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This history of the politics of moves towards school‐based management in Queensland education is located within a broader historical and political analysis of such moves across Australia since the Karmel Report. This paper specifically focuses in on developments in Queensland. The Queensland analysis traces the moves from Labor’s Focus on Schools through the Coalition’s Leading Schools and the most recent Labor rearticulation in the document Future Directions for School‐based Management in Queensland State Schools. The analysis demonstrates that the concept of school‐based management has no stipulative meaning, but rather is a contested concept. More generally, the paper provides an account and analysis of new forms of governance in educational systems and the tension between centralising and decentralising tendencies as school‐based management is adopted in order to address a number of competing policy objectives.

Presents a case study of the emergence and early stages of implementation of Queensland Education Department′s policy for devolution of responsibility to State Schools. Has four major purposes: to clarify the rhetoric by which the Department has developed and promoted its devolution policy; critically to examine the efficacy of the policy when it is “played out”, in “reality”, at the “school face”; to explore possible positive outcomes of the policy, potential impediments (within the Department and school community), and prerequisites to effective implementation; and to consider what is needed in pre‐service teacher education to enable future teachers readily to function in a school‐based organizational context. The “message” which emerges from these considerations is that stakeholders at all levels need to be vigilant observers, watching for inconsistencies as they develop, between the rhetoric and the reality of devolution policy in practice – in particular, “regression” towards centralized, bureaucratic control. Proposes an approach to a safeguard mechanism which could be applied at regular intervals. Poses questions at two levels: at the system level and at the level of the community at large.

Since its inception in 1876, Queensland’s premier agricultural and pastoral show and largest annual event, the Brisbane Exhibition, has provided a forum in which to observe and reflect on the achievements, values, development and scope of Queensland’s education system. The inaugural constitution of the Exhibition’s host body, the National Agricultural and Industrial Association of Queensland, drafted by the first headmaster of Brisbane Grammar School, Thomas Harlin, listed among its objects: ‘To award prizes for the attainment of proficiency by the youth of the colony in specified subjects’. In its first twenty‐five years of annual shows, the Association met this objective at a modest level through its schoolwork category, with the notable exception of 1883, when it sponsored a highly successful Juvenile Industrial Exhibition. Examination of both the regular schoolwork category and the Juvenile Exhibition reveals the elements of the local curriculum that the Association deemed appropriate for inclusion in its annual shows, while comments from newspapers, educators and other individuals on the quality and nature of the schoolwork displays offer insights into the context of and aspirations for the colony’s education system.

Among the newly developing metadata standards for the World Wide Web, Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (Dublin Core) is the pioneer in simple content description. There are various methods to deploy Dublin Core metadata, such as embedding it within a resource, linking it to a resource, or storing it in a database. This paper presents case studies of the deployment of Dublin Core at two significantly different institutions in Queensland, Australia. It aims to share experiences and ideas with those who are interested in deploying Dublin Core metadata. The two institutions are: State Library of Queensland, which demonstrates simple embedded metadata with minimum IT support; and Education Queensland, which utilizes a more complex metadata implementation within an Oracle database. Education Queensland also supplies its metadata to Education Network of Australia (EdNA), which collects metadata from all major Australian educational agencies and acts as an educational gateway.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the work of the Bible in State Schools League in Queensland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, culminating in the 1910 referendum on religious education in Queensland government schools. Through examining its campaign and the statements of supporters and opponents this paper seeks to examine the role of the school in relation to morality in this early period of the Queensland history.

This paper draws upon archival material, parliamentary debates, materials published by the Bible in State Schools League and contemporaneous newspaper accounts. These data are thematically analysed.

There was widespread agreement within the early Queensland society that the school was a place for moral formation. The Bible in State Schools League highlighted the tensions in the relationship between morals and religion in relation to the school.

This research problematises the notion that developments in education have followed a straight line from religiosity to secularisation.

Very little has been published to date about the Queensland Bible in State Schools League. This paper goes some way to filling this lacuna.

This article explores the case of the Queensland's reformatory for boys through the years 1871–1919 to analyse how the institution negotiated the complex, and at times competing, goals of reforming, educating and punishing its inmate population.

The article relies on documentary evidence, including archival material produced by the institution and newspaper records published between 1865, when the legislation allowing the institution to be created was passed, to 1919, when the institution ceased to be known as a “reformatory”.

This research demonstrates that, despite considerable changes during the studied period, the overarching goal of reforming criminal and potentially criminal young people continuously relied on achieving a balance between reformative techniques such as religious instruction and work placements, providing a useful education and punishing offenders. It also demonstrates that, despite efforts to achieve this balance, the institution was often described as unsuccessful.

Due to the paucity of available archival evidence, there is still relatively little known about how the reformatories of late-19th- and early-20th-century Australia attempted to carry out programmes of moral reformation. This paper contributes to the field through an analysis of an institution which faced unusual challenges as a result of a complex inmate population.

Education reform aimed at achieving improved student learning is a demanding challenge for leaders and managers at all levels of education across the globe. In 2010, the position of Assistant Regional Directors, School Performance (ARD-SP), was established to positively impact upon student learning across public schools in Queensland, Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the perceptions of the role and leadership understandings of ARDs in Queensland in order to understand more fully the tensions and opportunities they face within this reasonably newly created position.

