School autonomy policies have been cemented as a principal policy direction in state and territory education systems across the Australian federation (Gerrard and Savage 2022). These policies aim to devolve elements of school governance from centralised state bureaucracies to the local school level within publicly funded systems of education. A notable example is the Independent Public Schools (IPS) initiative, introduced in 2009 in the state of Western Australia (WA). Reflective of decentralising school reforms internationally (Keddie 2016), the IPS involved a suite of policy changes designed to increase flexibility and attune school governance to local needs, such as one-line budgets and the introduction of School Boards (Gerrard and Savage 2022). Over a decade since the IPS was first introduced, more than 80% of all students in WA government schools now attend an IPS school. Critical policy scholarship regularly positions autonomy reforms as part of a global shift towards neoliberal governance, with a particular focus on marketisation. For instance, Gobby (2016) interprets IPS as promoting neoliberal public service provision, while Fitzgerald et al. (2018) see it as intensifying market competition among schools, creating disparities. This paper extends critical scholarship, but in a different theoretical register. Rather than engaging in a critique of autonomy as an artefact of neoliberalism or marketisation, we explore the material and discursive underpinnings of the IPS through a conceptual lens centred on scalar politics. Drawing on Papanastasiou's concept of 'scalecraft' (2017), MacKinnon’s (2011) concept of scalar politics, and other critical accounts of scale as a social process (Fraser 2010; Savage, Di Gregorio and Lingard 2022), we frame scale as an epistemological tool in policymaking, used to reshape power and resource distribution. Our primary argument is that the IPS can be understood as a scalar intervention that rearranged relations between local schools, mid-level bureaucracies, and the central state department of education. Based on a synthesis of policy document analysis and interviews with senior WA policymakers, we show that scale was central to the design and implementation of the IPS and was used to legitimise its impacts. Building on existing theories of ‘scalecraft’, we make a novel contribution by introducing two new complementary concepts: ‘scalecreep’, which involved the rapid expansion of the IPS beyond the original scope envisioned by its architects; and ‘scalecrunch’, which resulted in the diminishment of the influence of regional-level bureaucrats as the relationship between principals and bureaucrats in the state’s Department of Education was prioritised.

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