Search

Artificial Intelligence has the potential to be an important part of education governance. It is already being built into everything from business intelligence platforms to real-time online testing. In this paper, we aim to understand how AI becomes, and forms, a legitimate part of authority in contemporary education governance in what we call the automated education governance assemblage, that incorporates technology companies and AI-supported products used in education. We focus on EduTech Australia – an education technology trade show in Sydney – as a way to look at: (i) how the different aspects of automated governance are connected at EduTech, including the relations between different participants, companies and products; and (ii) how the automated governance assemblage works to legitimise and constitute EduTech as a policy space and site of new authorities in education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports a rhetorical analysis of policy texts illustrating the emergence of the mandatory Educational Leader role in early childhood services in Australia. We argue that policy texts before 2012 constructed a 'problem' of workforce quality in early childhood education and offered a new leadership configuration as a policy solution. We identify and critically address how this social architecture was constructed and made persuasive through key rhetorical devices, particularly the combined pathos of the vulnerable child and a logos of quality improvement. Initial analysis indicated an apparent contradiction between the economic rationalism of earlier (policy advice) texts and an emphasis on professional dispositions in the later (policy implementation) texts, when describing the Educational Leader. We argue, however, that these policy implementation documents reinforce, rather than contradict, a neoliberal economistic logos, because they attempt to form Educational Leaders as autonomous moral agents of neoliberal responsibilization. We conclude by considering some potential implications of our analysis for the early childhood field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated literature to consider how eligibility to scheme participation and education services are shaped, and how education is positioned in the development and implementation of the NDIS. The analysis highlights tensions that exist for people with disabilities and their families who both access the scheme and who might draw on its provision to support their education, because of the way the policy is oriented towards pathological categorisation, standardised outcomes and service delineation rather than integrated support and informed involvement. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the policy priority across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries of increasing lifelong learning opportunities, fragmented NDIS policy in Australia prevents people with disabilities from achieving this ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically documents media portrayals of Australia’s performance on the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA), 2000–2014. We analyse newspaper articles from two national and eight metropolitan newspapers. This analysis demonstrates increased media coverage of PISA over the period in question. Our research data were analysed using ‘framing theory’, documenting how the media frames stories about Australia’s performance on PISA. Three frames were identified: counts and comparisons; criticisms; and contexts. Most of the media coverage (41%) was concerned with the first frame, counts and comparisons, which analysed PISA data to provide ‘evidence’ that was then used to comparatively position Australia against other countries, reference societies, which do better, with particular emphasis on Finland and also Shanghai after the 2009 PISA. The other two frames dealt with criticisms and contextual issues. This paper only focuses on the first frame. The analysis demonstrates the ways in which media coverage of Australia’s PISA performance has had policy impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues neoliberal programs of government in education are equipping parents for calculativeness. Regimes of testing and the publication of these results and other organizational data are contributing to a public economy of numbers that increasingly oblige citizens to calculate. Using the notions of calculative and market devices, this paper examines the Australian Government’sMy Schoolwebsite, which publishes academic and organizational information about schools, including national test results. While it is often assumed that such performance technologies contribute to neoliberal reform of education through school choice, the paper argues the website is technically limited in its capacity to facilitate the economic calculations and calculated action of parents resulting in school choice. The paper instead opensMy Schoolto analysis as a technique of governmental self-formation. Using the theoretical resources of actor-network theory and Foucauldian scholarship, this paper complicates assumptions in the literature about the extent to whichMy Schoolactually operates as a ‘market mechanism’. It arguesMy Schoolattempts to cultivate a calculated form of parental educational agency, irreducible to economic market agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primarily developed as an alternative to narrow measures of well-being such as utility and resources, Amartya Sen’s capability approach places strong emphasis on people’s substantive opportunities. As a broad normative framework, the capability approach has become a valuable tool for understanding and evaluating social arrangements (e.g. education policies and development programmes) in terms of individuals’ effective freedoms to achieve valuable beings and doings. This paper explores the recent emergence of ‘capability’ in Australian education policy, specifically in theAustralia in the Asian CenturyWhite Paper. We explore capability as a framing device and reveal how its various meanings are at odds with the scholarly literature, specifically Sen’s conception of capability and its implications for social justice in and through education. The analysis shows that the social justice intent of a capability approach appears to be overtaken in the White Paper by an emphasis on outcomes, performance and functionings that seek to serve the nation’s economic interests more than the interests of students, especially the disadvantaged. