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Quality early care and education (ECE) presents an unparalleled opportunity to avert disadvantage and promote children's development. Mealtimes are essential daily routines, yet are often overlooked in research on ECE quality. This paper crystallises a composite case study of ECE mealtimes in highly disadvantaged communities by combining Departing Radically in Academic Writing (DRAW) methodology with parent surveys, scorings of educator‐child interactions (inCLASS), and field notes. Poverty is perpetuated in these centres: children do not have enough food, and educator‐dictated feeding practices restrict children's opportunities to exercise their agency and learn. Systemic policy action is needed to address poverty in ECE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disadvantage in schooling is often constructed as a crisis in need of fixing. Global policy reforms tend to emphasise that solutions for disadvantage often lie beyond the capacity of the state, necessitating private/philanthropic intervention. This paper seeks to contribute to this line of analysis by investigating the rise of philanthropy in Australian public schooling. Our analysis focuses on the intermediary organisation, Schools Plus, which works to connect donors to disadvantaged public schools. Through qualitative content analysis and stakeholder interviews we demonstrate how philanthropy has come to be seen as a solution to the complex problem of disadvantage, or more specifically in this case, the perceived inadequacies of public education provision. The consequence of this, we suggest, is the changing of responsibility for addressing disadvantage from government to individual schools that have been able to establish an entrepreneurial culture to market their disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on transnational education inquiry from Guatemala to Australia. Grounded in field research on Indigenous matters, this paper offers fractal education inquiry as a proposition to interrupt the straight and spatialized notions of time that produce developmental, salvific, and progress-centric aspirations from which educational problems are generated. Set as a manifestación, the paper begins with the case of the Don Dale youth detention center in Australia's Northern Territory and moves on to define the terms of fractal inquiry to defy carceral logics. Fractal education inquiry is exemplified in the study of teacher education reforms in Guatemala. In the last section, the paper interrogates the logics of the gap, teacher competencies in diverse classrooms, and the disadvantaging of populations as reinscriptions of educational regimes attempting to tame multiple and Indigenous fractal ontologies that defy the linear temporalities ruling current schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A child's early relationships and experiences influence their long‐term development and learning. In Australia, some children can face complex levels of deprivation when compared to their peers. This study sheds light on how educators are responding. Data analysed consist of individual interviews with early childhood educators working in diverse communities. The findings highlight educators' accounts of responsiveness as narrowly framed with attention focused on children's cultural heritage which overshadows other equity groups. The paper argues that by becoming sensitive to the contexts of children's lives, there is potential to build the early childhood workforce's capacity for addressing inequalities in childhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial concentration of recently arrived immigrants in gateway cities and suburbs is usually seen as undesirable by urban academics and policy makers. This paper presents a counter-argument that the concentration of disadvantaged new immigrants in the form of humanitarian refugees and their families can, and does, result in positive outcomes for those groups. In part, our argument is based on making a distinction between people-based disadvantage and place-based disadvantage. The paper examines the changing nature of place-based ‘advantage’ for immigrants in Australian gateway cities through a focus on two metropolitan locations, Auburn (Sydney) and Springvale (Melbourne), known as popular destination suburbs for recent immigrants. While these two cases validate the benefits of such gateway suburbs, they also demonstrate that the capacity of recent migrants to emulate concentrated settlement patterns is now significantly undermined by changes in the labour market and affordability problems in the housing market. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible future of gateway suburbs and the implications of this shift for the wellbeing of particular groups of disadvantaged residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights troubling patterns within the Australian School-based Apprenticeships and Traineeships (SBATs) by analysing statistical data of 21,000 of 15–19 year old apprenticeship/traineeship learners engaged in Vocational Education and Training in School (VETiS). It confirms the alignment of social groups to certain qualification fields and levels and provides a compelling picture of the learner profile of SBAT including the type of occupations and qualifications being undertaken at school level. In a complex policy environment, where VET in Schools has been assigned the important task of preparing ‘workforce job-ready’ students for the ‘high skill and high earning roles our economy demands’, we argue that the SBAT pathway is not yet adequate to meet these high expectations. It is not an effective apprenticeship pathway as it potentially ‘locks-in’ already disadvantaged young people to precarious pathways, and reinforces the nature of an already highly gender-segregated Australian labour market. The paper helps to focus attention on endemic weaknesses in the Australian VET system that serve to