Beyond Nostalgia:: Reshaping Australian Education

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beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education

beyond
nostalgia:
"The polarised and exclusionary debate about education
(has created) unproductive walls of silence…
reconstructing a sensible debate about educational reshaping australian
reform is imperative for the long-term future of
Australian education and the people, young and old, who
pass through it."
education
Lawrence Angus & Terri Seddon
Enormous change to Australian education over the past decade
has created a maelstrom of debate among politicians, teachers
terri seddon and lawrence angus (eds)

and academics about the direction of education.
Beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education distils this
ongoing debate into a concise account of developments in
education, and provides a positive framework for finding a way
forward.
It examines the:
• shifting relationship between government and education;
• implications of commercialising education;
• broader social factors, such as globalisation, which impact on
education; and
t. seddon and l. angus (eds)

• prospects, challenges and opportunities for Australian education
in the new millennium.
With contributions from 12 highly-regarded education
professionals, this insightful and accessible book is important for
policy makers, undergraduate students, academics and educators,
as well as anyone concerned with education reform.
Australian
Education
Review No 44
PRESS
PRESS
PRESS
THIS FOLD REMAINS CONSTANT.

ADJUST SPINE WIDTH
TOWARDS LEFT HAND EDGE
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Beyond Nostalgia:
Reshaping Australian Education
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The Australian Education Review is a series of books on subjects of

current significance and emerging importance to Australian educa-
tion. Up to three titles are produced each year.
The books are written for a general audience and attempt to present
a broad discussion of issues. As the series title suggests, the books
describe and discuss current educational strategies or issues rather
than undertake major research projects per se. They have a national
focus, although case studies and research materials from individual
states and regions, as well as from overseas, may well be included. As
an additional resource for readers, each book includes a substantial
bibliography.
Further information is available from Dr Laurance Splitter, Editor,
the Australian Education Review, Australian Council for Educational
Research, Private Bag 55, Camberwell, Vic. 3124. Tel: +61 3 9277 5594,
Fax: +61 3 9277 5500, e-mail: splitter@acer.edu.au
Editorial Board
Professor Sid Bourke, Department of Education, University of
Newcastle
Ms Sharan Burrow, Federal President, Australian Education Union
Ms Deirdre Morris, Publishing Manager, ACER
Mr Howard Kelly, Chairperson, Board of Studies, Victoria
Associate Professor Jane Kenway, Faculty of Education, Deakin
University, Geelong Campus
Professor Helen Praetz, Acting Pro Vice-Chancellor (Academic
Projects), RMIT, Coburg Campus
Dr Laurance Splitter (Editor), Principal Research Fellow, ACER
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Australian Education
Review No. 44
Beyond Nostalgia:
Reshaping Australian Education
Terri Seddon and Lawrence Angus (Eds)

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First published 2000

by The Australian Council for Educational Research Ltd
19 Prospect Hill Road, Camberwell, Victoria, 3124
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright © 2000 Terri Seddon & Lawrence Angus
All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in

the Copyright Act 1968 of Australia and subsequent
amendments, no part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Edited by Ronel Redman

Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd
National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Beyond nostalgia : reshaping Australian education.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 86431 339 X.
1. Education - Australia. I. Seddon, Terri. II. Lawrence, Angus.

(Series : Australian education review ; no. 44).
370.994
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Contents
Introduction viii
Section I: Reinventing government

1 Competent citizens and limited truths 1
Ian Hunter and Denise Meredyth
2 Education and economy: A review of main assertions 24
Gerald Burke
Section II: Education design and class formation

3 Competition in Australian higher education since 1987:
intended and unintended effects 48
Simon Marginson
4 From lucky country to clever country: leadership, schooling
and the formation of Australian elites 70
Peter Gronn
5 Competition, education and class formation 91
Mark Western
Section III: Redesigning education

6 Institutions with designs: consuming school children 105
Jane Kenway and Lindsay Fitzclarence
7 Gender, teaching and institutional change: an historical
perspective 129
Marjorie Theobald
8 The social and organisational renorming of education 151
Lawrence Angus and Terri Seddon
v
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Section IV: Rethinking the education government nexus

9 The politics of postpatrimonial governance 170
Anna Yeatman
10 Beyond nostalgia: institutional design and alternative
futures 186
Terri Seddon and Lawrence Angus
References 210
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Figures and Tables

Figure 2.1: General government outlays, % of GDP, 1997 31
Figure 10.1 Statement of purposes of education in Synod
Report and the Victorian Department of
Education’s response 203
Table 2.1: Students in education and training, Australia,
1990, 1993, 1998 (‘000) 28
Table 2.2: Education participation rates, Australia,
1990, 1992 and 1997 (per cent) 29
Table 2.3: General government total outlays and outlays on
education, Australia, 1990–91 and 1997–98 30
Table 2.4: Public and private educational expenditures as
% of GDP, selected OECD countries, 1990 and 1995 31
Table 2.5: Government and private expenditures and outlays
on education, Australia ($billion, and % of GDP) 32
Table 2.6: School enrolments by type of school, Australia, 1990
to 1998 (‘000) 34
Table 2.7: School students and teachers (‘000), and student-to-
teacher ratio (STR), Australia, 1990 and 1998 34
Table 2.8: Labour force aged 15–64 by highest level of
qualification, Australia, 1993, 1996 and 1999
(May ‘000) 39
Table 3.1: Positional typology of Australian universities 61
Table 3.2: Competitive position, individual higher education
institutions 1993/1995, five different measures 62
vii
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Introduction
In October 1992, a Victorian State election tipped the Australian Labor
Party from office. The Liberal-National Party Coalition (i.e.
Conservative) Government, led by Jeff Kennett, was returned after a
decade of Labor administration. In October 1999, the Coalition lost
office to a minority Australian Labor Party Government. Immediately
after election, the Kennett Government moved on its reform agenda.
By the end of 1992, 55 schools around the State were closed, the cen-
tral education bureaucracy was downsized and over 8000 teachers
were declared ‘in excess of need’. One month after the election, 100 000
people took to the streets of Melbourne to condemn the new
Government’s savage retrenchment of the public sector, including
education. This public protest was the biggest public demonstration
since the Vietnam Moratorium marches in the 1970s, but the radical
restructuring continued. Anger began to give way to uncertainty, grief,
consent.
While teachers, principals and parents reeled under the impact of
these cuts, the Government announced its new flagship education pol-
icy, ‘Schools of the Future’. This promoted decentralisation of budgets
and administration. Principals were to become educational leaders in
their schools. They would be the school’s chief executive officers,
accountable to the community through their reconstituted school
councils, the schools’ boards of directors, and through the review
processes instituted by the Victorian Department of School Education.
In early 1993, at an evening seminar in Flinders Lane in the
Melbourne central business district, John Smyth, then of Deakin
University, presented a solid academic critique of the new
Government’s policy directions. ‘Schools of the Future’, he argued,
was the flipside of the Government’s policies of retrenchment. This
‘reform’ would create an educational market like that which had been
developed in England. The process of marketising education, he
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argued, destabilises existing educational provision and creates a con-

text in which funding cuts and the privatisation of public educational
assets can proceed.
A striking moment occurred during question time. A woman in the
audience said that she was on the school council at her children’s
school. ‘Our system of school councils has let parents like me work
with teachers and the principal. We have had our say in shaping the
education that our school provides for our kids. We have all worked
hard, participating together, to make sure that what our school does is
best for our children.’ A dark-suited man in the audience took up the
woman’s comment. He was an economist, he said, and he could not
understand why people continued to make statements like the
woman’s when the State Government’s debt meant that public expen-
diture could not continue as before. Education, like any other area of
government expenditure, was subject to fiscal constraint. The audi-
ence polarised. There were many words spoken but the two sides
never heard each other. Later, walking up the darkened Flinders Lane,
the woman expressed incredulity at what had happened. ‘We’ve
worked so hard for our kids,’ she said through tears of anger and pain,
‘and all they can do is talk about dollars.’
1993 seems a long time ago. Two elections later, the Kennett
Government is out of office yet its policies of restructuring have
become commonplace. While time has passed and change has contin-
ued, the politics of that Flinders Lane seminar has persisted: the
woman and the man; the mother and the economist; the person con-
cerned with kids and the person concerned with dollars. Both parties
talk at each other, but neither side hears.
Looking back at the start of 2000, it is clear that the motif of polari-
sation evident in that Flinders Lane seminar has been replayed over
and over again in education. The simple opposition between cost and
care has been elaborated in many different ways. The kind of radical
restructuring of Kennett’s Victoria has become increasingly evident
nationwide. All sectors of public education schools, technical and fur-
ther education (TAFE), adult and community education (ACE) and
universities have been subject to far-reaching reforms as governments
divest themselves of responsibilities for funding education and train-
ing. Efforts to spread these financial burdens across public and private
agencies have encouraged commercialisation and privatisation of pro-
vision.
The great historical achievements of public education appear to
have been forgotten in the press for marketisation. While we have long
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been critics of stifling bureaucracy, it seems that every feature of

