Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of "scaling up". This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement "what works" across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu's notions of…

Ability grouping in schools and classrooms constitutes something of a policy hiatus in the Australian context, in contrast to the conspicuous visibility of equity and quality as explicit policy goals. This article examines what I am calling the dialectics -- i.e. moments of negation that allow for creation -- and dilemmas inhering in the complex…

With the launch of the "My School" website in 2010, Australia became a relative latecomer to the publication of national school performance comparisons. This paper primarily seeks to explore the school choice experience as framed by "My School" website, for participating middle-class families. We will draw on Bourdieusian theory of cultural…

Jacques Ranciere remains neglected within educational debates. In this paper I examine the potential of his philosophies for enacting critical interventions in relation to contemporary (higher) educational concerns. Ranciere argues against the progressive temporality of pedagogic relations and provides an alternative thesis that equality is a…

In this moment of tremendous change, investing in old ways of doing education is not the best way forward. In offering a Charter for Change we recognise that knowledge and learning will be pivotal to the social and personal transformations necessary to address the idiosyncratic challenges of our times. The transformed economic system emerging from…

This article troubles constructions of "at-risk students." Utilizing Ranciere's discussion of dissensus, the author first argues that what is at risk are not students but contemporary common sense notions of schooling. From this perspective, students' labeled as "at risk" ways of knowing and being that interrupt ideas and ideals about the purpose…

This article provides a synoptic account of historically changing conceptions and practices of social justice in Australian higher education policy. It maps the changes in this policy arena, beginning with the period following the Second World War and concluding with an analysis of the most recent policy proposals of the Bradley Review.…

There is a changed "structure of feeling" emerging in higher education systems, particularly in OECD nations, in response to changed social, cultural and economic arrangements. Taking a student equity perspective, the paper names this change in terms of "mobility", "aspiration" and "voice". It argues that (1) new kinds and degrees of mobility are…

In this paper, I examine the provenance of distance education or "teledidactics" in Australia. I take as my case studies the New South Wales Correspondence School and the School of the Air and suggest that their emergence was underpinned by a desire on the part of educational and broadcasting bureaucrats to increase the equity of school provision…

One genre of reality television constructs working-class youth as the dysfunctional antithesis of the aspirational middle-class consumer who normally features in lifestyle media. Sent to boot camps, unruly youths undergo makeover by education into ways of living deemed to accrue superior cultural capital. This article analyses how one lifestyle…

No one publicly defends unequal educational opportunity, Christopher Jencks claimed in a well-known article two decades ago. But is this actually true? With the rise of a "global war for talent" and the push by business and political elites for a "global meritocracy", the terrain on which educators work is shifting radically. This article argues…

The application of market principles to educational provision continues to attract governments across the globe, despite an international body of literature suggesting that marketisation can exacerbate inequalities. In light of a renewed policy push in Australia towards accountability via a market model, this paper analyses the impact of existing…

The paper aims to explore the relationship between globalization and education through an investigation of educational policy development in the specific context of the Asia Pacific. The paper's primary focus is on data collected from the World Bank, OECD, IMF and UNESCO to look primarily at three interrelated trends in education: increasing…

This paper explores the potential for conducting collaborative and critical research in higher education which problematises the role and practices of the academy in maintaining exclusion. It begins with a brief discussion of UK government discourse on widening participation, and contrasts this with the research literature which indicates the…

In this paper I attempt to explore the implications for education policy arising from aspects of Third Way political thought and its troubled relation to neoliberalism. In particular, the implications for equality arising from Third Way reforms to secondary education are considered. The limits of contestation that mark out the centre ground of UK…