Jack Keating

Politics and School Education in Australia: A Case of Shifting Purposes.

Purpose – The paper aims to argue that there has been a privileging of the private (social mobility) and economic (social efficiency) purposes of schooling at the expense of the public (democratic equality) purposes of schooling. Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs a literature review, policy and document analysis. Findings – Since the late 1980s, the schooling agenda in Australia has been narrowed to one that gives primacy to purposes of schooling that highlight economic orientations (social efficiency) and private purposes (social mobility). Practical implications – The findings have wider relevance beyond Australia, as similar policy agendas are evident in many other countries raising the question as to how the shift in purposes of education in those countries might mirror those in Australia. Originality/value – While earlier writers have examined schooling policies in Australia and noted the implications of managerialism in relation to these policies, no study has analysed these policies from the perspective of the purposes of schooling. Conceptualising schooling, and its purposes in particular, in this way refocuses attention on how societies use their educational systems to promote (or otherwise) the public good.

Qualifications Frameworks in Australia

Australian education and training has been shaped by federalism and the nations history as a collection of city-formed states. Institutional and sectoral separation and autonomy have been powerful themes. The Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) is a weak model for achieving the objective of seamlessness in education and training pathways. Yet it has a rigid and semi-regulatory role within the Vocational Education and Training (VET) awards and quality assurance systems. The limits of the framework are expressed on the one hand by the autonomy of the sectors, and on the other by recent regional level developments designed to achieve greater qualifications coverage and pathways linkages. The AQF does have a future role within the Australian qualifications system. However, it needs to be reoriented to achieve more structured and active relationships with the regional and local developments, and to provide a framework for these developments to achieve national consistency and coherence in qualifications.

Post‐school articulation in Australia: a case of unresolved tensions

Post‐school education and training in Australia is based upon a binary system of universities and technical and further education (TAFE) institutes. The binary system has been fashioned through decisions that established different curriculum currencies and qualifications, sector orientations and governance, and student profiles for the two sub‐sectors. These arrangements assume the need for minimal articulation between the sub‐sectors. However, the relatively high levels of student traffic and credit transfer between TAFE and the universities suggest some tensions within the binary model. With the university sector in Australia facing some imminent and major structural changes there are opportunities for new forms of post‐school education provision that are more compatible with Australia’s generalist secondary school model, and that incorporate stronger internal articulation.

Letting schools off the hook? Exploring the role of Australian secondary schools in the COAG Year 12 attainment agenda

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.

Australian concurrent federalism and its implications for the Gonski Review

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.

Primary school principals and the purposes of education in Australia: Results of a national survey

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report the results of a national survey of government primary school principals in Australia, investigating the purposes of education, in terms of the importance and level of enactment of those purposes in schools.Design/methodology/approach – In 2009, an electronic survey was distributed to government primary school principals in Australia seeking their views on the purposes of education. The survey comprised 71 items of a closed format and three items of an open‐ended format. Respondents rated first the importance they ascribed to particular purposes of education, then second the degree to which they believed these purposes were actually enacted in their particular school. Factor analyses were conducted on the item responses. Differences between importance and enactment of purposes are discussed together with reasons for these differences.Findings – The findings overwhelmingly point to tensions between what they, the principals, believe ought to be the purposes ...

School Completion Targets and the "Equivalence" of VET in the Australian Context.

Located differentially (and to its detriment) within a status hierarchy of knowledge, vocational education has been called upon to satisfy an increasing range of political and social needs, including meeting the needs of industry and government and catering for increasing pupil diversity. Faced with stubbornly immobile rates of school completion in Australia, policy makers have turned to vocational education and training to play a part in achieving higher rates of school completion or its ‘equivalent’. This has been principally in the form of proposing alternative qualifications to the existing senior school certificates and increasing the role played by adult vocational education and training (VET) providers. This article considers the contribution of these various policy initiatives to progress in achieving school completion targets—focusing on current approaches to provision of vocational programmes (both in schools and in other providers), the equivalence of qualifications and the relative strength of non‐school pathways. It questions the integrity of these ‘alternative’ measures of school completion and challenges the notion that VET, delivered within a secondary school subject paradigm, can produce the gains in participation required to reach these targets.

The Malaysian qualifications framework. An institutional response to intrinsic weaknesses

NQFs and their genesis The global spread of national qualifications frameworks (NQF) at times has been accompanied by some extravagant claims about what they can deliver. Vague concepts such as ‘enhancing lifelong learning’ accompany more modest aims such being ‘mainly seen as communication or transparency tools whose main task is to clarify the relations – vertically as well as horizontally – between the different parts of the national system’ (CEDEFOP 2009). Coles (2007) has noted that while there have been high expectations of NQFs, many of the perceived benefits cannot yet be discerned, cannot be measured, or lack evidence for their realisation. A characteristic of policy processes in education, especially within modern policy and political cultures, is the necessity to float initiatives upon flows of rhetoric. This has been attributed to the globalisation of education policy (Rizvi and Lingard 2010) and the discoursive impact of education policy rhetoric. The incidence of NQFs, which Chakroun (2010) has recorded as 70 in 2009, most of which have been established within the past four years, is clearly a global phenomenon. The extent to which their expansion is the symptom of common problems across national education and training systems or the policy impact of global ideologies and rhetoric has not been fully explored. The rhetoric in the area of qualifications is unavoidably loaded with jargon that limits its audience. This may be a consequence of or result in the rhetoric having the partial purpose of convincing the policy makers who generate the rhetoric of the worth of the innovation, which appears to be