bureaucratic organisation has been redefined as a ‘bureaucratic rigidity’
and slammed as inefficient. Yet this universal condemnation over-
looks positive contributions: the way bureaucratic organisation under-
pinned the development of mass education in a large but thinly
populated country; the development of a complex technology of edu-
cational provision that attended to individuals’ differences and capac-
ities, and the formation of a modern and multicultural nation without
significant ethnic violence; and the protections which due process pro-
vided from corruption and patronage. Now that the nation-building
State has ‘changed its mind’ (Pusey, 1992), the work of government is
being refashioned, its bureaucratic infrastructure and community link-
ages being unpicked in the pursuit of market solutions.
The construction of the educational market place is pursued by gov-
ernment decrees that build upon and fuel the apparent crisis of public
education by offering choice for those who can pay. The choice of pri-
vate education is supported by increased funding for non-government
schools. The choice of training provider is backed by the allocation of
government funds to employers. Opportunities for individual choice
in higher education are increasingly structured by cost as the principle
of ‘user pays’ is accepted. In school education, such strategies ignore
the point that opportunities for choice vary according to socioeco-
nomic and cultural, as well as material, assets. Market solutions
advantage the advantaged and disadvantage the disadvantaged. They
naturalise inequality so that educational failure and the lack of social
and economic opportunities appear to be a result of the individuals’
poor choices or personal failings.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, under both Labor and Liberal gov-
ernments, an unproductive stand-off has developed in education.
Governments thrill us with hype about new opportunities for choice.
Yet, all that is on offer are options to exit from marketised contexts in
which educational ‘consumer’ confronts educational ‘producer’.
Policy makers have increasingly operated at arms length from the
face-to-face work of educational practice and the rich interrelation-
ships between teachers, students and administrators that enable teach-
ing and learning. In Victoria, for instance, education policy and reform
throughout the 1990s were driven by a government that suspended
virtually all consultation with organised teachers and their unions,
and even with organised parents and school councils. The distance
that developed between policy makers and practitioners meant that
there is a lack of feedback loops between the top-down redesigners of
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education and those who work day-to-day in the provision of educa-

tion and training. The gulf between policy and practice limits the flow
of information about the effects of reform and therefore limits the
capacity of government to fine-tune and optimise reforms.
This oppositional politics and the growing gulf between those who
redesign education and those who are subject to those redesigns are
accompanied by the construction of media spectacles which lead easily
to the unproductive stereotyping of positions. The positions seem
simple, black and white, opposites of each other. Those who press
reform forward claim the high ground: they are engaged in moderni-
sation of education and society. They are taking Australia in new direc-
tions that may be difficult, even painful, but which are nonetheless
necessary if the nation is to retain its standing in the global economy.
Those who decry what is happening are positioned as opposites. Their
concerns and fears are dismissed and they are presented as against
modernisation, as living in a time now past, as locked into opposition.
The cycle of politics plays on: if you are not with us, you are against
us. If you criticise the new, you must want the old. In the ugly politics
of polarisation, this dualism of modernisers and critics is easily painted
as an opposition between necessary reform and nostalgia.
Beyond nostalgia
This book steps decisively beyond nostalgia. It attempts to circuit-
break the unproductive polarisations in education by providing a
basis for building more productive conversations about education and
the course of education reform into the twenty-first century.
We accept that modernisation in education and society is an
inevitable feature of our times and that a return to some imagined
golden past is neither possible nor desirable. The challenge is to find
new ways of organising education and training to meet the impera-
tives of the new millennium. But we suggest that nostalgia is a com-
mon response to change, not just restricted to critics of reform. It is not
always clear what is new and what is old in proposals for change and
processes of reform. Our contemporary modernisers seem, increasingly,
to be advocates of nineteenth-century free market liberalism and to
pursue a comfortable status within traditional, apparently mono-
cultural, social hierarchies in which domination and subordination are
organised on the basis of class, gender and race. Those seen to be crit-
ics are often pilloried for being locked in the 1970s. Their nostalgia also
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rests on the personal experience of expanding social and cultural hori-

zons as social democracy struggled to extend and diversify prevailing
hierarchies of authority and power so that social leaderships could
accommodate difference.
We recognise that the polarisation evident in education is paralleled
in other domains of social life. In Australia, at the start of the third mil-
lennium, the politics of polarisation are being played out in ever more
destructive spirals. In the ten years to 1994, household disposable
income increased by 52 per cent in the lowest quintile compared with
71 per cent in the highest. In 1994, the top 20 per cent of households
received 40 per cent of total disposable household income (average
$1250 per week). The bottom 20 per cent of households received a 6 per
cent share (average $175 per week). Unemployment increased. The
youth labour market was particularly hard hit. In the ten years to 1995,
full-time employment among 1519-year-olds declined from 32 per cent
to 17 per cent. Meanwhile part-time employment increased, but usu-
ally in low-paid jobs providing little career opportunity or job security.
Industrial relations reforms have pressed for labour market
deregulation in which unions are seen to have little place. They serve
to reconfirm and unfetter employer rights and managerial prerogative
while leaving workers with very limited protection.
While the Government continues to dither about apologising for
past treatment of Aboriginal Australians, the social and cultural polar-
isation of Australian society proceeds apace. We acknowledge that one
of the pressing challenges of our times is to tackle the emergent poli-
tics of polarisation and its potentially ugly implications in a society
that is increasingly organised into the haves and the have-nots. This
requires us to recognise that the politics of polarisation is being driven
by nostalgias of both the Left and Right. It is fuelled particularly by
those who have been rendered vulnerable to the chilly winds of
change, who feel deserted by the withdrawal of old protections and
familiarities, and who see no option but to struggle to survive in a
compassionless world. The politics of polarisation is rooted in con-
temporary social change but is exacerbated by the growing disillusion
with government. Cynicism and disrespect have accompanied gov-
ernment efforts to engineer institutional reform.
We know that education is one of the instruments of government
that can play an important role in tackling this politics of polarisation.
But we can also see that, today, education is criticised as being part of
the problem, as well as being part of possible solutions, to our con-
temporary dilemmas. Education is a social institution which serves
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society by educating the next generation and by reforming society and

culture over time. It serves as a valuable bulwark to change, while also
inducting individuals into ways of thinking and acting that give birth
to innovation as well as conservation. It is these contradictory social
purposes that, in a time of rapid change, render education vulnerable
to criticism from all sides.
The so-called ‘crisis of education’ is tied to the complex agendas
that are run through the social institution of education. Governments
seek to redesign education to meet the presumed imperatives of new
times. To engineer change they construct crises in order to lever new
commitments that detach individuals’ affiliations from old institutional
arrangements and reattach them to new procedures and policies.
Resistance to change from both within and beyond education is gen-
erated in response. Resistance creates its own discursive politics, its
own perceived crises and its own preferred reform agendas. Moral
panics emanating in civil society are run through education as levers
on government policy and resource allocations. New vulnerabilities
associated with exposure to risk drive alternative proposals for
reform. Experts deploy their particular knowledge to the generation of
technical solutions to social problems: improved testing, performance
indicators, new management. Others seek to privatise risk, linking risk
to market mechanisms that depend upon individuals’ private capaci-
ties and resources. Security can be enhanced for those who possess the
capacity to pay for their own protection while deflecting risk to those
who are more vulnerable. Others are willing to share risk by con-
tributing to public benefit but, as the retreat from the welfare state and
clamour for tax cuts indicate, this is not a popular option today.
We understand that this rhetoric of crisis and politics of change in
education is confusing. It is not clear whether, in today’s society, it is
better for education as a social institution to change or to continue its
work of conserving cultures and social organisation. Because educa-
tion contributes to both change and continuity, it is challenged as a
means of change and, when frustration mounts, it is criticised for not
changing or not changing quickly enough. But we do not think that the
confusions of our times will be avoided or reconciled by simplifying
the issues. The challenge is to tackle the complexities of social change,
and the diversity of human responses which set nostalgias alongside
and against innovative proposals for reform.
Our concern in the current context is that the discursive politics of
education, the advocacy of reforms alongside reactions and nostalgias,
have created polarisations not only in practice but in the crucial
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debates about necessary change for the future. In this polarised and
exclusionary debate about education, unproductive walls of silence
have developed which limit full assessment of necessary and viable
reshaping of education. Reconstructing a sensible debate about educa-
tional reform is imperative for the long-term future of Australian edu-
cation and for the people, young and old, who pass through it.
Sensible debate, we believe, will not develop while there is stereo-
typed denunciation of either the current restructuring or those who
criticise it. Those who seek to modernise education are not just dollar-
driven rationalists and those who criticise the current marketising tra-
jectory of education are not just reactionary social democrats seeking
to escape change. Rather, there is growing recognition among many of
those involved in policy making, educational practice and research
that there are educational futures that lie beyond unfettered markets
and protectionist bureaucracies. Seeking and working towards these
alternatives is the task for our times. It depends upon setting aside
confrontationist stereotyped images of both those committed to arms-
length organisation of education and those concerned with the inti-
mate, face-to-face work of educating. It means building meaningful
conversations between policy makers, practitioners and researchers to
maximise the basis of knowledge and understanding among all those
engaged at the practical cutting edge of educational debate and
reform.
Research has a particular contribution to make in this process.
Researchers’ distance from both the direct work of arms-length policy
and face-to-face educational practice limits their capacity to grasp the
subtleties of day-to-day policy and practice. But this distance is also a
distinctive resource that permits researchers to stand aside from the
hurly-burly and provides them with a particular vantage point from
which documentation and critique can occur. Seeing educational
reshaping at a distance offers opportunities for commentary in a dis-
tanced, more disinterested and less partial way. These resources of
space and detachment also permit the exploration of new intellectual
and cultural resources in the debate about educational reshaping. This
is achieved by enabling marginal voices to speak back to policy and
practice, and also by extending the repertoire of concepts and under-
standings that can be used to make sense of reform processes, trends
and trajectories, and the practical limits of reform.
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About this book

