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Ideas and practices associated with inclusive education have featured prominently in the policies and reforms of successive Australian federal governments since the 1990s, yet there are limited historical analyses of these developments. This paper analyses federal and national inclusive education policies in Australia spanning from 1992 to the present. Drawing upon the concept of 'political rationality', the paper examines how the modes of reason underpinning inclusive education policies have evolved over time. Three distinct phases of policy development are identified, which we suggest are characterised by three dominant rationalities: (1) standardisation, (2) the neo-social and (3) personalisation. We argue that examining these rationalities reveals fundamental shifts in ways of thinking about and reasoning inclusive education in policy. We conclude by considering the implications of the different rationalities and single out the potential tensions emerging between rationalities of standardisation and personalisation as an area for future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes new insights to research on the socio-spatial dynamics of policy production by synthesizing the concepts of "policy assemblage" and "scalecraft". By conceptualizing scale as socially-crafted rather than pre-existing (a priori), we argue that assemblage and scalecraft provide generative means for examining how scale is imagined and assembled, and the boundary dynamics associated with these processes. To make this argument, we focus empirically on changes to the governance of schooling policy in the Australian federation over the past two decades. We argue that despite being a federation in which subnational (state and territory) governments maintain responsibility for schools, a new national policy assemblage has emerged that rests upon and produces new forms of boundary imagining, crossing and blurring. This is generating tensions and issues for policy actors, central to which is contestation about federal involvement in national reform. Drawing upon insights from semi-structured interviews with senior policy actors, we argue that new ways of imagining and seeking to govern schooling, at the national scale, grate uncomfortably against the realpolitik of Australian federalism, the principles underpinning the design of federal systems, and forms of scalar thinking that shape how policy actors perceive the "ideal" division of roles and responsibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 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]

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 engages with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's response to the recent special issue ofDiscourse(Vol. 34, No. 2) that examined evolutions of markets and equity in education. We welcome Morsy, Gulson and Clarke's supplementation of the special issue with the genealogical analysis they provide of private school funding in Australia and the attention they draw to elisions of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity and whiteness in contemporary framings of equity in policy and research. We also clarify and expand on some of the aims and arguments that framed the special issue. However, we feel that any response adequate to the ‘event’ that Morsy, Gulson and Clarke hope to stage – that is, a ‘debate redux’ and politics of dissensus in education as an antidote to depoliticisation – must extend beyond the rehearsal of pre-existing positions; it cannot stop at endorsing or critiquing the points raised in their paper, or reiterating the rationales and arguments of the special issue. We therefore respond by gesturing towards possibilities for ‘disagreement’, in the sense that Jacques Ranciere gives this term, about the political vocation of critical policy sociologists, and the modes of doing and being that can be seen as ‘critical’ and ‘political’ in academic education research. We do not disagree with Morsy, Gulson and Clarke in the usual sense; for that reason, we engage seriously with their call for a politics of dissensus in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term equity is ubiquitous in Australian education policy and evolves amidst ongoing debates about what it means to be fair in education. Over the past three decades, meanings and practices associated with equity have reflected broader shifts in advanced liberal governance, with equity being reframed as a ‘market-enhancing’ mechanism and melted into economic productivity agendas. In this paper, I argue that an emerging, yet, under-examined policy tension is the view that secondary schools are capable of being equitable, whilst simultaneously acting as adaptive service providers, tailoring education to different students and local markets. A dilemma here is whether or not schools should ‘tailor equity’ or whether tailoring equity is indeed antithetical to equity in so far as it implies unequal provision. To explore this tension, I draw upon fieldwork from ethnographic research in two socially and economically disparate government secondary schools in suburban Melbourne, Australia. In doing so, I explore how equity is enacted and governed by educators, how forms of equity at each school relate to versions of equity in policy and the extent to which each school tailors equity to its local community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conjunction of equity and market logics in contemporary education has created new and different conditions of possibility for equity, both as conceived in policy discourses and as a related set of educational practices. In this editorial introduction, we examine how equity is being drawn into new policy assemblages and how, in the context of marketisation, equity is evolving and being enacted in new ways across education sectors. Different conceptions of equity are considered, including the increasingly influential human capital perspective promoted by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We argue that, separate from critiques of neoliberalism and its deleterious effects on equity in education, it is necessary to analyse carefully the increasing rationalisation of equity agendas in economic terms, the associated effects on education governance and policy-making, as well as on the work of educational institutions and educators. Providing an overview of the contributions to this Special Issue, we direct particular attention to the multiple, complex and often contradictory effects of the current education reform agenda in Australia, which has prioritised equity objectives and intensified performance measurement, comparison and accountability as means to drive educational improvement and reduce disadvantage. [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]

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]

This article questions the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory ethical forms present in contemporary neoliberal policy frames. In particular, we analyse the demands of responsibility – as a form of ethical commitment – requested of parents by education policies in the contexts of Chile and Australia. Assuming neoliberalism as a contextualised and multivocal form of governing, we applied a policy sociology approach to study the ethical implications for parents of two recent educational reforms developed in the national contexts of this research. Our analyses show that the emerging demands on parents for responsibility in the educational field exceed univocal forms of individual responsibilisation, encompassing expressions of responsibility that respond to collective and public goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive reconstitution of social justice as equity in Australian and OECD policy, and analyse NAPLAN and PISA as technologies of governance that re-articulate equity as a measure of performance. These re-articulations are set against the extension of neo-social economistic rationalities to all domains of life and the topological production of new spaces of policy and power. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]