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In this paper we seek to understand how structural, contextual and institutional conditions influence the construction of individual agency in career development policy. We focus on responsibilisation, the process by which responsibility for outcomes is transferred from the state to the individual, through a combination of policy actions and the framing of public discourse. We use Australia as a case study to examine how the state has recast its role in the creation and regulation of employment. We outline how the role of the state now involves guiding the citizen towards the "right choice", with individuals responsible for and active managers of risk in the labour market. To determine the complex narratives around agency, we examine the assumptions embedded in some current Australian government career guidance websites, to highlight how jobseeker autonomy, self-direction, agency, and self-management are framed. The implications for socially just career development provision are discussed.

In this article we explore Australian policymaker perspectives on the quality assurance of career development (CD) programmes in schools. We found that Australian policymakers are concerned about the quality of CD provision in schools and have a wide range of approaches that they deploy to ensure and assure quality at the school level. Quality assurance within the country is focused on the qualifications and professionalism of the people delivering career development programmes rather than on systemic or organisational quality. We also found that the range of quality assurance tools that are deployed by such policymakers varies across the different Australian jurisdictions and is influenced by geography, the size of the jurisdiction and the level of priority given to career guidance.

In rapidly changing employment markets, career guidance has a vital role to play in supporting people in navigating transitions between education and employment across the lifespan. In this article, the issue of quality and quality assurance in career guidance is explored. Although there is no clear agreed international understanding of what quality career guidance looks like, through a review of current approaches we identify six main areas which may be quality assured and propose a new typology of approaches to assuring quality. The article concludes with a critical consideration of the issues that quality assurance approaches in career guidance generate, highlighting the need for caution so that the pursuit of quality does not undermine the goals it seeks to achieve.

Many countries are experiencing teacher shortages, with particularly long-standing issues in attraction and retention in secondary science and mathematics. Policy initiatives often focus on science and mathematics undergraduates, with the aim of encouraging them to consider teaching by offering scholarships into teacher education or fast-tracking into employment permanency. However, those who have already chosen to teach in non-science and mathematics teaching specialisations have already shown their interest in teaching and form a pool of candidates that may potentially be recruited into science and mathematics teaching pathways. While these non-science and mathematics teacher candidates could have the capacity to address in part longstanding science and mathematics teacher shortages, there is a lack of research examining their motivations from the perspective of initiatives that may attract them into science and mathematics teaching, and little that examines their science and mathematics backgrounds. We sought to address these gaps by surveying 349 initial teacher education (ITE) students from four Australian universities, examining their career motivations, interest in science and mathematics teaching, and science and mathematics backgrounds. We explored perceived barriers to secondary science and mathematics teaching, and responses to potential policy initiatives. We found that 61% of non-science/mathematics ITE candidates indicated high interest in secondary science or mathematics pathways. Policy options such as support for science and mathematics retraining after several years of teaching in their current subject area or level, were selected as likely to support this choice. Our results suggest considerable capacity for policymakers and tertiary institutions to design initiatives that may attract non-science/mathematics ITE candidates into science and mathematics teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even in a society of meat-eaters such as the United States, when diet is addressed in school at all, it is widely treated as matter of personal choice, the consequences of which are borne by individual consumers. Overlooked are myriad connections involved in human diet and the implications of consumption for other entities. In the first part of this essay, Suzanne Rice discusses ways in which diet, particularly meat-eating, is connected to animal suffering, environmental harms including climate change and pollution, and risks to the health of agricultural workers and consumers. In the second part, she discusses ways in which education might be "ecologized" in efforts to help students gain insight into such connections. There are many ways to ecologize education, but regardless of how teachers proceed, they are likely to encounter not only simple ignorance, relatively unproblematic gaps in students' knowledge linked to youth and inexperience, but also willful ignorance, more problematic gaps linked to avoidance, manipulation, or rejection of evidence perceived as threatening.