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a comparative analysis of national curriculum reforms in Australia and the USA, set against the backdrop of global trends since the 1980s. The analysis is driven by an interest in the reconstitution of national policy spaces in global times, and draws particularly upon Stephen Carney’s notion ofglobal policy-scapesas a way of understanding the complex and disjunctive flows of transnational policy ideas and practices. The paper begins by arguing that reforms since the early 1980s have been driven by global panics about globalisation, equity and market competitiveness. These global influences have underpinned parallel reform attempts in each country, including the development of national goals in the late 1980s, failed attempts at national standards in the early 1990s and rejuvenated attempts towards national consistency in the 2000s. Building on this, we argue that despite shared global drivers and broad historical similarities, reforms in each country remain distinct in scope and form, due to several unique features that inform the national policy space of each country. These distinctive national policy spaces provide differentconditions of possibilityfor reform, reminding us that despite global commonalities, policy reforms are relational and locally negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper tackles what is arguably one of the most pressing and intractable educational issues confronting western democracies – the disengagement and disconnection from schooling of alarming numbers of young people. The paper looks at the policy response in Victoria, Australia, and through ethnographic interviews with a small number of young people; it finds a significant mismatch between the policy intent of re-engagement programmes, and the experiences of young people themselves. It seems that this is an instance of what might be termed policy deafness, a situation that will likely produce devastating consequences unless corrected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citizenship education in Australia is embedded throughout the school curriculum. Despite a coherent policy context for the inclusion of citizenship and civic education at all levels of schooling, the links between education and civic minded citizens are tenuous. This paper explores these connections by drawing on the views of participants in an international community service program between Western Australia and Tanzania. By situating the interview data in relation to the policy goals, the paper argues that the current policy framework 'sanitises' the political nature of modern citizenship. The results from this study demonstrate that students have little understanding of the connections between the civic, the social and the political realms of citizenship. These results suggest that the current policy context does not adequately prepare young people to position themselves in the political realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid the growing ‘teacher quality’ discourse, early career teachers have increasingly been positioned as problematic in Australian education policy discourses over the past decade. This paper uses a critical policy historiography approach to compare representations of early career teachers in two key education policy documents, from the late 1990s and mid-2010s. Starting with the Government response toA Class Act: Inquiry into the Status of the Teaching Profession(1998) and moving to the Government response toAction Now: Classroom Ready Teachers(2015), it explores changing representations in the context of broader shifts in education policy related to teachers’ work over this timeframe. It argues that the early career teacher ‘problem’ is articulated in very different ways in these two timeframes, explores the antecedents of key tenets of the current policy settlement, and, using the theory of practice architectures, considers the implications of these for the preconditions that shape and frame teachers’ work in contemporary times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflecttransnationaltraits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, from the particular positioning of educational researchers working in Australia, we unpack the figure of the '21st century learner' from both broad and specific perspectives. The paper begins with a policy genealogy that traces this figure through networks of documents, events and bodies that transcend borders and hemispheres. We suggest that although there appear to be multiple origins for current Australian policies on educational innovation, they are intricately entangled and interdependent. We identify the steady 'economisation' of the learner, and a concomitant corporatisation of educational innovation. The second section of the paper presents a discursive analysis of an extract from a recent book that frames up educational innovation through technology in order to further trace the operations of these regimes of thought. Our analysis here indicates the kind of critical work that needs to be done to interrogate and