When the paperwork is the policy

ANU council signed a voluntary undertaking on 27 April. The undertaking is a few pages long, freely visible, and contains the most consequential change to Australian university governance this decade. Every council in the country, in every sector that has a regulator overhead, should read it before the end of the week.

The headline says TEQSA blocked ANU's chancellor pick. That isn't quite right. ANU council still has the formal appointment power. What ANU did was sign a document agreeing the regulator would pick the chair of the selection panel and at least half of its members, and that council would notify TEQSA within thirty days if it deviated from the panel's recommendation. The chair TEQSA chose is Peter Coaldrake, a former TEQSA chief commissioner.

So the appointment power is intact. The mechanism by which it gets exercised has been replaced.

This is the part educators should care about. TEQSA didn't legislate. It didn't issue a directive. It got a public university to sign a piece of paper. The paper now exists as a template. The next time a public university stumbles this badly, the regulator does not have to invent the mechanism. It hands over the template and asks for a signature.

Times Higher Education described it as a first for the sector. That framing is correct in the narrow sense and misleading in the wider one. The narrow sense: yes, this is the first time a regulator has effectively chosen the chancellor of a public Australian university. The wider sense: voluntary undertakings, memoranda of agreement, conditions on registration, and similar documents have been quietly carrying more and more of the work that legislation used to do, across every sector schools touch. State education departments use them. ECEC regulators use them. Teacher registration bodies use them. The ANU example is just the most visible one this week.

For school principals, business managers, and councils, the practical implication is uncomfortable. Two questions a school's leadership should be able to answer in writing, today.

The first is what your governance review would look like under scrutiny. Not whether you have one. Whether the document a regulator would receive on request matches the actual decision-making practices of your council. ANU's didn't, by any reasonable read of the council's last twelve months. Most school councils have never been asked. That doesn't mean the document is sound. It means the question hasn't come yet.

The second question is more uncomfortable, and the workforce data published this week sharpens it. An EduResearch Matters analysis drawing on workforce data found that 78 per cent of the teaching workforce are women, that full-time teachers average 52 hours a week, that 77 per cent of casual relief teachers are women, and that around a third of CRTs are working what amounts to full-time hours through the back door of casual contracts. The pattern is mid-career women moving from full-time roles into casual work, then out of the profession altogether, because the structure of the job assumes a worker without caring responsibilities.

Read in isolation, that is a workforce data point. Read alongside the ANU story, it is a documentation problem. The structural assumption sits inside role descriptions, contract templates, and award provisions. Those documents could be redesigned at the school or system level. Most haven't been touched in twenty years. When the regulator or the union or the legal team eventually arrives, the answer "we never updated the role descriptions because they were just admin" will land the same way ANU's governance review landed.

Stephanie Flower's piece on Tasmania's multi-school organisations rounds out the pattern. Her argument is not that the model is wrong. It is that Tasmania chose it on the strength of confirmation bias, having selectively read English evidence and consulted the high-profile trusts rather than the broader picture. The decision now exists in policy documents, in funding allocations, in role descriptions for new executive teams. Reversing it requires undoing the documentation, not just changing minds.

The thread is simple. The architecture of how your school is run has migrated, over the last decade, from legislation and curriculum into a layer of documents that sit below both. Voluntary undertakings, role descriptions, evidence bases, governance reviews, audit trails. Those documents used to be administrative overhead. They are now the mechanism through which pressure gets applied and decisions get made. Reading them, writing them well, and revising them when the world changes is not a clerical task. It is the job.

The educators best placed for the next decade are the ones whose paperwork would survive being read carefully.