This book opens a more inclusive debate about the reshaping of edu-
cation for new times. It conveys a hard-nosed recognition of the con-
ditions within which the reconstruction of modern education must
proceed. It walks a path between utopianism and conformity to con-
temporary realities, seeking preferred but feasible educational reform.
It steps between the advocates and critics of current education reform
agendas in order to rethink education beyond nostalgia.
The collection pursues this aim by contextualising and document-
ing developments in Australian education in the 1990s as a basis
for extending debate about the reshaping of education in the 21st
Century. It affirms that there are preferred, as well as probable, futures
and explores the kind of contribution that education might make to
social reform.
Our approach in this collection is informed by recent debates in
institutional theory which we have accessed through our role as coor-
dinators of the education strand of the cross-disciplinary Reshaping
Australian Institutions project that has been orchestrated by the
Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National
University. This project is committed to documenting and evaluating
the ongoing work of rethinking and reshaping Australia’s most crucial
social institutions as we arrive at the turn of the century and the cen-
tenary of federation in Australia. It has encouraged debates between
researchers investigating different theories of institutions, institutional
change and processes of institutional design, and researchers involved
in more substantive investigations of different social institutions
(e.g. constitution, labour market, family, indigenous Australia, gender,
population, economy, and education).
The larger Reshaping Australian Institutions (RAI) project has pro-
vided a context that has both framed and supported the work of the
education strand in the preparation of this book. Specifically, it has
encouraged us to apply an institutional perspective to the study of
Australian education and its contemporary reshaping. In framing the
collection, we have focused on education as a social institution. We
have drawn on the RAI definition of institutions as a useful starting
point. The RAI defines institutions as
sets of regulatory norms that give rise to patterns of action, concrete
social structures or organisations... Institutions can be public or private,
so long as they refer to a set of regulatory norms (not merely a single
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norm), resulting in a whole structure of relations rather than just a sin-

gle relation. Institutions therefore constitute the social infrastructure
which orders the behaviour of relevant social actors (both individuals
and groups) and organises relations among them. Institutions may
either have been deliberately chosen (as in the case of laws) or have
emerged from interactions among persons without explicit design (as in
the case of social conventions) but they all have an impact on the distri-
bution of authority and influence in society. They both establish indi-
vidual and organisational centres of power and constrain the exercise of
that power. (Reshaping Australian Institutions, 1994)
This definition highlights the context in which practice occurs.

Although some contributors would argue with aspects of the defini-
tion, it suggests that action always occurs in a social infrastructure
which orders and organises behaviour, relationships, individuals and
groups, and power and authority. This social infrastructure is the
social, discursive and organisational medium in which practice occurs.
The definition also offers a way of understanding recent restructur-
ing in education and the radical role played by government. The logic
is simple. If, as the definition suggests, contexts shape behaviour and
its outcomes, then changing contexts will change practice. If preferred
changes in practice are identified, then the contextual levers that pro-
duce such change can be sought. And if these contextual levers can be
identified, they can be used to bring about changes in practice and to
re-engineer institutions, including government.
The great insight of radical reformist governments has been to
recognise that contextual changes have potent effects and that these
can be manipulated towards preferred ends. The great shortcoming of
recent governments has been their preoccupation with rational actor
theories of institutional change. Society has been reconceived as the
market in this process and individuals have been seen as self-seeking
actors who pursue their own interests as their primary (only) motiva-
tion. The result has been far-reaching institutional redesign which has
focused on the introduction of systems of ‘carrots and sticks’ in order
to engineer changed behaviour. But, as Saul (1997) argues, this narrow
view of the individual as an economic unit, divorced from its social
attachments and contexts, can result in a civilisation locked in the
embrace of corporatism.
The acceptance of corporatism causes us to deny and undermine the
legitimacy of the individual as citizen in a democracy. The result of such
denial is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-
interest and our denial of the public good. (Saul, 1997, p.2)
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This corporatised social organisation privileges particular groups and

vests authority in particular interests. Individuals’ primary loyalty
becomes tied, not to society or common humanity, but to their group
membership. Social action becomes oriented and organised relative to
these particular group interests, rather than to the common interests of
individuals living together on a small planet. As a result individuals
are formed as subjects who acquiesce to the dictates of particular
group interests. Decision making becomes a consequence of group
negotiation with individuals merely enacting functions within the
process.
This social organisation emerges as a stark contrast to societies
in which ultimate authority lies with the individual citizen (as a
social actor rather than an economic unit). Such social organisation is
not built on particular interests, but on the shared disinterest, of
individuals. Action is shaped by a commitment to put the common
interest before self-interest to regulate activity by the standards of the
public good. Institutional design is oriented not to the privileging of
self-interest but to the practical protection and encouragement of
disinterest.
The challenge is to promote concern with the provision of education
for our children. Today, the preoccupation is with providing education
for my children.
This book examines the changing social infrastructure of education
in order to identify the effects of recent reforms in both shaping indi-
vidual behaviour and the ongoing work of educating in Australia. Our
concern is not only to document the immediately identifiable out-
comes of reform, but also to see how changes in the framework of
institutional rules that shape education as both an institution and prac-
tice may play out in the longer term. No one can see the future, but
careful documentation coupled with analysis that seeks to identify
trends and understand processes of change from past, to present and
future, can offer tentative insights about our current pathway into the
future and its implications.
The authors represented here are all engaged in detailed empirical
and theoretical research that sheds light, in one way or another, on the
nature of education as a social institution and the processes through
which education has changed and is changing. They each approach
the analysis of education as a social institution from different intellec-
tual traditions but, by drawing on their disciplinary resources, they
provide a valuable range of commentaries that document and critique
the way education is being reorganised as a social institution and as a
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means of inducting new generations into the ways and wisdom of an

age. The chapters cluster around three major themes: reinventing gov-
ernment, redesigning education and rethinking the educationgovern-
ment nexus. These themes have been used to organise the chapters
into sections.
The two chapters in Section I: Reinventing government, focus on
the changing work of government in Australia and its linkages with
education. The first chapter, by Hunter and Meredyth, considers edu-
cation as an instrument of government. Hunter and Meredyth argue
that education has been institutionalised as a means of managing pop-
ulations by being oriented to the production of particular kinds of
individual selves. They analyse the emergence of the modern school at
the conjuncture of confessional communities and secular states. The
former reworked religious discipline pedagogically so that it operated
in the day-to-day lives of individuals and communities. The latter pur-
sued calculative bureaucratic strategies of population management in
the formation of secular states. The ongoing coincidence of these
dynamics shaped education as calculative bureaucratic technique that
deployed pastoral pedagogies in the production of moral self-
regulating individuals within secular societies. Marketisation and
devolution in education rework this technology of population man-
agement, liberating local forces relative to bureaucratic regulation and
reworking the secular settlement on which 20th Century Australian
education has been built. However, Hunter and Meredyth argue, the
current politics of education cannot be seen as a crisis. The current
debate in education is better seen as part of ongoing negotiations
about the contribution of education to the work of government: the
social organisation and ordering of local impulses, economic develop-
ments and civic responsibilities.
In Chapter 2, Gerald Burke examines the prevailing assumptions
about government in Australia. He shows that the reinvention of gov-
ernment in Australia, as in other parts of the Anglo-Saxon world, has
been informed by particular views about the state of the economy and
the way government best supports economic development. These
assumptions have shaped the work of government, particularly policy
development and resource allocation activities. The result has been an
increased emphasis on the contribution of education to economic
development and vocational preparation, alongside moves to cut pub-
lic expenditure and free up market mechanisms. Burke draws on sta-
tistical and trend data to show that recent criticisms of government are
not sustained by the data and yet rhetoric about the necessity of
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BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xix
governmental and educational reform has had significant resource