deconstruct aspects of current education policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the perverse effects of the new accountability regime central to the Labor government's national reform agenda in schooling. The focus is on National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results that now act as 'catalyst data' and are pivotal to school and system accountability. We offer a case study, with two embedded units of analysis, in which NAPLAN has become high stakes testing for systems. The first involves the relationships between the federal government and three States (Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland) in negotiating performance targets on NAPLAN for reward payments in respect of a national agreement to improve literacy and numeracy. We show how Victoria used 2009 data as baseline, set ambitious targets and failed to meet them, while Queensland set much less ambitious targets, met them and was rewarded. New South Wales created targets that combined literacy and numeracy scores, obfuscating the evidence, and met their targets. The second focuses specifically on Queensland and the ramifications of the poor performance of the State on the 2008 NAPLAN. This resulted in a review commissioned by the Premier, a Report on how to improve performance, and the introduction of Teaching and Learning Audits and State-wide targets for improvement on NAPLAN. This unit of analysis focuses on the perverse effects of this highly politicized agenda. This paper shows how States seek to protect their 'reputational capital' and as such, 'game' the system. The data for the analysis draw upon interviews with relevant senior policy-makers and on analysis of relevant documents and media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on historical and policy analyses as well as interviews with government representatives and other key actors, this research paper argues that intergovernmental relations in Australian education are predominantly driven by concurrent federalism, but with the reverse effect creating a coordinate model in education. It discusses implications for school funding and the successful implementation of a recently released Australian Government review of funding for schooling, the so called the Gonski Review. The Gonski report makes a case for a radical restructuring of school education funding and accountability across the federal framework. If implemented, the changes would involve a major shift from the current coordinate model to a cooperative federalism. The paper provides an opportunity for a critical discussion of how educational policy is negotiated, contested and determined, within an array of competing, cooperating and coercive political power interests between various levels of government in a contemporary Australian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the latter half of the twentieth century, Australia, like many countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, experienced rapid expansion in participation in higher education which was supported by government through increases in the number of publicly funded university places. However, in spite of this expansion, a disproportionately large share of the undergraduate student population is still drawn from higher socio-economic backgrounds. This paper seeks to understand the persistence of inequality in higher education by examining changes in patterns of participation in Australian universities since the 1970s. Using logistic regressions to analyse data collected by three Australian surveys conducted between 1987 and 2005, the authors examine the influence of having a university-educated parent on an individual’s chances of obtaining a higher education degree. They find that although the expansion of higher education has had some impact in terms of reducing inequality, having a university-educated parent continues to exert a direct effect on an individual’s propensity to graduate from university. The paper draws on the theories of maximally maintained inequality and relative risk aversion to interpret institutional and student behaviour. The policy challenges of addressing structural inequality in higher education are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

School funding is a principal site of policy reform and contestation in the context of broad global shifts towards private- and market-based funding models. These shifts are transforming not only how schools are funded but also the meanings and practices of public education: that is, shifts in what is ‘public’ about schooling. In this paper, we examine the ways in which different articulations of ‘the public’ are brought to bear in contemporary debates surrounding school funding. Taking the AustralianReview of Funding for Schooling(the Gonski Report) as our case, we analyse the policy report and its subsequent media coverage to consider what meanings are made concerning the ‘publicness’ of schooling. Our analysis reveals three broad themes of debate in the report and related media coverage: (1) the primacy of ‘procedural politics’ (i.e. the political imperatives and processes associated with public policy negotiations in the Australian federation); (2) changing relations between what is considered public and private; and (3) a connection of government schooling to concerns surrounding equity and a ‘public in need’. We suggest these three themes contour the debates and understandings that surround the ‘publicness’ of education generally, and school funding more specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the educational experience constructed under Australia’s policy decision in 2009 to extend compulsory education by requiring that students must be ‘earning or learning’ till 17 years of age. The discussion draws on an empirical project that