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In recent decades, the Australian higher education landscape has achieved significant expansion. Initially aimed at getting more people into university, massification policies have, more recently, focused on widening participation – encouraging a more diverse array of students to 'choose' higher education. Paradoxically, this shift has deepened stratification, with new inequalities within and across the academy. However, this stratification is glossed over in widening participation policy and research. In this paper, we challenge this view by examining young people's capacities to 'choose' university using the heuristic of 'embedded choosers' and 'contingent choosers.' Our analysis of two school-based case studies highlights the early stratification of students' post-school choices, conceptualised as a continuum from an absence of choice to a wide array of global choice. We argue that rather than focus on gains in overall enrolment, there is a critical need to address the insidious stratification that is subsumed within the widening participation agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of performative culture in education and intensifying forms of test-based accountability have subjected teachers to a ubiquitous 'field of judgment' through which they are held to account. Within this context, professional development is consistently deployed as a key solution to stagnant or declining student outcomes. In this paper, we examine how accountability might be reimagined through one approach to professional development known as Quality Teaching Rounds (QTR). We draw on Foucault's notion of panopticism and Ball's influential writings on performativity to analyse interviews with 21 educators from 14 schools in New South Wales, Australia, conducted during a 2014–2015 randomised controlled trial. Participants highlighted the pervasiveness of testing and test results in shaping their experience of teaching in a system of perpetual surveillance where numbers bite deep into practice. By contrast, participation in QTR afforded teachers rare spaces of freedom within the structure of performativity to collaboratively focus on pedagogy. We argue meaningful professional development can alter the field of judgment and enable teachers to reclaim accountability on their own terms, while maintaining a clear focus on student outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While international research has demonstrated that ability grouping is inequitable, Australian research has often overlooked equity concerns, predominantly focusing on studying the benefits of grouping for students perceived to have high ability, especially in mathematics. This paper investigates the effect that mathematics ability grouping has on senior secondary mathematics participation for low and middle grouped students in New South Wales, Australia. We drew on interviews about mathematics participation with 85 students and 22 mathematics teachers from 11 government high schools. Our thematic analysis of these data identified that secondary school grouping practices often serve to entrench student interest and/or performance from primary school. This has consequences for many students, with a differentiated curriculum in Years 9 and 10 precluding low and middle grouped students from participating in high-level mathematics when they reach senior secondary school. These findings raise serious equity questions about the current push in Australia for universities to re-introduce high-level mathematics as a prerequisite to entering certain degrees. We argue that stakeholders need greater awareness of the consequences of ability grouping and that those seeking to lift post-compulsory mathematics participation should be targeting primary and early secondary school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities have increasingly adopted "first-generation status" as a new category for addressing equity in higher education, especially in the UK and Australia. This category targets students whose parents do not have a university degree and therefore are "newcomers" to higher education. While the category is well-intentioned, given the persistence of inequitable enrolment patterns and the need to widen participation, it has resulted in a fairly narrow and limiting view of first-generation students. Typically, students have been set in binary opposition to their peers with university-educated parents and consequently positioned within deficit discourses – as sharing a similar set of "problems" that need to be remedied by policy and practice. This paper problematises such a totalising depiction of first-generation entrants by examining diversity within the category rather than simply demarcating differences from their continuing-generation peers. Drawing on focus group data from 198 prospective first-generation students enrolled in government schools in New South Wales, Australia, we utilise the Bourdieusian lens of social capital to explore the multiple social networks within which young people are situated. We propose a new continuum that better captures how students are differentially positioned in social space, and identify three clusters based on their capacity to mobilise capital – "inheritors", "opportunists", and "outsiders". In so doing, we unsettle the symbolic boundary around what it means to "be first", and argue that this more nuanced reconceptualisation of first-generation entry is critical if the category is to be a meaningful vehicle for redressing historical exclusions and widening participation in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While university participation rates among Indigenous Australians have been on the rise in recent years, parity targets remain elusive. In this context, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how aspirations for higher education are formed and nurtured. Studies tend to focus on barriers to access, often in ways that position Indigenous Australians as a homogeneous 'Otherised' group. This paper counter-balances hegemonic narratives of Indigeneity by analysing what Indigenous students from middle-class families say about their aspirations for university. Drawing on interview data collected in 2016 in government schools in New South Wales, Australia, it offers fresh understandings of school–to–university transitions, both empirically and conceptually. Using the lens of four–dimensional social space as conceived by Indigenous scholar Maggie Walter, we illustrate how race and class function in powerful but complex ways to shape the aspirations of two young Indigenous women. We argue that if we are to shift longstanding demographic patterns of university participation, then visible stories of Indigenous success, such as those told here, can help to redefine current discourses on Indigenous aspirations for higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the shift from elite to mass education, the odds of accessing university remain stacked in favour of those with a university-educated parent. Not only are first-generation students less likely to engage in higher education, but the dominant narrative surrounding their enrolment emphasises cultural deficiency, constructing individuals as 'too different' to succeed. Drawing on data from focus groups with 198 school-aged students in Australia, this paper reframes this narrative by using the concept of familial habitus to examine how aspirations for higher education are shaped and nurtured by the home lives of prospective first-generation entrants. We develop three characterisations of familial habitus – 'projected', 'meritocratic', and 'supportive' – each of which demonstrates the inventive and transformative power of habitus. Cautioning against pathologising accounts of first-generation entry, we argue that the social justice motives of widening participation will be thwarted unless first-generation students are repositioned as legitimate participants in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sports participation and elite sporting success are fundamental to Australian culture and a prominent source of national pride. As sport is a major part of day-to-day living in Australia, it is not surprising that many young people aspire to careers as sportspersons. While such aspirations are often dismissed as fanciful and unattainable, the reality is that a higher proportion of Australians participate in the workforce as sportspeople than in careers as mining engineers, surgeons, optometrists or barristers. Indeed, little is known about aspirations for sports careers. Drawing on data from a 4-year longitudinal study involving 6492 Australian school students in Years 3–12, we sought to understand the extent to which young Australians aspire to a career as a sportsperson and the extent to which these aspirations are evenly distributed across demographic categories. Our findings suggest that not only was sportsperson the most popular occupational category, but this interest was heavily shaped by social and cultural markers of difference. Logistic regression analysis revealed that significant predictors of interest in a career as a sportsperson were being male, Indigenous, from high socioeconomic background, and attending advantaged schools. Far from sport's reputation as the great equalizer, accessible to all, these results demonstrate that aspirations for a career as a sportsperson largely reflect the status quo of sports participation in Australian society and wider inequalities. Given the growing number of careers in professional sports and the value sport holds in the lives of Australians, we argue that aspirations for careers in sport should be treated seriously, and that disrupting current patterns in who aspires to careers as sportspeople is vital. It will require access for a more diverse range of students to the kinds of social resources and networks that nurture their capacity to aspire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]