and educational effects.
Section II shifts attention from changes in government, to the
impact of recent reforms in education on processes of elite production
and class formation. The section begins with a chapter by Simon
Marginson which challenges the simple notion that competition is a
good thing. He suggests that competition is currently advocated as a
means of disciplining education providers so that they provide educa-
tional services that are of higher quality, cost-effective and responsive
to customer demand. But, he notes, education is a quasi-market and
does not conform to textbook models of markets. The economic com-
petition unleashed by marketising government reforms articulates
with market segmentation in education that has long been organised
on the basis of competition for positional goods. Students have always
competed for positional goods in education, for ‘good’ schools and
university places. The value of these goods depends upon their exclu-
sivity; the more there are, the less value they carry. The shift towards
market competition does not ‘introduce’ competition but further seg-
ments the educational market. Some providers compete for students
on the basis of their low cost and quality of provision. Other providers
are protected from such economic competition because they offer posi-
tional goods. They chose their students and are under no compulsion
to either restrict cost or lift quality. Their reputation, their brand name,
ensures market success. The contemporary reshaping of Australian
education is being played out between these different forms of com-
petition, as Marginson shows in relation to the market segmentation of
Australian universities. It exaggerates market stratification, differenti-
ates reform imperatives in different strata and reaffirms class, gender
and ethnic differentials in provider performance and educational out-
comes.
The notion of elite markets is also pursued by Peter Gronn, whose
chapter makes it clear that particular educational institutions have
long played an important part in elite formation. Gronn focuses on
education as an instrument for the development of capacity for social
leadership. He notes that, in the 20th Century, old models of social
leadership based on inherited privilege and class patronage were con-
tested on meritocratic grounds, fuelling the growth of both profes-
sionalism and managerialism. Now, market reforms privilege
managerialism relative to professionalism. Meritocracy is destabilised
and processes of institutional redesign are reshaping the processes of
elite formation and its composition. In this analysis, Gronn examines
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xx BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION
traditional and emerging processes of elite formation that operate

through schools and through management education. He draws atten-
tion to the long-standing class-biased nature of Australia’s elites and
the way elite recruitment is made even more selective as a result of
marketising reforms in education. While acknowledging that social
leadership is a necessary feature of modern societies, he warns of the
social and civic dangers which accompany skewed elite recruitment
and its dysfunctional consequences narrowness of vision, the emer-
gence of predatory elites and lack of trust.
The final of the three chapters in Section II, by Mark Western, draws
specifically on the previous two chapters. Western draws attention to
the relationships between education and class formation in Australia.
He uses Gronn’s work on historical elite formation, and Marginson’s
chapter on the effect of recent higher education policies on cementing
the relationship between social class and prestigious educational
access, to argue the centrality of educational institutions in shaping
social stratification. He maintains that the reconfiguration of education
provision as an education market is reconfirming class differentials
and creating increased emphasis on positional goods. Where class
relations had been de-emphasised and obscured by the myths and par-
tial practices of meritocracy, they are now starkly revealed. Western
comments on the implications of these developments for ongoing
processes of institutional change in Australia and for research in class
analysis.
Section III: Redesigning education, introduces three cases of
market-oriented educational designs being played out in specific edu-
cational contexts. First, in Chapter 6, the impact of marketisation in
school education is explored further by Kenway and Fitzclarence.
These authors examine the way education has been commodified as a
consequence of recent reforms, creating new imperatives for advertis-
ing schools and their products, and new articulations in the patterns of
consumption among students and parents. Drawing on ethnographic
data collected since 1992, Kenway and Fitzclarence draw attention to
the way students and their parents read the commodification patterns
within schools and inscribe themselves into schools’ commodification
practices. The analysis reveals the cultural micro-workings of marketi-
sation; the processes by which marketisation constructs differentiated
and stratified social spaces occupied by students, parents and schools,
and the cruel dilemmas students and parents face as they negotiate
these new consumer contexts.
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BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xxi
A particular historical experience of teachers in marketised contexts

is the focus of Chapter 7. Marjorie Theobald takes us back to Victoria
in the 1860s to show how decentralisation and marketised education
created distinctive patterns of opportunities and constraints for teach-
ers and principals in schools. Using archival records, Theobald intro-
duces us to a number of Victorian women teachers in order to show
how they constructed viable lives and livelihoods between the stric-
tures of the market, the local community and the family. Some of these
teachers became entrepreneurial stars on good incomes in this envi-
ronment, well able to tough out criticism and local politics because of
their networks and community standing, but many others faced limited
opportunities in both pay and teaching duties. This market environ-
ment came to an end in 1872 with legislation that instituted public
educational provision orchestrated through bureaucratic organisation.
Theobald shows how legislative and administrative decisions recon-
stituted the institutional rules which shaped teachers and their work,
closing off the spaces in which the entrepreneurial superstar could
work and encouraging a professionalised and public service teaching
force. The expansion of public educational provision increased the
demand for teachers, but the vision of a male-dominated teaching
force left women vulnerable to exploitation in the emerging bureau-
cratic arrangements. As Theobald argues, there are distinctive patterns
of winners and losers in both market and bureaucratic organisation
which are divided by the way gender norms and practices cut across
the institutions of state, market, education and family. The articula-
tions of education, family and market in the 1860s enabled some
female teachers to flourish. The shift from educational market to male-
dominated bureaucracy and profession re-gendered teachers and their
work by institutionalising inequalities through, for example, the mar-
riage bar for female teachers which persisted until the mid-20th Century.
The final chapter in Section III also examines the way teachers and
managers deal with the emerging educational market. Angus and
Seddon document the marketising trajectory in schools and Institutes
of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) in Victoria. Drawing on
interview data they show that the institutional redesign agendas of
government not only reshape teachers, managers and their work, but
also fuel bottom-up institutional redesign agendas as teachers and
managers enact, resist and rework changing institutional rules and
relationships through their day-to-day activities. They argue that the
scope for working in and against new institutional arrangements is
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xxii BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION
influenced by local factors and by the longer cultural and social tradi-
tions of each workplace and sector. In school education there was more
evidence of the reassertion of cultural myths about education, accom-
panied by grudging compliance to change, whereas in TAFE respons-
es to change were more pragmatic. There were advocates and resisters
but, in TAFE, we also found some of the most interesting and innova-
tive rethinking of educational practice.
Section IV steps back from the specifics of reinventing government
and redesigning education in order to offer more general commen-
taries on the changing nexus between government and education. The
final two chapters draw out key themes which emerged in the earlier
sections and consider their implications for the future. They speak
back to both the theorists of institutions and institutional redesign, and
to those who are engaged, top-down or bottom-up, in the practical
politics of reinstitutionalisation in Australia.
In Chapter 9, Anna Yeatman explores the contemporary politics of
institutional change in the longer history of democratisation. She
argues that the new contractualism that is emerging as the mechanism
for orchestrating relationships is being driven by a common impulse
towards individualised democratic governance. However, this
impulse is tensioned by different conceptions of the individual: the
sovereign individual versus the individual in relationships of many
kinds, not sovereign but embedded. The politics of institutional
redesign plays out between these different conceptions of the individ-
ual and of the social organisation presumed to drive them. It encour-
ages, on the one hand, trends towards neo-liberal postpatrimonial
governance and, on the other, the development of relational, postpat-
rimonial social democracy.
The final chapter explicitly looks to the future and to the feasibility
of a design of education that is different to that which is currently
being asserted. It argues that education and training are crucial to the
social and economic well-being of the entire community. As such, edu-
cation, educational governance and educational provision will neces-
sarily be important items on any political agenda, and governments
that cannot demonstrate that their policies have contributed to educa-
tional progress will always be vulnerable. It is through education and
training of various kinds that learners develop relevant capacities as
citizens, social practitioners and productive workers. Governments
cannot abolish responsibilities in these processes, regardless of how
the role of government is defined. It is a responsibility that must be
addressed by all members of society.
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Competent citizens
and limited truths
IAN HUNTER AND DENISE MEREDYTH
Australian education is said to be in crisis. The crisis is said to have

been precipitated by a series of developments in which economic
globalisation and the international trend to deregulation have
undermined the effectiveness of national economic governance and
eroded citizens’ claims on social welfare states. Public policy has
been overwhelmed, it is said, by a mixture of classical liberal polit-
ical philosophy and neo-liberal economic theories. National gov-
ernments are reducing public spending, deferring national
economic planning decisions to international markets, and devolv-
ing regulatory capacities to autonomous agencies and brokers
(Alford & O’Neill, 1994). In the educational domain these develop-
ments are seen as undoing decades of social democratic reform.
Whereas schooling was once oriented to the cultural development
of individuals and communities, students, families and employers
have now been reconceived as consumers who calculate a private
rate of return on educational risks and investment (see for example
Lingard et al., 1993a; Marginson, 1993).
There is no doubt that Australian education has undergone
major shifts in the past decade. Both Labor and Liberal–National
Coalition governments have been committed to reorienting educa-
tion to meet the needs of employers, labour market reform and
national industrial competitiveness. The main party platforms have
1
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2 BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION
a common emphasis on the need to use education to build a ‘national