explored the moral order operating in classrooms for students retained under this policy in non-academic pathways in high schools and Technical and Further Education colleges across three towns experiencing youth employment stress. It asks how the policy regulating these students’ prolonged engagement with formal education plays out in classroom interactions, to what end and to whose benefit. A theoretical lens informed by work by Standing and Wacquant is used to understand the contemporary moment, and work by Durkheim and Bernstein unpacks the moral work implicated in classroom interactions. The analysis describes the light curriculum and the heavy compliance demanded in these ‘edufare’ programmes then argues that in essence the policy seeks to manage the social risk posed by the future precariat. The conclusion reflects on whether this is an adequate policy response to broad generational changes in fortunes and prospects to which education may not have the answers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on ideas of assemblage to examine the contingency and (in)coherence of education policy. The paper is a conceptual and thematic attempt to understand the policy terrain, broadly conceived, pertaining to opposition to the establishment of private Islamic schools in Australia and public Afrocentric schools in Canada. This opposition is located within complex policy terrains relating to multiculturalism, whiteness and race/racism. The paper focuses on the complex racialised politics surrounding education policy initiatives that support marketisation and choice in private and public K-12 schooling – with an interest in what forms of choice are legitimated in and by a racialised education market. The paper concludes that opposition to Islamic and Afrocentric schooling highlights the ambiguity of equity, and the fragility of identity in racialised education policy environments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The new schooling-leaving age policy in New South Wales, a state in Australia, requires all students to stay at school until they are 17 years old. The policy was introduced in January 2010, with little warning and, it appears, little consideration of its impact in complex contexts. In south-western Sydney, the most diverse region in the city, the impact is just being felt. In this paper, we draw on Ball’s approach to policy, maintaining ‘the complexity and scope of policy analysis – from an interest in the workings of the state to a concern with contexts of practice and the distributional outcomes of policy’. The paper explores the impact of the increase in school-leaving age on the curriculum, and the implications for ethnically diverse schools, and for students with learning and behavioural issues. Interviews with principals, teachers, parents and students suggest that there are dimensions of gender, ethnicity and ability to consider when responding to the new policy. Many schools find a lack of opportunity or too much competition for opportunities, and limited pathways. Whole school change is restricted by inadequate resourcing in some schools and by insufficient social networks in their communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the repositioning of state curriculum agencies in response to the establishment of the Australian Curriculum and the key national policy organisation responsible for its development: the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA). I begin with an analysis of the federal Labor government's role in the early years of the Australian Curriculum reform, arguing that Labor was afforded a rare window of political opportunity that enabled the fundamental restructuring of curriculum policy at the national level, and which has significantly altered intergovernmental and inter-agency relationships. Following this, I engage with research literature that has sought to theorise the changing nature of Australian federalism in relation to schooling reform. I then present an empirical analysis based on interviews with policy-makers in ACARA and curriculum agencies in four Australian states (Western Australia, New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria). My analysis draws attention to three dominant trends: powerful new roles for ACARA in driving national reform and inter-agency collaboration; increased policy overlap and blurred lines of responsibility; and an uneven playing field of intergovernmental and interagency relationships and powers. I conclude by considering the implications of emerging reform trends for conceptualising the shifting dynamics of federalism in Australia and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the convergence of urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and posits a politics of place as a useful frame to both understand policy and undertake policy analyses. It reiterates calls for place to be taken seriously in education policy studies, but also proposes that it is equally important to strive for preciseness when using concepts such as space and place. The theoretical component of this paper concerns the intersection of relational notions of place and space with discursive concepts of the identity. The paper then applies these ideas to analyse urban and education policy in inner Sydney, and teases out possible understandings of how schooling may be implicated in a politics of the inner city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilizes Bourdieu’s conceptual frame to examine the mediatized effects of policy processes concerned with the growth and support of knowledge industries in Australia. These policies span education, science, research and other knowledge industries (such as venture capital firms and intellectual property law). The paper argues that some policy processes are best represented as