce Mitchell, the paper contributes to a deeper understanding of teacher unionism and teacher activism in the 1920s and 1930s. Apart from brief attention by Federation historians in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been no history of the formation, reception and significance of the Educational Workers League.

Public external examinations were woven into the fabric of the education system of New South Wales (NSW) during the first three decades of the 20th century. By the late 1920s examination results had become the fetish and goal of most teachers and pupils in the state. In the early 1930s a reaction to this state of affairs developed; examination reform became a lively issue of debate. Central to the debate was the issue of the examination which marked the close of general adolescent education: the Intermediate Certificate (IC) examination. The agitation for IC modification began in the 1930s and did not cease until the 1960s. It began in the dissatisfaction of the 1930s, developed through the 1940s when opinion crystallized, survived the stagnation in educational reform of the late 1940s and early 1950s, quickly revived during the professional and public discussion surrounding the hearing and deliberations of the Committee Appointed to Survey Secondary Education in New South Wales (Wyndham Committee) and finally ceased with its abolition in the mid 1960s.

The paper is a study of Clarice McNamara, née Irwin (1901–1990), an educator who advocated for reform in the interwar period in Australia. Clarice is known for her role within the New Education Fellowship in Australia, 1940s–1960s; however, the purpose of this paper is to investigate her activism in an earlier period, including contributions made to the journal Education from 1925 to 1938 to ask how she addressed conditions of schooling, curriculum reform, and a range of other educational, social, political and economic issues, and to what effect.

Primary source material includes the previously ignored contributions to Education and a substantial unpublished autobiography. Used in conjunction, the sources allow a biographical, rhetorical and contextual study to stress a dynamic relationship between writing, attitudes, and the formation and activity of organisations.

McNamara was an unconventional thinker whose writing urged the case for radical change. She kept visions of reformed education alive for educators and brought transnational progressive literature to the attention of Australian educators in an overall reactionary period. Her writing was part of a wider activism that embraced schooling, leftist ideologies, and feminist issues.

There has been little scholarly attention to the life and work of McNamara, particularly in the 1920s–1930s. The paper indicates her relevance for histories of progressive education in Australia and its transnational networks, the Teachers Federation and feminist activism between the wars.

Despite general agreement amongst educators, both in Australia and other countries, that an authoritarian inspection system, whatever its virtues, has outlived some of its original purpose, reformist demands in this aspect of school administration have been slow to be met. In N.S.W. inspectors of schools have advanced proposals for change and the Department of Education has implemented some of these, together with other recommendations from its own committee of inquiry into the inspectorial system. The result has been a further liberalization of school inspection, although some traditional aspects remain. Arising out of the reforms are questions about whether inspections are necessary, how accountability and promotion are to be managed if they are not, and whether inspectors are justified in feeling insecure. The view is held that the growing professionalism of teachers will assist them to become more accountable directly to those they serve, but that regional education officers will still perform indispensable functions aimed at improving the educational quality of schools.

The main research aim was to investigate relationships among teachers' occupational stress, coping, teacher self‐efficacy and relevant teachers' perceptions of curriculum changes in a major educational reform.

A theoretical framework that included the attribution of responsibility for stress model, aspects of social cognitive theory and perceptions of the changes to the HSC, was used to guide the study. Multilevel variance decomposition and structural equation modelling were employed.

Stress attributions to personal and organizational domains were associated with the teachers' perceived stress from implementation of the new curriculum. Furthermore, results suggested that these teachers may have coped with stress associated with the changes using palliative strategies rather than direct problem solving. Teachers' greater understanding of what the curriculum changes entailed was associated with lower teacher self‐efficacy.

Emphasises that curriculum reform cannot be carried out in a vacuum, and that teachers' mental models or schemata of the education system within which they work are likely to influence their interpretations of the reform and its implementation. Analyses provide insights into teachers' cognition in relation to stress and self‐efficacy during curriculum change.

The nature of the reform, which was the focus of this study, is relatively rare, for both the magnitude of the curriculum change and the size of the education system (750,000 students) involved.

It has often been said that a great part of the strength of Aslib lies in the fact that it brings together those whose experience has been gained in many widely differing fields but who have a common interest in the means by which information may be collected and disseminated to the greatest advantage. Lists of its members have, therefore, a more than ordinary value since they present, in miniature, a cross‐section of institutions and individuals who share this special interest.

A distinction must be drawn between a dismissal on the one hand, and on the other a repudiation of a contract of employment as a result of a breach of a fundamental term of that contract. When such a repudiation has been accepted by the innocent party then a termination of employment takes place. Such termination does not constitute dismissal (see London v. James Laidlaw & Sons Ltd (1974) IRLR 136 and Gannon v. J. C. Firth (1976) IRLR 415 EAT).

“BY WHAT CRITERIA”, a modern Socrates might ask his pupils, “are we to know that a good woman is good ?” And the pupils, after pondering for many months, might reply “We have sought out many good women and they tell us that their measurements are 36‐23‐36; know therefore that any woman who conforms to these measurements is a good woman, but any woman who fails to so conform is not a good woman”. But Socrates would know that a woman might conform to these measurements yet still be ugly in appearance and shrewish by temperament; cold and unloving, while conversely many women could be paragons of womanliness and be nowhere near these measurements.