skill pool’ and to compete internationally within ‘a global economy of
increasing technical sophistication’ (Kemp, 1996; cf. Dawkins &
Holding, 1987; Keating, 1994). In government, both Labor and
Coalition have ‘marketised’ education, encouraging educational insti-
tutions to orient themselves to students as customers and clients
(Marginson, 1997). Both have used tactics of privatisation and devolu-
tion, deferring educational planning to a constellation of institutions,
stakeholders and agencies.
The effects of this combination of deregulation and re-regulation
have been felt across each of the education and training sectors. In pri-
mary and secondary education, the policy emphasis on privatisation
and deregulation, and the use of financial incentives, have encouraged
migration from public into private schooling. Following the lead of
Victoria, State governments are encouraging competition in the public
sector as well as in the private. Planning capacities and responsibilities
have been devolved to schools, while ‘de-zoning’ policies have
required schools to gain student numbers through competition and
aggressive marketing (see Kenway & Fitzclarence, Chapter 6, this col-
lection). Consequently, schools are increasingly dependent on the
goodwill of both parents and corporate sponsors. Asked to be more
entrepreneurial, schools are more dependent on parents for voluntary
work, fundraising, expert advice and policy direction. They are corre-
spondingly less likely to orient themselves to the needs of underpriv-
ileged groups or to particular racial or ethnic communities
(Marginson, 1997). At the same time, with deregulation and the
increasing availability of government subsidies to private educational
initiatives, we are beginning to see the proliferation of small-scale par-
ticularist schooling. A variety of schools dedicated to specific ethnic,
religious and social cultures is sprouting in the cracks and fissures of
bureaucratic governance, with potentially divisive consequences for
the state’s civil culture and political order.
For many, these developments can be traced directly to a clash
between rival political and economic ideologies. Recently, critical soci-
ologists have extended their commentary on ‘economic rationalism’
(Pusey, 1991) to analysis of the combined forces of deregulation, glob-
alisation and new contractualism. This analysis combines empirical
exposé, epistemological dispute and dialectical hermeneutics. Often,
attempts to understand the role of neo-liberal economic theory in pub-
lic policy collapse into a series of exemplary normative contrasts
between the market and the community, the economic and the social,
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 3
COMPETENT CITIZENS AND LIMITED TRUTHS 3
the technical and the human (see comment in Miller & Rose, 1990;
Rose, 1995). Observation of the effects of internationalisation on
national economic planning become predictions of global change and
of the end-of-the-nation state. A certain eschatological uncertainty
appears as, with the predicted breakdown of state governance, we face
either wholesale human ruination or redemption through ‘global citi-
zenship’, popular sovereignty and active participation (cf. Turner,
1993; Kymlicka & Norman, 1994). For the redemptorists, participation
is seen as transformative and empowering, having the potential to
change individual self-interest into collective ideals and action (e.g.
Nielsen & Limerick, 1993). Civic participation is to be the answer to
consumer sovereignty.
In such scenarios, global change and local adaptations have made
the defence of centralised governance irrelevant to the new age of the
enterprising self and the self-governing entrepreneur. The rise of new
communitarian movements has made it possible to seek ‘a form of pol-
itics “beyond the State”, a politics of life, of ethics, which emphasises
the crucial political value of the mobilisation and shaping of individ-
ual capacities and conduct’ (Barry, Osborne & Rose, 1996, p.1; cf. Hirst
& Khilnani, 1996; Yeatman, 1994). The argument is a popular one
among intellectuals, and in many ways chimes with the dominant
theme of this collection. Nevertheless, recent analysis of the extent of
economic internationalisation suggests that it may be premature to rel-
egate the steering capacities of national state agencies to the historical
dustbin (Hirst & Thompson, 1996). Closer to home, it is also uncertain
that the power of neo-liberal economic theory has been sufficient to
cause the abdication of political governance in favour of the rule of the
market.
Given some uncertainty regarding the extent to which state agen-
cies have actually quit the field of social governance – or are perhaps
acting on it in new ways – it may be premature to place too much faith
in self-governing communities as alternative sources of civil adminis-
tration. There are, we suggest, two reasons for adopting a degree of
scepticism regarding the supposed capacity of neo-liberalism to
replace state administration of education with an archipelago of edu-
cational markets and private providers. First, neo-liberalism may itself
be a form of economic and social governance dependent in various
ways on the political and social infrastructure of the nation state.
Second, there are important features of education as a social institution
that can neither be conceptualised nor regulated via the language of
markets, consumption and consumer sovereignty.
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 4
Liberal government: less is more

To begin with, some phenomena taken as symptomatic of the push to
minimise government may not be what they seem. Rather than seeing
economic rationalism as the victory of market forces over government,
it might better be seen as the dominance of a specific form of govern-
ment: liberal government of the economy. Liberal government may be
taken as a sophisticated technology of government that operates
through the dual processes of the government withdrawing from
direct participation in a given activity while simultaneously tightening
the steering and information mechanisms responsible for regulating
that activity. ‘Economic rationalism’ is perhaps best seen as the ideol-
ogy of a movement dedicated to achieving a liberal governance of the
economy while more or less ignoring the tasks of government in other
(civil, social and political) domains. In the area of education this push
can be seen in the introduction of various kinds of market signalling,
budget cutting, the shifting of public funding from State to private
schooling, the introduction of more corporate forms of management,
and so on.
Despite their sometimes ideologically driven implementation, such
developments show the same combination of deregulation and re-
regulation that can be seen in other domains of liberal government.
Arguably, what has occurred over the past two decades is the estab-
lishment of a ‘government-made market’ in the governmental regula-
tion of private schooling and of the provision of privatised modes of
training (see Smith, 1993; Marginson, 1997). Across the education and
training sectors – public and private – government has created educa-
tional market places that provide students and parents with the means
in which to conduct themselves as conscientious consumers – con-
sumers with the capacity and the desire to choose (Smith, 1993, 1991).
These developments take place not in a ‘free market’, but as part of
governmental systems for allocating resources and for planning the
provision of educational services – a process entailing considerable
public regulation. Observing this makes it less easy to believe in the
demise of national governance and in the consequent rise, for good or
ill, of global and local communities.
The progressivist educational sociology of the 1970s and 1980s has
rendered academic educational discourse uniquely ill-equipped to
understand the mix of deregulation and re-regulation found in neo-
liberal programs. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, educational
sociology viewed the economy as a pre-political ‘material’ force acting
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 5
causally on the other social institutions, including education. The

resulting accounts of education took several forms, with some stress-
ing the role of pedagogical discipline in creating a factory-work disci-
plined labour force (Thompson, 1963); others targeting the role of a
‘competitive academic curriculum’ in systemically favouring the
social promotion of those with middle-class ‘cultural capital’ (Connell
et al., 1983; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977); and still others combining
these approaches in accounts of the role of the school discipline in
reproducing the repressed minds and divided capacities suited to the
capitalist division of labour (Bowles & Gintis, 1976). What these
accounts have in common, though, is the view that market capitalism,
left to its own devices, is capable of remoulding education and society
in accordance with economic needs and to the detriment of human
self-realisation.
Secondly, as a result of its dialectical structure – in which economic
determination is theoretically opposed by intellectual self-
determination – progressivist educational sociology had a radically
ambivalent view of the state. On the one hand, under conditions of
capitalist domination the state was seen as little more than the instru-
ment of the economy, translating its needs for trained workers and
docile populations into the reality of repressive schooling. Hence it
was widely held that the disciplinary relation between teacher and
student mimics and reproduces the repressive relation between the
middle and working classes (Bowles & Gintis, 1989). On the other
hand, because this economistic discipline was conceived as acting on
essentially self-determining individuals or communities, progressive
theory was committed to an ideal form of the state – one that would
democratically express the self-realising capacities of citizens
(Gutmann, 1987).
It is this dialectical oscillation between an actual state seen as the
instrument of a repressive economy and an ideal state seen as the
instrument of self-determining community that renders progressivism
incapable of understanding neo-liberal forms of governance. For it
means that the apparent withdrawal of the state from economic gov-
ernance is seen as the final pure form of economism as markets are
allowed to do their amoral worst; while hope is simultaneously invest-
ed in a return of the state in its ‘true’ form, as the executor of morally
self-governing communities. But this dual response is doubly unsatis-
factory: it underestimates the degree to which neo-liberalism involves
the governmental regulation of social markets; and it over-estimates
the degree to which communities are capable of conducting
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 6
themselves as ‘civil’ societies without the continuous administration

