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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 reports on the findings of an in-depth genealogical study of the discourse of quality in Australian Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy. Quality reform has become the foremost global policy agenda for ECEC due to assumptions about the economic potentials of quality services. In Australia, the recent National Quality Framework elevated early childhood policy in Australia from the margins as the lynchpin of a broader economic reform agenda. However, quality ECEC - what it is and does - is a complex, contestable notion that could be considered problematic for the sector to execute, particularly through market models of provision. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discourse as the ‘already said’, the truth assumptions that have underpinned policy uses of quality ECEC in Australia are identified and critiqued. It is shown that the discourse of quality has been tactically deployed in Australian ECEC policy to realign quality ECEC outcomes with educative outcomes, as a means for government to selectively grow and govern human capital. This positions quality as a high-stakes reform discourse for early childhood stakeholders, entwined with the expanded reach and intensification of selective, performance-related standards and incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the vexed educational policy aspects of area-based interventions (ABIs) in neighbourhoods designated as 'disadvantaged' in an Australian context. We find that the way in which the policy of ABIs is supposed to operate and impact education is highly problematic. What we present instead in this paper is a much more complex process by which aspirations are formed, sustained, contested and maintained by young people who regard themselves as 'ordinary' and as being engaged instead in a process of navigating educational opportunities on the basis of resources available to them. [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]

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]

This paper analyses the traditional relationship between public schools in Australia and Australian democracy. After reviewing the challenges to democracy in a globalizing world, the paper argues for the need to retheorize the democratic purposes of public schools in ways which move beyond the discourse of nation building and which redefine the concept of education as a 'public good'. It argues that contemporary neo-liberal educational policies are destructive of these democratic purposes, and concludes by suggesting strategies to advance a progressive public education agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on issues of the professional identity of teachers in Australia under conditions of significant change in government policy and educational restructuring. Two discourses, democratic and managerial professionalism are identified which are shaping the professional identity of teachers. Democratic professionalism is emerging from the profession itself while managerialist professionalism is being reinforced by employing authorities through their policies on teacher professional development with their emphasis on accountability and effectiveness. The second part of the paper examines the types of professional identity emerging from these discourses. The two identities identified are the entrepreneurial and the activist identity. While these identities are not fixed, nevertheless at various times and in various contexts teachers may move between these two professional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals the array of practices arising from strong policy pressure for improved student results in national literacy and numeracy tests in Australia: the National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The paper provides an account of a policy context characterised by significant pressure upon teachers and principals to engage in practices to ensure improved outcomes on standardised literacy and numeracy tests, and of teachers and principals’ responses to these policy pressures. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article argues that what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’ has become increasingly dominated by a ‘logic of enumeration’, and that high test results on standardised literacy and numeracy tests are increasingly valued capitals, evident in a strong focus upon teachers meeting, discussing and informing one another about NAPLAN; engaging in curriculum development practices which foreground NAPLAN, and; actively preparing students to sit the test, including, whether intentionally or unintentionally, teaching to the test. Such a focus has important implications for the sorts of practices most valued in schooling settings, as more educative logics are potentially marginalised under such circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper explores the methodological basis for empirically researching moments of major policy change. Its genesis is in the methodological challenges presented by the initial stages of an ongoing research project examining the current attempts to establish the first nation-wide Australian curriculum. We draw on Dorothy Smith’s development of institutional ethnography and Bourdieuian field analysis to outline a methodological framework for research that has at its centre a concern to understand the social and institutional processes that enable, support and discursively prepare for significant educational reform. Working with and between these two eminent contributions to sociological enquiry, our paper explores the ways in which research can trace educational governance through the production, reproduction and subsequent enactment of generations of policy texts even before they are officially released for use in schools. In particular, we suggest that examination of the day-to-day processes involved in policy production shows how policy texts are progressively invested with institutional meanings and come to instantiate and govern institutional relations. The methodology we are developing foregrounds the creation and dissemination of discourses that support specific orientations to educational practice and governance, as well as the institutional practices that embed the logics of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