temporary social fields. The nature of these fields can be described by the kinds of cross‐field effects that they produce. A case study of an Australian knowledge economy policy, The chance to change , and associated policy processes demonstrates the broad analytic capacities of Bourdieu’s conceptual frame for policy analysis, when combined with the concepts of cross‐field effects and temporary social field developed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will explore private sector participation in public sector education in the Australian context, focusing on case studies of Queensland and New South Wales, with reference to developments in other states and territories and internationally. In Australia, most states and territories have PPP policies and key projects include the Southbank redevelopment in Brisbane and the ‘New schools’ Project in Sydney. The case studies are both supported by Labor state governments and typify the state of affairs nationally, For Queensland, the Southbank TAFE Institute and Brisbane State High School have been brought into a new education precinct in order to ‘free up’ the system by outsourcing non-core services and ‘free up’ valuable inner-city land. In NSW, nine new public schools are being built by a private consortium, for a cost of $100 million as part of a program totaling $5 billion in areas under-serviced by government schools. Yet despite a concerted effort to sell the value of PPPs, Australians appear to be ambivalent about ‘privatization’ of public services. This paper will look at whether PPPs are robbing the public sector to pay the private sector, and where this strategy is taking Australia and the future of our education systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews the changes, which have been introduced to public education in Australia, particularly over the last decade. These changes are analysed against the background of the free, compulsory and secular Education Acts that were implemented in every Australian colony during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This legislation has formed the cornerstone of public education in Australia since that time. The principles of free, compulsory and secular public education and the underlying social values which underpinned the legislation are re-examined, together with the factors leading to the development of the centralized state education bureaucracies which were set up to administer the Acts. In considering current changes to public education policy in Australia, the paper argues that the principles underlying the establishment of public education have been significantly eroded. In the space of little more than a decade, the social values underpinning the Education Acts have been dramatically changed, leading to a re-invention of what public education means in this country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to conversations about school, post-compulsory and further education policy by reporting findings from a three-year study with disaffected students who have been referred to special ‘behaviour’ schools. Contrary to popular opinion, our research finds that these ‘ignorant yobs’ do value education and know what it is for. They also have aspirations for a secure, productive and fulfilled life, although it may not involve university-level study. Importantly, we found that students who responded negatively with regard to the importance of schooling tended to envision future lives and occupations for which they believed school knowledge was unnecessary. The implications of this research for school, post-compulsory and further education policy are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understanding how teachers make sense of education policy is important. We argue that an exploration of teacher reactions to policy requires an engagement with theory focused on the formation of ‘the subject’ since this form of theorisation addresses the creation of a seemingly coherent identity and attitude while acknowledging variation across different places and people. In this paper, we propose the utility of Butlerian ideas because of the focus on subjectivity that her work entails and the account she gives for social norms regulating people’s actions and attitudes. We use Butler’s stance on how ‘cultural intelligibility’ is formed to account for the complex, messy and sometimes contradictory ‘take up’ of curriculum policy by 10 teachers at a secondary school case study in Queensland, Australia. We use the phrase ‘policy reception’ to signify a particular theoretical line of thought we are forming with our application of Butlerian theory to the analysis of teacher attitudes toward curriculum policy, and to distinguish it from ‘policy interpretation’, ‘policy translation’ and ‘policy enactment’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Debates continue about how high-stakes testing regimes influence schools at all levels: their impact on teaching practices, distribution of resources and curriculum provision, and whether they achieve the intended increases in student achievement in targeted areas. In 2008, the Australian government introduced a national testing scheme, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), in which all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are required to participate, and a national website, MySchool, was established in 2010 to publish the results of all schools. This paper reports on the first national study of educators' views on the impact of NAPLAN on Australian schools and students. Over 8000 educators from all states and territories participated in the study, and the findings indicate that the testing regime is leading to a reduction in time spent on other curriculum areas and adjustment of pedagogical practice and curriculum content