of governmental discipline.
Ironically, there are some points in common between these leftist
valorisations of community participation and the neo-conservative
advocates of choice. Each distrusts expertise, especially the expertise
concentrated within the bureaucracy. Each counterposes the technical
and expert elements of educational governance to an ideal, whether it
be that of the rational economic actor or that of the self-realising dem-
ocratic community. Our argument suggests, however, that the school
system can neither be explained nor reformed by appeal to a single
historical principle of intelligibility, whether that of rational economic
agency or democratic participation. Historically, mass education was
formed from more contingent ‘settlements’ between various groups
and interests. These continue to inform the school’s mixed ‘pastoral
bureaucratic’ accommodation of various purposes: social discipline
and self-realisation, national interest and community formation, civil
pacification and self-expression. Mass schooling has no single purpose
or organising principle, though it has incorporated definite institu-
tional commitments and capacities.
Instruments of government
We can begin with the critical counterposition between instrumental-
ism and human self-realisation – or, in its alternative formulation,
between expertise and democracy. How convincing is the argument
that education has been overtaken by a new instrumentalism? Surely
it is quite appropriate for policy analysts, economists and applied soci-
ologists to address the institutional redesign of the school system as an
a-historical technical problem. We should not be concerned if in doing
so they use an array of expert means – statistical survey, input-output
measures, economic modelling, rational-actor modelling – in order to
achieve various economic and managerial objectifications of the insti-
tutional field. Such objectifications – whether deployed via govern-
ment bureaus or private consultancy firms – are an integral part of the
monitoring, administration and reform of education. Without them
there would be no way of knowing where to build new schools; how
many teachers should be trained to staff them; what the economic
costs and benefits of schools might be; how they might best be admin-
istered or geared to their markets; and so on. For this reason it seems
a reasonable conjecture that these objectifications will be an indispen-
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 7
sable part of any large-scale education system, whether administered

by a ‘command state’ through an exhaustive bureaucratic apparatus;
by a ‘social democratic’ government presiding over a mix of State and
private subsystems; by a ‘minimal’ government seeking to amplify
‘market signals’ for private providers and consumers; or by ‘commu-
nal democratic’ government seeking to transform the school system
into the transparent instrument of the people’s self-realisation.
At the same time, it is not appropriate to address the institutional
design of schooling as a purely technical problem if one is attempting
to achieve an unimpassioned historical understanding of the institu-
tion. For, given this objective, it quickly becomes apparent that in
addressing institutional design in this way, policy analysts are them-
selves giving symptomatic expression to a specific historical way of
rendering schooling intelligible. This mode of intelligibility became
available to governments during the 18th and 19th centuries when the
increasingly systematic deployment of demographic and economic
statistics, in combination with ‘cameralistic’ social calculation, allowed
education to be conceived by relevantly trained experts as a problem
of ‘government’; that is, as a problem open to objectification from the
viewpoint of administrative calculation and manipulation. Despite
some significant differences, today’s modes of objectifying schooling
as an institutional sphere open to expert knowledge and technical
planning are the linear descendants of these earlier intellectual
technologies.
This observation is meant neither to question the objectivity of the
statistico-technical approach, nor to insist that it should always be
accompanied by a critical reflection on its historical conditions of pos-
sibility. On the contrary, we have already suggested that administra-
tive objectification will remain indispensable for all large-scale school
systems. Further, there is no reason to think that such expert-technical
knowledge will be functionally improved by the addition of critical or
historical reflection and, perhaps, some reason to suspect that it might
be impaired by it. Rather, our observation points towards the fact that
the technical-governmental objectification of schooling occurs within
certain limits; roughly, the limits imposed by the expert means that
allow schooling to appear as a quantifiable and technically manipula-
ble object. These limits though are set by the historical disposition of a
certain kind of expertise, rather than by epistemological reflection.
Identifying the limits of this expertise is thus not a prelude to tran-
scending it – in a self-reflective consciousness, waiting to ‘humanise’
it, or a self-governing community waiting to ‘democratise’ it.
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 8
Identifying its limits is instead a means of contextualising and plural-

ising expertise, through empirical-historical reflection on its circum-
stantial relation to other modes in which schooling has been rendered
intelligible.
Foremost among the latter is what might be called the moral-
philosophical intelligibility of schooling. If schooling’s technical-
governmental intelligibility is grounded in a certain administrative
milieu, then its moral-philosophical intelligibility emerges from the
milieu of modern pedagogy, whose core elements in fact derive from the
pastoral pedagogy of post-Reformation Christianity. It is this milieu that
gives rise to the understanding of schooling as the unfolding of latent
intellectual and moral capacities towards their ‘complete’ form in and
as the ‘person’; that is, in the unified form of self-reflective, self-deter-
mining being. Like the technical-governmental objectification, this
pedagogical ‘moralisation’ of schooling has its own irreducible reality.
It is the means by which the pastoral intellectuals organise the peda-
gogical disciplines and relationships of a specialised learning environ-
ment. This is a milieu in which students acquire knowledge via the
ritual of a hermeneutic recovery of latent capacities under the super-
vision of a teacher who combines discipline and personal care.1 This
does not mean though that schooling is insusceptible of ‘technical-
instrumental’ planning, by virtue of its morally self-realising end in
the person, or its historically self-realising end in the community.
These all-too-familiar views are symptomatic of the failure to realise
that the moral-philosophical intelligibility of education has its limits
too, in the pedagogical disciplines of the pastoral milieu.
We should not feel compelled therefore to take sides in arguments
over whether education can be rendered transparent to economic or
statist planning or, alternatively, remains opaque to such planning by
virtue of its ‘organic’ relation to personality or community. Nor should
we feel compelled to take sides in debates over the planable or unplan-
able character of schooling – over the alleged opposition between the
instrumental and the hermeneutic in education. Such arguments are in
fact the result of a misunderstanding that occurs at the borders of the
technical-administrative and moral-philosophical understandings of
schooling. They arise from the assumption that the school system is a
homogenous reality open to a single mode of intelligibility of one kind
or the other. We are suggesting, however, that the technical-
governmental and moral-philosophical views represent discrete
understandings of schooling. They arise from the different parts of the
system – the administrative and pedagogical – where each functions as
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 9
the ‘theory-program’ for organising a local functional milieu. Further,

while each theory-program is indispensable for the organisation of its
particular milieu – the bureau, the classroom – neither is capable of
achieving a detached understanding of the school as an institution.
This is because their role is to form intellectuals possessing the spe-
cialised capacities required by the milieus – the capacities for the
administrative objectification of schooling, and those associated with
the role of pastoral intellectual.
Our historical outline of the institutions of education must therefore
include a description of its different (administrative and pastoral)
forms of intelligibility. In developing this sketch we must be particu-
larly careful to avoid establishing a dialectical relation between these
forms – the dialectic of the instrumental and the normative, the tech-
nical and the hermeneutic. For such a dialectic treats the institution as
the point where the technical-administrative and the moral-philo-
sophical reach an ideal reconciliation, giving rise to scenarios in which
instrumental reason might be returned to self-realising consciousness,
and technical administration to self-determining community –
returned, that is, to the larger wholes from which they have suppos-
edly been alienated. But the technical-administrative and the moral-
philosophical are not parts of a larger whole represented by
self-reflective consciousness or a self-governing community. Rather,
they belong to irreducibly real and distinct historical milieus – the gov-
ernmental and the pastoral – which impose functionally allied but
intellectually incommensurate modes of intelligibility on schooling. It
is this combination of functional alliance and intellectual incommen-
surability that is central to understanding the school system as an
institutional order.
The historical ends of education

The institutional form of modern school systems emerged from the
unplanned convergence of two major historical developments in early
modern Europe: the ‘confessionalisation’ of populations by rival
Christian churches, and the state-building undertaken by territorial
monarchs and their court bureaucracies. Confessionalisation refers to
the pedagogical practices by which churches, beginning in the
16th Century, sought to make religious discipline operative at the level
of the daily life of whole communities (Schilling, 1988a, 1988b).
Central European state-building, which was occurring at the same
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 10
time, refers to the process by which princes began to carve out

independent territorial-administrative states from the tottering edifice
of the Holy Roman German Empire. The ground on which these inde-
pendent movements converged was that of the social disciplining of
populations (Oestreich, 1982). In transferring spiritual discipline into
everyday life, the confessionalising churches offered emergent territo-
rial states a powerful governmental instrument and, for their part,
these states offered the confessions political protection in troubled
times (Zeeden, 1985). That these developments occurred with greatest
intensity in the German states is reflected in the fact that prototypes of
the modern school system – that is, systems oriented to the pastoral
education of entire populations – first emerged there in the 17th
Century (Melton, 1988). Further, it was due to the peculiarity of its his-
torical emergence – in the unscripted exchange between Christian
confessionalisation and secular state-building – that this system devel-
oped as a distinctive hybrid of pastoral pedagogy and gov-
ernmental administration (Hunter, 1994).
The pastoral pedagogy of the new form of schooling is evident in
the schools built by the Pietists of Halle in the latter part of the 17th
Century. Emerging as a Lutheran ginger group in the wake of the
Thirty Years War, the Pietists represented a relatively late and
restrained stage of the process of confessionalisation – allowing for a
degree of separation between inward spiritual and outer civil duties.
Nonetheless, in addition to their cultivation of religious inwardness
they also practised an intense social activism, transforming Halle in a
burst of institution-building. This included a large orphanage, small
manufactories and a trading company associated with proselytising,
and a school system designed to cater for the entire population of the
city, which included elementary schools for the poor, a Latin school for
middle-class boys intended for university, and a Pedagogium or board-
ing school for upper-class boys (Hinrichs, 1971). It was not just the sys-
temic organisation of the Pietist schools that qualifies them as
‘modern’, but the form of pedagogical discipline they deployed.
Elaborated by A.H. Francke, the object of this discipline was to effect
the moral transformation of each child through a process that called
the ‘old self’ into question – via continuous supervision – and created
a ‘new self’, in the form of an inwardly concerned and self-directed
individual (Francke, 1885). The pedagogical arrangements supporting
this end – the exhaustive timetabling of the teaching day, the develop-
ment of standardised lessons and textbooks, the continuous surveil-
lance and periodic examination of the students – represented major
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 11
innovations whose derived forms remain at the pedagogical core of

