The impact of globalised education reforms is evident with increased educational inequality, particularly in advanced Anglo economies. Together with the shift from state managed capitalism to transnational capitalism, debates over the role of the state in educational provision and matters of social justice have been revitalized (Kenway 2013). This paper considers how the feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser’s principles of social justice- redistribution, recognition and representation – offer a strong explanatory framework as to understand why feminist and other critical frames failed to inform mainstream reform movements such as GERM (Fraser 2009) and how both feminist and progressive education discourses have been appropriated by neoliberal policy discourses of individual choice and rights (Fraser 2013). Fraser’s theoretical tools offer ways of rethinking contemporary Australian policy and for what could now be conceived as a crisis in Westphalian governance. Finally Fraser’s principles of social justice have a capacity to inform leadership practices in terms of unraveling and resolving the tensions and contradictions between reforms characterized by standardization and policy by numbers and the reality of cultural and contextual diversity of contemporary societies (Blackmore, 2016).

Blackmore, J 2016 Educational Leadership and Nancy Fraser London: Routledge Fraser, N 2009, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Columbia University Press, New York. Fraser, N 2013, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis, Verso, London. Kenway, J 2013, ‘Challenging inequality in Australian schools: Gonski and beyond’, Discourse 34 (2): 286-308.