This qualitative study is based on interviews with 18 ARDs and two of their supervisors to gauge a better understanding of the nature of the role as it relates to leadership and management in the Queensland context.

Interview data revealed three key themes pertaining to the nature of the role and these were performance, supervision, and professional challenges. A key finding was that the notion of supervision was experienced as problematic for ARDs-SP.

This study has limitations and these include a sample that focused on ARDs within one State of Australia and one schooling system (i.e. public education); and interviews were the primary data collection source.

Although there have been studies of supervisors of principals (referred to as superintendents, directors) in other countries and other systems, this study is a first to explore the tensions and opportunities faced by executive leaders in Queensland.

The purpose of this paper is to find an answer the question of whether an educational institution of a fair socio-economic mix of pupils, and an institution favoured with powerful political connections, made any difference to access, equity, and exclusivity in relation to the transition into secondary education. It undertakes this purpose as a historical investigation of Junction Park State School in the early twentieth century combined with statistical analysis of family backgrounds of scholarship holders and their cohorts from 1915 to 1932.

The socio-economic study uses a published list of scholarship holders from Junction Park State School for the years 1924-1932. The study compares the scholarship groupings with their different school cohorts for the same years using the data on parental occupations, extracted from the Junction Park State School Admission Records 1915-1931. After refinement the study examines a cohort data set of 4,531 pupils which includes 287 scholarship holders. Parental occupations are categorised into socio-economic groupings with high and low occupational ends. There were 237 parental occupations described among the cohort, 1915-1931, from the admission records.

The statistical chance of obtaining scholarship is increased for a pupil from “commercial low” and “industrial low” background when the school starts with a cohort that has a large representation from such backgrounds. Pupils who were at the lower end of the socio-economic scale at Junction Park State School did much better in scholarship outcomes than for the state. However, pupils whose family background was at the high end of the professions did marginally better than the state result. For the school between 1915 and 1932, in most socio-economic groupings, the boys outperform the girls in the like-to-like comparisons.

The numeric value is excessively low for the primary producers (high) category and numbers in cohort groupings vary. This study deliberately applied like-to-like comparisons: the number of scholarship holders compared to their own gender for the same socio-economic cohort. Percentile in relation to the study’s total was not used due to numeric variations between cohort sizes. The study is a historical investigation of a formative period before Junction Park State School developed its reputation as a scholarship school in the 1940s, and historical factors relating to the post-Second World War era would have different results for a similar statistical analysis.

The paper presents a case study of particular historical significance; however, a generic principle that institutional status can change access and equity opportunities can be tested within the historical setting. The paper claims that historical investigation provides the groundwork to establish the distinctive actuality. Historical investigation picks up on unusual patterns over time, not necessarily to disprove the sociological model, but more to test the model against actual events.

The Queensland social history is connected to the study’s statistical analysis. The data are considered from a perspective that, first, Junction Park had a diverse population of pupils from different socio-economic backgrounds. Second, the school had a solid reputation as a leading school, partly from the political standing of the school leadership, and partly from the strength of its scholarship teachers. Together these factors suggest that pupils at Junction Park State School from the socio-economic backgrounds less inclined to foster educational values were given greater support to achieve better scholarship outcomes.

Statistical analysis is rarely brought to academic history work. There are greater risks in misinterpreting the data. There is also a difficult enterprise of extracting the required information. Nevertheless, the reward from this paper is an insightful view of a large and an innovating Queensland primary school, picking up the details in the life experience of pupils. In that historical process there is a greater degree of accuracy and better interpretive value which can be applied to the sociological model.

Women find it difficult to achieve promotion into senior administration positions in education systems throughout the Western world. This paper reports on interviews with 23 women who are employed by Education Queensland (Australia). These women, who were all participants in a Women in Management course offered by the Queensland University of Technology, have been successful in being promoted into administrative positions in schools and school support centres. The focus of the paper is on why these women have gone for promotion and the successful strategies that they employed to achieve promotion. These strategies included “putting runs on the board”, being persistent, networking, managing in their own way and accessing appropriate professional development. The paper concludes with the warning that the culture of the central bureaucracy, however, is perceived as overwhelmingly male and this acts as a significant barrier to further career progress.

It is part of educational folklore that Australian State school systems are highly centralised. A corollary of the lore is that schools generally lack the organisational flexibility to cater adequately for the diverse educational needs of their students. This article tests these beliefs as they relate to the States of Queensland and New South Wales. The research finds that the form of system‐level directives is more prescriptive in the latter State. In both States, however, the proportion of time which must be devoted to prescribed activities is less than many would expect, both for teachers and pupils. Even where head office directives appear to constrain, regional office staff can practise “benign neglect” in their policing of the directives, if they can see that there are educationally sound reasons for doing so. The article finds that there is sufficient substance in the folklore to give conservative principals an excuse to resist introducing innovations in their schools. Any principals who are determined to adapt their schools′ operations to better serve the educational needs of their students are however, unlikely to be prevented by central directives.