entrench disadvantage in Australian society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 2017 paediatrician Dr Peter Jones called for a policy debate on the need for some people in Australia to have fewer children. His call came in response to unacceptably high numbers of children and young people in out-of-home care in Australia and resulting adverse outcomes for these children and young people. This paper challenges this call from a critique of neoliberal society which is characterised by increasing socio-economic disadvantage and rising inequality. It uses Standing's notion of a social construction of a precariat grouping to understand what is happening in many vulnerable families where children's safety and well-being needs are compromised. The argument posed in this critique is that societally we need to promote policies that tackle poverty, inter-generational disadvantage and associated social ills in an attempt to address the causes of these unacceptably high statistics on children in the statutory care system. The paper examines the responsibilities of a critically informed social work approach to posit an alternative social policy approach. Such an approach is based in particular philosophical beliefs about the need for social change to benefit vulnerable citizens. The author concludes that we need to do more to challenge dominant negative discourses about those families. Only when all has been done in the active provision of support should we be having discussions about policy restrictions on family choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic and lay discourses around disadvantaged urban areas often draw on the language of ‘dumping grounds’ to encapsulate the poverty, marginalisation and social problems often found there. Yet the concept of a dumping ground remains insufficiently theorised. This paper addresses this issue by identifying five constituent features of the dumping ground: the perception of people as waste whose fate is to be discarded; the need to accommodate this human ‘waste’ and the logic by which places are selected for this purpose; the mechanisms through which this spatial sorting occurs as problem populations are moved to their ‘rightful’ place; the relations of power which enforce or encourage this mobility; and finally, the reactions of incumbent residents in neighbourhoods that are compelled to host unwanted social groups. In the second part of this paper, these themes are illustrated via a case study of the Australian city of Logan where residents complain that their city has been treated as a dumping ground in order to explain its poor reputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the first child‐led research programme to be implemented in Australia in which children design and lead their own research about issues they identify. The programme was specifically adapted for children who were service users of a nongovernment organization that provides social welfare and support services to vulnerable children and their families, living in communities of the disadvantaged. The practitioner – researchers faced the expected challenges of power in child–adult relations pertinent to the status of children in a genuinely child‐led research endeavour. However, the paper details the additional challenges and responses required when conducting research in a practice environment and the successful adaptations that were used to meet these challenges. The positive findings of an independently commissioned programme evaluation raise important questions about the place and purpose of child‐led research within the field of children's social welfare practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is indicative of a country that is deeply confused and conflicted around a policy discourse of inclusion that is sutured within an existential context heavily committed to the tenets of neoliberalism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of higher education, in which the proportion of young people from backgrounds of ‘disadvantage’ has remained implacably stuck at around 15% for several decades. The research from which this paper comes is an innovative community-based university-provided programme for young people for whom university education was never a realistic possibility – because of family histories, interruption to their lives, of having undertaken forms of secondary education that prevented them from gaining university entrance qualification, or who had terminated their education before completing the secondary years of schooling. This paper explores the story of one young person in his first year in a university programme, as he struggled with obstacles and impediments of a higher education system and set of neoliberal policy discourses that remain deeply sceptical and antagonistic to his trajectory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Children have been made a priority in Australian government obesity interventions, with programmes tending to focus on promoting behaviour change in food and exercise practices. This paper reports findings from ethnographic research with a group of Australian children aged 10–14 years living in a low socio-economic suburban setting. We propose that central to these children’s experiences of food and eating is the negotiation and management of hunger. Historically, disadvantage has been embodied and inscribed on children’s bodies in very visible ways, and the coexistence of hunger and obesity is part of this continuum. Despite considerable evidence of food insecurity in our research site, issues of hunger were absent in an obesity intervention underway at the time. We examine how hunger was felt in children’s lives, how it was managed and the ways in which messages about eating less, while eating more ‘healthy foods’, were at odds with the children’s experiences of hunger. Moreover, we argue that hunger and obesity in this context were doubly stigmatised, as children were very aware of how their