In recent times critical approaches to educational policy studies have been subject to increasing interrogation over methodological issues, often by critical policy researchers themselves. In the main, their reflexive posturings have been informed by critique which proceeds that beyond brief descriptions of research logistics and a general commitment to the methodologies of a critical orientation, critical policy analyses offer few explicit accounts of the connections between the stories they tell about policy and the data used to tell them. As a way of addressing these silences, this paper proposes three methodological approaches within which to explore and explain matters of policy, each generating its own particular view of the (policy) issues worth looking for, where they can be found and how to look for them. Drawing on research into the production of Australian higher education policy during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the paper illustrates the characteristics of these approaches, referring to them as policy historiography, policy genealogy and policy archaeology. Without claiming absolute distinctions between their interests, the paper couples policy historiography with the substantive issues of policy at particular hegemonic moments, policy genealogy with social actors' engagement with policy, and policy archaeology with conditions that regulate policy formations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The ascendency of neoliberal ideas in education and social policy in the 1980s and 1990s was succeeded in the new millennium by a 'new' social democratic commitment with emphases on community empowerment, building social capital and a 'whole of government' approach to partnering with civil society to meet community needs. In Australia, this approach has resulted in the development of partnerships between schools and community organisations formed as part of a targeted, holistic approach to service delivery to meet the settlement and educational needs of refugee youth. Drawing on interviews conducted with community workers and government officers involved in the school-community partnerships, we document how these partnerships are working 'on the ground' in Queensland schools. We analyse our findings against the international literature on changing notions of neoliberal governance, and discuss the implications of the shift to the 'partnering state' for schools and community organisations working with refugee young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a context of global reform agendas that promote economic ideologies in education the discourses surrounding 'school failure' have shifted from 'individual risk' to 'a nation at-risk'. Enhancing the quality of schooling through improving educational outcomes and standards for all, and thereby reducing 'school failure,' is simultaneously constructed as enhancing both social justice and a nation's economic advantage in the global marketplace. Within this broader context, this research explores the complexity of issues related to policy for students at educational risk through an analysis of the Education Department of Western Australia's 'Making the Difference: Students at Educational Risk Policy.' This research adopted a theoretical framework of a 'policy cycle' (that allowed for an exploration of power relations within the policy process. Primarily, consideration is given to the competing social and economic discourses found within the policy text and subsequent tensions reflected and retracted throughout the policy process from macro (system), to meso (district) and finally to micro levels within the schools and classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International comparative testing, such as the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), has considerable impact on policymakers, the media and the general public. A central assumption underlying PISA is that global variation in students' academic performance is attributable to national educational structures and policies. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the problematic nature of this assumption. Rather than critiquing it from the outside, we turn the tools, data and presumptions of the current discourse of international comparisons upon themselves, showing that this assumption is refuted by analysis of immigrant student test scores. Data from the PISA 2009 tests show that Chinese immigrant students in New Zealand and Australia achieve math scores that are more similar to those of students in Shanghai than to their non-immigrant Australian and New Zealand peers. Thus, cultural background appears to be more consequential for the educational attainment of Chinese immigrant students than exposure to the educational systems of Australia or New Zealand. We discuss limitations of our analysis, using them as basis to discuss the shortcomings of PISA more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy implementation at school level is often recognised as transformative enact-ment. Positioning school leaders as gatekeepers in this enactment is limiting. This study of one Australian school explores the complex contextualised agency of school leaders showing that their role, far more than gatekeeping, can be enabling and transformative. Identifying the agency of school leaders in enacting policy imperatives to 'know Asia' creates space to imagine localised narrative possibili-ties that negotiate and potentially challenge policy agendas. Accounts of policy work by school leaders are heteroglossic and densely intertextual in their mobili-sation and collocation of discourses. A metaphor of a frog in a well is taken up to translate policy in locally specific ways that make it much more than a template of externally devised policy. Deep contextual knowledge empowers school lead-ers to imagine policy in innovative ways; however, it is paired with a cautionary note on risks inherent to shaping policy for 'like-minded' futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bourdieuian concept of ‘position-taking’ is applied in this analysis of recognition of prior learning (RPL) policy and practice in Australian higher education. Data from institutional documents and participant interviews indicate that, within RPL policy, the universities selectively employ prevailing discourses of ‘quality’ and ‘equity’ to reinforce or potentially improve their reputation and symbolic power in the field of higher education. There is no common consensus about either equity or quality across the sector, as each university interprets the two concepts for its own benefit. The evidence suggests that, despite rhetoric in government policy implying that both are equally important, quality is a far stronger discourse and policy imperative than equity in RPL policy and practice. Also, RPL policies and practices provide an insight into how the key policy priorities of equity and quality are addressed by universities, when applied to a specific educational process or practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We are now at a point in higher education policy studies where we know that neoliberal discursive rationalities and practices are prevalent in the contemporary enterprise university, and we are beginning to get a sense of their impact on academic work and subjectivities. The article asserts that a more pressing question is how to powerfully and effectively resist neoliberalisation. The article investigates the conditions of possibility for resistance by exploring how resistance is struggled over in everyday academic work practices. The article presents an ethno-drama, based on materials collected through participant observation in several Australian universities, and offers a reading of the drama which focuses on what in Actor-Network Theory is called 'enrolment'. It is argued that a better understanding of how academics, collectively and as individuals, are vulnerable to the enrolment practices in the enterprise university is necessary for the enactment of effective resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically grounded in a tradition of meeting local skills needs and training the children of the poor, vocational education and training (VET) in schools continues to struggle in terms of esteem and parity of status. Associated in the literature with the training of a reliable and compliant class of workers, it has also been tainted by its links to the processes of social selection and its lowly status in the hierarchy of school subjects. However, VET has also been proposed as a means of democratising the school curriculum and improving accessibility for marginalised populations. The evidence presented in this article suggests that VET provision in Australian schools is of relatively poor quality and furthermore is associated with significant levels of social selection - rather than democratisation. The Australian policy framework, strait-jacketed by the belief that it must avoid narrow instrumentalism, has allowed and assisted the evolution of a low quality, low-intensity VET regime which serves a mainly working-class clientele in mainly working-class schools. In reviewing the current Australian evidence, it argues that if the central debate is one between the competing demands of achieving equity (which is associated with comprehensive provision) and that of achieving quality VET (which is associated with tracked provision) then, sadly, Australia fails to deliver effectively on either of these aims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article problematises the construction of regulation as an effective manager of risks to children in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. Adopting a Foucaldian, governmentalist approach to regulation and risk, the authors suggest that governments in Australia have 'risk colonised' regulation to meet their own interests rather than make effective use of regulation as a mechanism for quality assurance. They propose that the risk colonising of regulation has not effectively addressed societal risks to children in ECEC services, and has generated its own risks to quality standards through a preoccupation with institutional risk. In these ways, 'the laugh of Foucault' resounds in the regulation of ECEC services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces two chronologies of gender inclusive policy development in Australia's national and state education policy arenas to demonstrate, from a feminist perspective, their limited applicability at the school level. Although gender inclusive principles are seen as desirable, inadequate policy conceptualizations are viewed as limited in the extent to which gender inclusiveness can be realized in schools. In particular, it is argued that more transformative conceptions of gender inclusiveness evident in the feminist academy should be promoted in policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]