From call-out to complaint: the care work of school leaders in asymmetrical educational relations

Contemporary school leadership increasingly unfolds within digitized publics marked by heightened scrutiny, expanding accountability expectations, and escalating reputational risks. We examine how Australian school leaders experience and make meaning of parent engagement within these affective and digital conditions. Using hermeneutic phenomenology, semi-structured interviews with fourteen primary school leaders were analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis to explore how emotional and ethical labor is reshaped by complaint processes, platformed visibility, and expectations of fairness. The analysis identified interrelated dynamics illustrating a shift in how care is enacted and evaluated. Leaders described environments where care must be shown, evidenced, and defended, and where emotional composure is continually interpreted by networked publics. These patterns suggest that parent engagement has become increasingly procedural, reputational, and affectively demanding. Drawing these insights together, the study characterizes these conditions as asymmetrical educational relations, in which digital visibility, moral surveillance, and procedural defensibility reshape how care is enacted and judged. This conceptualization foregrounds how platformed accountability recalibrates the emotional, relational, and ethical conditions of leadership and contributes a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how care is reconfigured under conditions of digital visibility and accountability.