hunger and their bodies marked them as different and disadvantaged. Attention to both the embodied and social impacts of hunger on children and their everyday relationships is key in formulating more sensitive, contextualised public health interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: Housing is a key determinant of the poor health of Aboriginal Australians. Most Aboriginal people live in cities and large towns, yet research into housing conditions has largely focused on those living in remote areas. This paper measures the prevalence of housing problems amongst participants in a study of urban Aboriginal families in New South Wales, Australia, and examines the relationship between tenure type and exposure to housing problems.Methods: Cross-sectional survey data was provided by 600 caregivers of 1406 Aboriginal children aged 0-17 years participating in Phase One of the Study of Environment on Aboriginal Resilience and Child Health (SEARCH). Regression modelling of the associations between tenure type (own/mortgage, private rental or social housing) and housing problems was conducted, adjusting for sociodemographic factors.Results: The majority (60%) of SEARCH households lived in social housing, 21% rented privately and 19% either owned their home outright or were paying a mortgage ("owned"). Housing problems were common, particularly structural problems, damp and mildew, vermin, crowding and unaffordability. Physical dwelling problems were most prevalent for those living in social housing, who were more likely to report three or more physical dwelling problems than those in owned (PR 3.19, 95%CI 1.97, 5.73) or privately rented homes (PR 1.49, 1.11, 2.08). However, those in social housing were the least likely to report affordability problems. Those in private rental moved home most frequently; children in private rental were more than three times as likely to have lived in four or more homes since birth than those in owned homes (PR 3.19, 95%CI 1.97, 5.73). Those in social housing were almost half as likely as those in private rental to have lived in four or more homes since birth (PR 0.56, 95%CI 0.14, 0.77). Crowding did not vary significantly by tenure type.Conclusions: The high prevalence of housing problems amongst study participants suggests that urban Aboriginal housing requires further attention as part of efforts to reduce the social and health disadvantage experienced by Aboriginal Australians. Particular attention should be directed to the needs of those renting in the private and social housing sectors, who are experiencing the poorest dwelling conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates a suite of policies that comprise the National Partnership Agreement between federal, state and territory governments in Australia that are ostensibly aimed at improving the educational attainment levels of young Australians. It specifically explores the policy terrain of educational targets that have been arrived at by Australian governments and associated policies, using a critical policy ethnography approach. It first traces out the historical development of populist policies such as this, demonstrating how attainment targets affect the lives of young people from the most challenging backgrounds. The second, ethnographic component of this paper provides some powerful insights into what is missing from the policy although of central importance to the existential lives of the young Australians targeted by such policy reform initiatives. This paper reveals how both school and societal circumstances create barriers to the capacity of these young people to meet policy demands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It is becoming increasingly apparent that, in order to understand a range of socio-economic outcomes, research needs to be focused on a multi-dimensional approach that accounts for individual characteristics and behaviours together with locality and activity within space and place. Within labour market analysis there is a need to situate empirical analysis within a conceptual framework that considers both the assets of individuals within the labour force and the social and local labour market contexts in which they find themselves. Using a broad notion of employability, this paper develops an analysis of unemployment in Australia's metropolitan labour markets. Specifically it uses a combination of individual survey data and aggregate labour market data to consider the associations between these multi-level factors. It finds that, while individual characteristics are important in understanding unemployment in metropolitan areas, it is equally the case that the strength of spatially distinct labour markets also plays a role. The paper reaches the conclusion that, while contemporary labour market policy tends to focus on individual characteristics, there is a need to widen the policy understanding of labour market outcomes so that other broader contexts, including the impact of space and place, are also seen as being influential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background There is increasing evidence that schools internationally are not meeting the needs of increasing numbers of young people, especially those at the secondary level, and whose backgrounds have placed them at disadvantage. The evidence is that significant numbers of young people are becoming disconnected from school. While the official term for this is 'disengagement', it seems that official educational policy responses to these tendencies, far from 'fixing' the problem, seem to be exacerbating it. Current policy preoccupations that emphasize accountability, greater parental choice of schools and a more prescriptive curriculum can present difficulties for young people, particularly those from challenging backgrounds. There may be a mismatch between formal educational policy, and the lived experiences at the level of the school and classroom for the most vulnerable young people. Purpose This