to mirror the tests. The findings suggest that the modification of teaching and curricular practices is in response to concerns regarding the use and reporting of NAPLAN data and the potential impact on schools. This confirms findings of researchers in other countries on the capacity of high-stakes regimes to distort teaching practices, constrain the curriculum and narrow students' educational experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines teacher accountability and authority in early childhood policy. It reports on data from a study that investigated the influences affecting early childhood teacher decision-making at the preschool level in Victoria, Australia. Using a question raised by Ball 'Where are the teachers in all this [policy]?' provided a starting point for the critical discourse analysis into how forms of control, teacher authority, obligation and constraint within policies potentially influenced teachers' curriculum decisions. The study found that despite no government-mandated curriculum framework at the time, teachers were held accountable for their curricular practice. Yet as professionals, early childhood teachers were denied public acknowledgement of their expertise as they were almost invisible in policy. In the four policies analysed, proprietors of early childhood settings and preschool agencies held authority over curriculum. Subsequently, teachers' authority as professionals with curricular knowledge was diminished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set a target to lift Australia’s Year 12 or equivalent attainment rate from 83.5 to 90% by 2015. In the context of global financial uncertainty, the target was rationalised as a means for boosting national productivity and developing human capital to help Australia compete in the global knowledge economy. Historically, Year 12 attainment targets have been designed to pressure state and territory education systems to innovate and reform senior secondary curriculums and certificates, as retention and attainment rates depend largely on how flexible, diverse and inclusive the senior years are. In this paper, however, we argue that the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda is flawed and does very little to inspire innovation or reform in Australian senior secondary schools. Our argument comprises three parts. First, we argue that the COAG agenda is based on a weakened measure of attainment which is misleading and directs the burden for innovation away from senior secondary schools. Second, we argue that there are inherent limits in Australian secondary school systems which prevent the depth of innovation required to significantly contribute to raising Year 12 attainment. Third, we argue that the COAG agenda is further weakened by issues of equivalency, quality and comparison. Together, these arguments cast doubt over the value and meaningfulness of the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda and of target setting as a governmental strategy in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Understandings of young children as active and capable citizens, while evident in discourses of early childhood education and research, are not widely reflected in the policy for the early years of schooling in Australia. This paper makes an analysis of the gaps and tensions between discourses of young children as active citizens and policy for citizenship education at the national level in Australia and at the Queensland State level. There is a widespread discourse within early childhood that regards young children as citizens and democratic participants in their own lives, as a reflection of the oft-cited Article 12 in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. However, educational policy and curriculum for citizenship in Australia, by and large, adheres to age and stage understandings of children that deem young children unable to conceptualise and/or articulate ideas of what it means to 'be a good citizen'. We ask which discourses are being harnessed in educational policy for citizenship in Australia, what discourses are silenced or ignored and what this tells us about how young children are thought about in Australian politics and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Australia, a distinct political-educational imagination drives contemporary policy and praxis. This imagination finds root in the social governance models of British Third Way policy and can be considered social capitalist. Central to such politics is a view that social governance is capable of pursuing and achieving the social democratic ideals of equity and social justice, within the architecture of a globalising and competitive capitalist economy. In this paper, I analyse Australian federal and Victorian state education policies to argue that social capitalist politics has significant implications for the ways schools are being imagined and governed. Specifically, I argue that schools are re-imagined as 'learning communities' through which excellence and equity are seen to operate harmoniously amidst a marketising system of educational services. In doing so, I feature empirical data from an ethnographic project conducted in two socially disparate Victorian government secondary schools, to highlight myriad tensions and paradoxes that emerge when each school attempts to govern itself towards policy ideals. In conclusion, I argue that policy imaginations of schools as havens of excellence and equity are difficult to take seriously when infused into the architecture of an education system that is deeply stratified and structured to discriminate between individuals in line with performance hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concern about poor school attendance and participation, particularly of Indigenous children, is a key