Of course they care! Understanding the caring work of principals in Australian government schools

Some emotional labour performed by school principals can be described as care work. Drawing on data from a broader study into Australian government principals’ emotional labour, this article explores how care is performed by 40 principals who shared their feelings about managing a critical incident via a national qualitative survey. We found that principals’ care could be categorised in five ways: caring about, caring for others, self-preservation, being not cared for and working with others to develop collective-know-how. This heuristic, and thus our analysis of principal testimony data, is informed by the feminist theorising of key scholars who explore care as labour in neoliberal contexts. We show that for the principals in our study, individualised and instrumentalist approaches to care continue to dominate over system and/or collective care infrastructures. We interrogate the challenges and possibilities that emerge in the context of this dynamic and argue that while departmental systems and protocols can support principals to perform care work in their schools, these systems do not include sufficient care for principals themselves and are not structured in ways that encourage collective caring practices.