‘Enough is enough': the struggles of secondary school principals to make sense of negative media coverage

Negative media coverage of schools is a significant concern for school leaders. Drawing on a survey of 94 South Australian secondary school leaders, we examine how they interpret and respond to negative media about their schools. We show the narrative work done by school leaders as they construct accounts that restore sufficient coherence to allow continued professional action. This narrative work is made more difficult by the character of media crisis narratives and by institutional protocols that render leaders silent in the domain where narrative contest is taking place. The contribution of this paper is both empirical – an account of how secondary principals in one Australian state experience negative media coverage – and theoretical – we discuss the power imbalances in which leaders’ sense-making occurs. We argue that principals need ‘voice’, the institutional and systemic capacity to participate in the public stories about what their schools are and do.