paper reports on a single instance of a high school that embarked upon a process of reinventing itself in respect of the importance of relationships and 'relational power' for students over their learning. The paper examines what the teachers and students had to say about the efficacy of this school-based reform. Sample The case-study school was located in an area of extreme social disadvantage in which young people had diminished educational expectations. The research involved observations and interviews with a small sample of stakeholders and focus groups with students (13-16-year-olds). Design and method The study was an ethnographic case study of a single secondary school conducted over a five-week continuous period. It used 'embedded interviews' involving observation of in-class teaching prior to extensive 1-hour interviews with teachers and students' focus groups. All interviews were recorded. Detailed field notes were kept of classroom observations and other activities, including school assemblies, staff meetings and reflections on informal conversations held during teaching breaks in the staffroom. Results and conclusions Positive outcomes emerged from a context where fair boundaries were established and in which students could see school as a place where they could experience fun in their learning. The process was by no means complete, but the school felt that it had found a more efficacious way to move forward and the students made this clear in their statements about what the school was attempting to do with them. Key to these positive outcomes was a commitment to placing relationships between students, teachers and parents at the centre of everything the school did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in a preschool program in the year before starting school can promote children’s healthy development, and has the potential to reduce inequities in developmental outcomes for at-risk subpopulations. In Australia, boosting preschool attendance has emerged as a national policy priority. In this paper, we draw on data from the Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) to describe preschool attendance in two sequential population cohorts, with preschool experiences in 2008 and 2011 reported retrospectively by teachers of children in their first year of school. Overall, findings show that the proportion of children attending preschool remained relatively stable between the two AEDC cohorts (in 2008, preschool attendance ranged from 57.0% to 85.8% across the states and territories, while in 2011, attendance ranged from 49.2% to 93.7%). At a subpopulation level, children from non-English speaking and Indigenous backgrounds and children living in disadvantaged communities all had substantially higher odds of not attending preschool in both 2008 and 2011. These findings highlight the need to maintain policy attention on efforts to further reduce barriers to preschool access for at-risk subpopulations, and the value of monitoring population trends in preschool attendance to better inform policy and service provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a recent study of aspirations for higher education by secondary school students from disadvantaged backgrounds in regional Australia. At the same time, it goes in search of explanations that transcend a Bourdieuian account of aspirations as produced by and reproductive of cultural histories and dominance, given the apparent inadequacy of these accounts in redressing disadvantage. To this end the authors distinguish between historicising and spatialising aspirations, taking up Appadurai’s notion of navigational capacity as a way of advancing greater agency for disadvantaged groups. Data from the research inform the analysis, including the mediation of students’ desired futures by their perception of what is possible given their differentiated locations and access to resources. It is concluded that while this spatial turn in theorising aspiration has potential for changing the terms of recognitioninternalto disadvantaged communities, there remain structural limits on change ‘from below’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: Alcohol disproportionately affects socially disadvantaged groups including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Methods to assess alcohol intake for disadvantaged communities need to be able to capture variable or episodic drinking. The ability of a seven-day diary to capture typical consumption for a predominantly Aboriginal sample has not been assessed. Objective: One aim of this paper was to examine agreement between a seven-day retrospective diary and 'usual' drinking assessed by a modified version of the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test question 3 (AUDIT-3m; two questions). Other aims were to describe drinking patterns as reported in the seven-day diary. Method: In 2012, consecutive adults attending an Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service completed a cross-sectional health risk survey on a touch screen laptop ( n = 188). Alcohol consumption questions included the retrospective diary and AUDIT-3m. Agreement was assessed using weighted kappa analysis. Results: There was good agreement between the two measures of consumption; however, the AUDIT-3m questions identified more current drinkers. Respondents who were drinkers (54%) tended to consume large amounts per drinking occasion: almost half (46%) of diary completers reported nine or more standard drinks on at least one occasion in the last week. Conclusions: The seven-day diary did not adequately capture variability in alcohol consumption common among this sample. Although the AUDIT-3m appeared acceptable, alternative approaches to assess usual or risky alcohol consumption, such as asking about specific drinking occasions, or allowing participants to respond in non-standard drink sizes, also need to be considered for indigenous and other disadvantaged communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) is