ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the effects of standardised assessment and how it has significantly reorganised teachers and leaders work. It also shows how these educators, despite inescapable accountability requirements, work to create spaces for ethical practice that recognises the distinctiveness of their school context. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the broader study from which it draw, introduce elements of institutional ethnography that inform the analysis, and then discuss specific school-invented practices that illustrate how the school's leaders hold on to ethics while managing the demands of test-based accountability. The Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project, Educational leadership and turnaround literacy pedagogies, investigated emerging forms of educational leadership in disadvantaged primary schools in South Australia. Finally it focuses on the schools common literacy agreement described clearly in the chapter and consider how this locally produced agreement, together with the literacy chats that take place between classroom teacher and literacy leader, actively organise teachers' work in classrooms.