A significant body of research documents the negative consequences of dropping out of school for both the individual and society. In attempting to respond to the problem of early school leaving, schools and systems internationally have put in place a range of system-level and local responses such as mentoring, targeted additional career guidance and homework clubs. Unfortunately, these 'add-ons' often stop outside the classroom door, and do not consider the impact of teaching practices on students' engagement in school and their decisions to remain or leave. This article reports on the development of instruments aimed at measuring four constructs that have been shown to be related to student engagement and school completion, namely competence, autonomy, relatedness and an appreciation of subject relevance. Analyses of data from a small sample of Year 9 students (N = 48) in two Australian secondary schools indicated that, with some adjustments, the research instruments developed provided reliable and valid measures of the four constructs for use in large-scale research with students.

High-stakes testing regimes, in which schools are judged on their capacity to attain high student results in national tests, are becoming common in both developed and developing nations, including the United States, Britain and Australia. However, while there has been substantial investigation around the impact of high-stakes testing on curriculum and pedagogy, there has been very little research looking at the impact on teachers' professional opportunities. The current project used a case study approach to examine the impact a high-stakes national testing programme had on teachers' access to professional learning and their teaching allocations in four Indonesian public schools. It found that better qualified teachers were allocated to classes that would be sitting for the national examinations, and that these teachers were given much more access to professional learning opportunities than those teaching non-examined year levels. This in turn impacted negatively on the staff morale of less qualified teaching staff and potentially on their career trajectories. Findings suggest that school leaders should be wary of targeting better qualified and/or more experienced staff to year levels sitting for high-stakes tests, as this may lead to staff stratification within schools, limiting opportunities for staff to learn from one another and reducing the morale of less qualified and less experienced staff. They also add support to a substantial body of research that suggests policy-makers should be wary of the flow-on effects of using performance in high-stakes tests as the key means of judging school effectiveness.

"Teach For" and "Teach First" programs now constitute a significant pathway into teaching in a number of countries. One criterion for selection into these programs is leadership capacity, and evidence indicates that many candidates do move into leadership roles in education, business, and policy in the years following their time as a "Teach For"/"Teach First" candidate. Given their capacity to influence policy directions and school practice, and to speak with the authority of at least some experience in challenging schools, it is important to understand the types of conclusions they draw from their time in teaching, and the solutions they propose to the problems of educational inequality. This study set out to explore the types of attributions made by 76 "Teach For" candidates for the low achievement of disadvantaged students, and what they consider to be potential means of effectively addressing the achievement gap. Participants gave most importance to the types of people attracted to and retained in teaching, and placed relatively little importance on improving school resourcing or addressing systemic and structural contributions to educational disadvantage. Implications for those training and working with "Teach For" candidates are discussed.

There is a significant body of research supporting the notion that teachers are the single most important school-based resource schools have to lift student achievement, and many principals and policymakers are aware of the need to retain good staff. This study used a large sample of Australian teachers in primary and secondary government and non-government schools to examine differences in the importance given by more and less effective teachers to particular factors that might hold them in a school or cause them to leave. More effective teachers placed greater emphasis on factors such as promotion opportunities and improved professional learning options as means to retain them in a school, while less effective teachers valued a more selective intake of students. More effective teachers gave greater emphasis to poor support from the principal as a reason for leaving a school, while less effective teachers gave greater emphasis to poor student behaviour. Implications for school leaders and policymakers are discussed.

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.

This article examines the emergence and persistence of curriculum differentiation in the comprehensive high school. We argue that curriculum differentiation has roots in Plato's Republic, where it is proposed that education (and later work, especially the work of ruling) should be distributed on the basis of ability. The concept of "ideology" is used here to help explain why the practice of curriculum differentiation has remained a defining--and largely unchallenged--characteristic of the comprehensive high school. The persistence of curriculum differentiation matters because it is a means by which different groups of students are given access to different kinds of knowledge. Not all knowledge is equally valued, and access to certain kinds of this educational good has implications for young persons' well-being that extend well beyond their formal schooling.

An overview of positive and negative potential effects of the setting of compulsory exit-level standards in literacy and numeracy for students completing their final years of schooling is presented. The overview rests on studies completed primarily outside Australia, reflecting the reality of such practices not having been implemented widely in Australia. Both negative and positive potential effects are discussed, culminating in a summary of the evidence for these. The relevance of implementation of such standards in Australia is considered, particularly in the context of the implementation of the national curriculum. Notwithstanding individual studies, which appear to demonstrate both negative and positive impacts of such standards, the weight of evidence is judged to be insufficient to justify implementation of this approach in Australia.