a two-year senior school certificate available to secondary students in Victoria, Australia, and has been operational for almost a decade. It is delivered by secondary schools and further education providers. In 2010, two programmes from each of these providers were reviewed and considered in the context of current government public education policy. This paper provides some context for the current policy environment, whilst considering the two programmes from the perspective of students. The result, it is suggested, is akin to astudent sieve, which is a part of the current policy landscape of the public education system whereby one group of students are even further disadvantaged as education providers try and induce the more capable students to stay at their school, whilst assisting those less capable to find alternative pathways. The alternative to mainstream education has increasingly become a setting that is not appropriately funded or equipped to manage students who drag theirPandora’s boxof issues behind them into every classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The re-shaping of the Australian senior secondary landscape in recent years and the emergence of a new space for vocational knowledge within Australian senior secondary certificates of education have been underpinned by a national focus on raising retention rates and achieving Year 12 or equivalent attainment rates in the context of a diversifying senior secondary cohort, and on delivering effective training to meet the skills needs of the growing economy. Absent from this policy agenda is a focus on the efficacy of the expanding vocational education and training (VET) in Schools. At the core of this discussion are the impacts of ongoing tensions between the instrumentalist labour market role of VET in Schools programmes and the expectation that an equitable senior secondary landscape should respond to the education and training needs of all students. Despite rapid growth, low achievers and socioeconomically disadvantaged learners remain the dominant participants in VET in Schools programmes, and pathways for these students into post-school education and training or full-time employment remain weak. This paper draws on the views of students, teachers, and policy-makers to examine the ways in which vocational programmes are delivered within the different curricular contexts of VET in Schools across Australian senior secondary education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The importance of suitable, affordable housing in promoting the well-being of children is widely acknowledged. However, despite growing interest in geographic differences in child well-being, little is known about the spatial distribution of characteristics associated with housing disadvantage for Australian children. This paper seeks to develop knowledge in this area by creating a headline indicator of child housing disadvantage. It uses spatially disaggregated Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Census of Population and Housing 2006 capturing overcrowding, public housing tenure and dwelling type, and creates synthetic estimates of housing stress using spatial microsimulation techniques. These variables are then combined into a single index of housing disadvantage. Next, the spatial microsimulation techniques and index creation methodology are described, and the results of the validation process, including sensitivity analysis of alternative index creation approaches, are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a wide variety of universities, university campuses and university courses in Australia available to those interested in pursuing a higher education degree. This paper examines the impact of increasing competition for entrance to university on the educational outcomes for students from the government school sector. Using Melbourne as a case study, the research shows that, over a four-year period of increased competition, entry to some of the more academically accessible university campuses in the city became more difficult and this disproportionately affected the opportunities for university entrance among some groups. Despite the fact that there was no noticeable change in the academic standards achieved by government school completers, the rate at which government school students gained access to these universities declined noticeably during this time. These findings show how changes in supply of university places from year to year can have a profound effect on the opportunities of secondary-school completers—particularly those in more educationally disadvantaged settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern over the reliability of conventional poverty studies has focused attention on the need to demonstrate that those identified as poor are actually experiencing hardship. This paper takes a step in this direction by examining poverty using a living standards approach derived from the literature on deprivation and social exclusion. Deprivation - defined as an enforced lack of socially perceived necessities - has emerged as a way of identifying who is missing out on what the community regards as the necessities (or essentials) of life. Social exclusion - which exists when individuals do not participate in key activities in society - has opened up new areas of inquiry relating to a lack of connectedness between individuals, the communities in which they live, and key economic and social processes. The findings indicate that many Australians face deprivation and exclusion in numerous aspects of their lives, and that those defined as poor in income terms are different from those who are deprived or excluded. The low overlap between the three indicators implies that they all have a role to play in documenting the extent of social disadvantage and helping to identify the factors that contribute to its various manifestations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]