the school system (Melton, 1988; Gawthrop, 1993, pp.150–75). They
emerged as a technical solution to the problem of how to take the
intimate relation of pastoral supervision – in which students learn to
attend to and shape their inner selves through their relation to a
morally concerned exemplar – and make it work in large teaching
institutions on lower-class children.
As far as the process of territorial state-building is concerned, two
aspects are of particular concern to us. First there is what has been
called the ‘governmentalising’ of the state (Gordon, 1991). This refers
to the breaking-up of administration into a series of linked domains –
territory, economy, population – each with its own particular end and
form of expertise. Seen first in the so-called ‘cameralist’ or Polizei
(police/policy) states of Germany, this process detached government
from the immediate interests of the prince and tied it to expert knowl-
edge of the domain to be governed. In the cameralist textbooks of the
17th and 18th centuries we find both the typological division of zones
of government – into finances and taxes; military governance; eco-
nomic development, social welfare and public order; trade and tariffs
– and the elaboration of the associated expert demographic, economic
and policy sciences (Polizeiwissenschaften) (Justi, 1782). This was
accompanied by the formation of a special stratum of cameralists or
bureaucrats whose ethos was governed by the provision of technical-
governmental advice in a given area, ideally, regardless of their per-
sonal moral views. It was in this context that mass schooling was first
brought within the domain of administrative intelligibility. Here it
appeared as a means of disciplining the population in accordance with
the social and economic interests of the state, which were in turn iden-
tified with the ‘happiness’ or social well-being of the people. And it
was in this context that demographic and economic discourses were
first applied to education, rendering it intelligible as a calculable and
manipulable sphere of government.
The second aspect of state-building of concern to us is the emer-
gence of a set of doctrines, of sovereignty and reason of state, whose
role was to separate the spheres of state and civil society. The initial
unplanned convergence of confessionalisation and state-building had
issued in the system ‘confessional states’ – an array of states in which
the dependence of political rule on mutually hostile confessions led to
an uncontrollable slide into religious civil war (Schilling, 1988b). In
reacting to this devastating occurrence, intellectuals and statesmen
began to elaborate doctrines aimed at ‘de-theologising’ politics by
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 12
quarantining the problem of political order from the domain of moral

community. These areas had been inseparable in the confessional
states, whose intellectuals saw politics and the state in terms of the
execution of the will of the moral community, giving rise to the first
popular sovereignty doctrines. Given that the moral community was
in fact the confessional community, these moral communitarian con-
ceptions of politics had in fact been part and parcel of the slide to reli-
gious civil war. Hence, in attacking the political communitarians,
statist intellectuals like Henning Arnisaeus elaborated doctrines in
which political order became its own end – an empirical domination to
be preserved through expert exercise of sovereign power regardless of
the religious or moral culture of the community or civitas (Dreitzel,
1970). It was this de-theologisation of politics that allowed statesmen
to view moral education in a purely secular manner – as a question of
‘political hygiene’ – hence to begin to deconfessionalise it.
Approaching education in this statist manner, Friedrich Wilhelm I of
Prussia could support the school-building initiatives of the Halle
Pietists at the expense of Lutheran orthodoxy and despite the ruling
house’s own commitment to Calvinism. In the Pietist division of inner
religion from outer public conduct, the king and his court bureaucrats
recognised a form of religious education that allowed significant space
for the formation of a purely civil regulation of conduct; that is, regu-
lation understood in terms of the preservation of external civil order
regardless of inner moral conviction.
Given this kind of emergence, we should be less surprised to find
that the modern school system is not a homogenous institution in
which a single set of norms gives rise to a group of social practices and
structures. The alliance of pastoral pedagogy and governmental
administration was reached neither through the adoption of common
norms, nor, for that matter, through a dialectical reconciliation of the
‘normative’ and the ‘instrumental’. Instead it was achieved through
the gradual and piecemeal elaboration of a modus vivendi that allowed
atheist governmental states to deploy Christian pastoral schooling by
encouraging its deconfessionalised civil forms. Needless to say, this
did not occur in England and Australia with the speed or statist elan
of Prussia, and there are many differences between the resulting
national school systems (Green, 1990). Nonetheless, the emergence of
school systems in all such societies is characterised by similar modus
vivendi reached between confessionalising churches and governmen-
talising states.
It is for this reason that the history of state schooling in Britain and
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 13
Australia is marked by the 19th Century struggle to arrive at a decon-

fessionalised pastoral pedagogy; the emergence of hybrid public-
private, state-religious systems; the continuation of confessional sys-
tems in the form of the Catholic parochial and Protestant private
schools; and the later efforts of the state to bring the heterogenous sys-
tems within a single field of calculation and planning through the
deployment of overarching monitoring and funding regimes. This his-
tory, which shapes our present thinking and circumstances with great
force, testifies to the fact that schooling is not a homogeneous institu-
tion based on a single normativity or social function. It must instead
be seen as an institutional hybrid, emerging from the governmental
deployment of a pastoral pedagogy and, as a result, harbouring diver-
gent ends and serving a variety of functions.
Education and community