issue in Australian education; however, strategies to address this issue have been piecemeal and have met with limited success. While much has been written about the issue of school attendance, little attention has been given to absenteeism in early childhood education or its effects at this level. Drawing on data from a longitudinal ethnographic study of Indigenous children in early childhood education in an Australian city, this paper examines the impact of intermittent attendance on the academic, social and personal wellbeing of young Aboriginal children. Explanations for non-attendance, particularly in the non-compulsory pre-school, are considered, and the efficacy of current policy trends to coerce parents to deliver children to school by withholding welfare income is challenged. It is argued that because absenteeism in the Indigenous context is part of the broader complex of social exclusion and disadvantage, policy-makers and service providers, such as the school, are presented particular challenges involving the balancing of competing principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parent engagement in schooling has long been held as a vital component of the successful navigation of the schooling process and, consequently, governments often invite such engagement via policy implementation. However, at times, contestation arises about parent engagement, with some parents seemingly 'crossing the line' when attempting to be involved in their children's schooling. This paper investigates the possibility of parent engagement in schooling in Queensland, Australia, conceptualising it as a game of social and systemic practice. The author examines this notion using a recent example of contestation between parents at a regional government school and the education authority. Policy directives about parent engagement are explored, with the rhetoric of such policy applied to the example in question. The work of Bourdieu and Foucault is used to argue that the invitation to parents to engage is framed and thus often misrecognised, resulting in unintended conflictual relationships between parents and governing authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Youth ‘at risk’ is the currently favoured label used in Australian policy for youth whose educational outcomes are considered too low, with an emphasis on the risk of not completing senior secondary education. Although some research has identified factors contributing to this risk as stemming from complex interactions between individual and family circumstances as well as characteristics of schools and society, policy identification of youth ‘at risk’ has tended to simplistically focus on personal attributes of young people. Moreover, this identification has set up a false distinction between a supposed problematic minority versus a ‘normal’ majority. Thus, the dominant conceptualization of youth ‘at risk’ draws attention to what is wrong with these youth, rather than to what may be wrong with schooling. This paper examines both empirical observations and discursive conceptualizations to critique the ‘youth at risk’ label, and proposes use of the concept of ‘marginalized students’ instead, which identifies individuals not through their personal characteristics but through their relationship with schooling. This approach allows recognition that marginalization is at least in part a product of schools and society, and requires action in those arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade 'quality' has assumed the status of one of the meta-discourses across many domains of public policy, including education. This paper focuses on the specific example of quality policy in Australian higher education of the 1990s, and in particular, on the micro level of quality policy practice as experienced by academic practitioners in 6 universities. As such, it forms a follow-up to an article published earlier in the Journal of Education Policy (Vidovich and Porter 1997) which examined macro (national) and intermediate (the Committee for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) levels of a quality policy cycle consisting of contexts of influence, policy text production and practice, as articulated by Ball and colleagues (Bowe, Ball and Gold 1992, Ball 1994). The findings of in-depth interviews with key university personnel provide evidence of the 'messy' realities of the policy process and considerable variation in quality policy practices at local sites, particularly in terms of the different historical contexts of universities which were categorized as 'traditional', 'alternative' and 'former college' types. However, despite such variation, the 'bigger picture' effect of the quality policy under investigation was to enhance Australian national Government control of higher education, albeit at a 'distance', characteristic of the culture of performativity increasingly pervading higher education across many OECD countries. A further effect was to increase inequalities, both between and within universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper claims that current preoccupations with 'enterprise culture' in the policy and practice of schooling deflect attention from crucially important problems such as deindustrialization and the changing nature of work, the creation of meaningful work opportunities for the young, social justice, and moral and social regeneration. It is also claimed that 'enterprise culture' draws upon a social pathology, which locates problems in individuals and whose function is to shift responsibility for economic growth and stability on to individuals and their schools. It is all part of a rush to find simple solutions to complex problems - solutions that promote the values of the business sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]