This understanding of the school system’s institutional form has a
number of consequences for some of its economic and political theori-
sations. As noted above, marxian educationists have generally held
that the disciplinary relation between teacher and student mimics and
reproduces the repressive relation between the middle and working
classes (Bowles & Gintis, 1989). Those few who notice that pastoral
discipline is in fact designed to intensify the student’s capacity for self-
reflection and self-control, rather than repress it, explain the anomaly
away by treating this as the internalisation of repression in the form of
conscience (Johnson, 1976). By contrast, our history of the institutional
reality of the school suggests both empirical and methodological
grounds for political theorisation of the school in terms of the corre-
spondence or non-correspondence between its disciplinary and
administrative forms and the self-governing form of the democratic
community.
As a matter of historical fact, mass education did not originate in
democratic societies as the means of realising their capacities for polit-
ical self-governance. As we have seen, it emerged first in authoritarian
societies from the unscripted exchange between confessionalising
churches and governmentalising states. To the extent that schooling
between the 17th Century and late 19th Century was ‘community
based’, the communities in which it was based were confessional ones.
Left to their own devices, these communities were incapable of pro-
ducing the kind of education required by ‘liberal’ citizenship, because
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 14
they were incapable of separating civil discipline and social order from
spiritual discipline and moral zeal – that is, of separating the good cit-
izen from the good Christian or ‘man’. We have already noted that this
separation was made possible in part by the appearance of religions
that divided outer conduct from inner morality, and in part by the
political neutralisation of moral communities (civil society) achieved
by radical statism. This process was characterised by the shifting of
schooling from the political to the social sphere through its recon-
struction as a deconfessionalised civil-moral pedagogy. It was also
marked by the ‘authoritarian liberal’ protection of schooling from
direct political intervention, to the degree that it respected the border
between confessional moralisation and the civil education of tolerant
citizens.
Marxian and liberal theories that lament the gap between school
and community, public and private, as a ‘depoliticisation’ of social life
may be in danger of underestimating both the fragility of depoliticisa-
tion and the degree to which secular-civil citizenship depends on it.
That conjecture is at least worth consideration as we reflect on the exis-
tence of various kinds of community-based schooling: the Protestant
and Catholic schools of Northern Ireland; segregationist community
school boards in the southern USA; the rival Anglican and Dissenting
elementary schools of early 19th Century Britain; the Koranic schools
of Muslim fundamentalism; the biblicist schools of various Christian
sects.
There is no reason to think that the exercise of democratic citizen-
ship in a liberal state requires either democratic school discipline or
democratic educational administration. There is a sense in which the
goal of pastoral pedagogy is indeed the formation of self-reflective
self-governing individuals. It does not follow, however, that this ped-
agogy should or can be reflectively chosen and governed by the indi-
viduals it acts upon. In fact, there is a fundamental reason why it
cannot be: despite the fact that this pedagogy represents itself as
maieutically ‘educing’ them from pre-existing intellectual capacities, it
actually only teaches self-reflection and self-governance as particular
‘tasks of behaviour’ or conducts of the self. The condition of students
acquiring such conduct is their moral-disciplinary subordination to a
pastoral teacher, whose personification of love and surveillance is
internalised by the students in the form of self-concern and self-
restraint (Hunter, 1994, pp.49–58, 79–87). Hence, far from being an
obstacle to the conduct of tolerant self-controlled citizens, the non-
democratic discipline of pastoral pedagogy is one of its central conditions.
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 15
Similarly, while it is true that during the 19th Century the school
system added the grooming of democratic citizens to its long list of
objectives, this does not mean that the system itself should or can be
democratically administered. The reason for our scepticism here
should be clear enough: The administrative intelligibility of schooling
was the achievement not of ‘conscience and consciousness’, but of an
expert-technical objectification effected by intellectual technologies
housed, not in the community but in the bureau. There is little reason
to think that these intellectual techniques can be put at the disposal of
communities, nor, given the history of community-based schooling, is
there much incentive for thinking that they should be. They may, how-
ever, be distributed to a special group of parents going under the name
of the ‘school community’. Such a distribution does not signify the
partial expression (or partial betrayal) of the community’s irrepress-
ible desire for educational self-determination. Rather, it must be
understood in terms of the difficult and tenuous integration of limited
groups of activist-parents into the bureaucratic governance of the
school. To exemplify this, we turn now to the Australian context.
Australian settlements
Given the history we have sketched, it is possible that the current
devolution of educational administration to school communities may
jeopardise the civil-secular educational accommodation reached
between the state and the churches at the turn of this century. The
bureaucratic measures permitting this accommodation were the result
of the constitutional and religious settlements of the 1870s, which
established a bureaucratically registered teaching profession ordered
by centralist standards, inspection and statistical record keeping (see
Theobald, Chapter 7, this collection). Replacing systems of ‘local con-
trol’ (loose alliances between State government, private entrepreneurs,
parents and parochial boards) these measures introduced a system of
(notionally) ‘free, compulsory and secular’ elementary education sit-
ting alongside the confessionally specific schools of the Anglicans,
Catholics and Dissenters (Portus, 1937; Austin, 1961). These reforms
consolidated bureaucratic efforts to introduce systems of central
administration that could redress the perceived ignorance and apathy
of local control, and that could introduce the model of mass pastoral
schooling that had been developed in Britain from the 1840s (Turney,
1969, 1991). This model depended upon removing children from the
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 16
moral influence of the family and the street, enclosing them in the
reformatory playground and in the expert architecture of the class-
room (Jones & Williamson, 1979). In the State education systems, the
claims of local communities to educational control foundered in the
face of the expertise possessed by the new ‘pastoral bureaucrats’ – a
failure that was also to haunt denominational schooling until well into
this century (Smith, 1991).
The governmental management of educational markets and com-
munities consolidated as the State took on more direct responsibility
for post-elementary schooling. By the 1910s, direct State intervention
had extended elementary education and established arrangements in
which diverse forms of extended elementary, secondary and technical
schooling were shaped into the modern mould of mass secondary
education. The rationales supporting this extension are strikingly
familiar: bureaucrats referred to the new pressures of international
economic competition and to the need to make Australia industrially
competitive, while providing more choice and flexibility to a rapidly
expanding mass education population possessed of new political
rights and social expectations. The explicit aim of State planning was
to train workers suited to national needs, while providing a common
and minimum preparation for citizenship. This was to be rendered
capable of meeting the needs of a scattered and often isolated popula-
tion through the centralised bureaucratic provision of curriculum,
examinations and inspection.
The historical interpretation to which these developments were
subject in the 1970s and 1980s tends to draw on the familiar duality
between democratic values and instrumental calculation – between a
potentially democratic and organic school community and the ration-
alism of bureaucratic experts (Ely, 1978). Where bureaucratic reform-
ers were not treated as bearers of a secular liberal vision (Smith &
Spaull, 1925; Crane & Walker, 1957), or as liberals supporting illiberal
policies (Hyams & Bessant, 1972), they became representatives of
middle-class and patriarchal interests (Miller, 1986; Miller & Davey,
1990; Vick, 1990). Bureaucratic effort has been counterposed, in these
historiographic debates, to ‘the promise of a holistic, spiritually com-
mitted education, an active local educational culture, working-class
cultural traditions, and the unleashed resources of an educational mar-
ket place’ (Smith, 1990, p.68). However, these early administrators can
also be regarded as the inhabitants of a bureaucratic stratum, the
inheritors of two centuries of ‘pastoral bureaucratic’ educational gov-
ernance concerned both with fostering unique individuals and with
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 17
forming productive, healthy and moral populations. Our previous

historical discussion encourages us to see these negotiations as driven
by something far larger than the rival political philosophies that
accompanied them. From the perspective of our broader history they
appear as part of the political neutralisation of civil society. They have
their origins in governmental rationalities whose aim was to form
‘civil’ citizens and competent workers from confessionally divided
communities. Since this time, the school as a governmental system has
been charged, among other things, with ensuring that moral commu-
nities are not the only source of the future citizenry’s political affilia-
tion and civil conduct.
This responsibility was explicitly discussed at the time by pioneer-
ing educational bureaucrats such as Frank Tate and Peter Board,
Directors of Public Instruction in Victoria and New South Wales
respectively. According to Board, secondary schooling must combine
‘the preparation of the youth of the nation for the most efficient par-
ticipation in productive industry’ with the provision of a common gen-
eral education, sufficient to make future citizens moral and literate,
possessed of sound general knowledge and good civic habits.
Constructing new school systems adapted to industrial expansion and
an extended franchise demanded some sort of harmonisation of pri-
vate belief and civic duty, Christian doctrine and non-sectarian moral
formation. Schools were to be ‘the instruments for national purposes,
for the cultivation of individual productiveness and intelligent citi-
zenship, the training grounds for national defence, and the nurseries
of the nation’s morality’. Education, for Board, was ‘the unifying and
consolidating influence in a State, bringing about common standards
of honour and of conduct and common habits, so that the school of the
people is the birthplace of the national conscience’ (Board, 1910, pp.708−2).
Nevertheless, in the interests of maintaining civil peace, the State
set limits to its regulation of the ‘moral’. At the same time it sought to
forestall religious incursions into the still-fragile realm of civil society:
the unacceptability of direct teaching of sectarian doctrine had been
established by statutory provision in Queensland and New South
Wales, so as to prevent religious sectarianism and prohibit confessional
instruction in State schools. From their European heritage, however,
Australian school systems had to hand the means of forming a teach-
ing corps capable of indirect and non-coercive moral influence, within
the milieu of non-coercive moralisation and ‘supervised freedom’ that
constituted to basic pedagogical economy of mass schooling (Hunter,
1988). Accordingly, early twentieth-century models for moral forma-
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 18
tion and civic instruction relied on the teaching of literature and

history and on the effects of school ethos (Thomas, 1994a, 1994b;
Meredyth & Thomas, 1997). Civic textbooks used historical and liter-
ary lessons to emphasise practical civic and ethical capacities. Lessons
featured a combination of moral and physical training, shaping the
rounded ‘character’ through the pastoral technology of self-directed
play and practical activity. The common environment and ‘corporate
life’ of the school, as Board put it, was the main instrument in ‘the
development of the pupil into a citizen of the State’, making public
spirit and obligation to the community ‘habitual’, so that personal
ambitions could be directed to useful ends and national purposes
(Board, 1905, p.6). This was the contemporary form of the standing
accommodation between private morality and State schooling – one
that is still being negotiated today.
There were other aspects to these settlements between the bureau-
cratic governance of State schooling and the organised lobbies of reli-
gious communities and familial interests. Board and others were
seeking ways to manage the expectations of a population capable of
making demands on State education, both as citizens and as human
souls possessed of unlimited potential. Then, as now, the State school
system operated within patterns of inherited economic and cultural
privilege, while promising equality of opportunity. The hypocrisy or
confusion of those who made these promises has exercised contempo-
rary egalitarians, preoccupied with the effects of doctrines or ideolo-
gies. But while these early bureaucrats drew in different ways on the
resources of democratic and liberal philosophy, or developed enthusi-
asms for ‘mental science’ or child study, their strategies were more
consistent than their educational philosophies. The interests of the
nation-building state lay in identifying ability and in distributing
vocational outcomes and social rewards on the basis of that ability,
more or less independently of family background or expectations. Its
interests also lay in maintaining social cohesion, and therefore in man-
aging individual and familial ambition. The State’s concern in mass
secondary education, as Peter Board argued, was not to promote indi-
viduals’ aspirations for university entry and social mobility, but to
provide common civic preparation and fair vocational differentiation.
Students should be regarded as ‘contributors to the well-being of the
State as a State’, capable of pursuing their personal progress and free-
doms, but able to subordinate personal freedoms to the welfare of the
State. This combination, he noted had ‘produced the most stable and
contented communities’ (Board, 1905, p.6).
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 19
If we look past the ‘undemocratic’ elements of Board’s concerns

with State interest, we can see the process of social settlement at work.
Mass secondary education provided the means by which government
sought to defuse the unrest caused by the gap between the formal
political equality of enfranchised citizens and their unequal social and
economic resources (Marshall, 1963; Donzelot, 1988). On the one hand,
the routines of the classroom made it possible to enclose diverse social
groups within a common regimen of pedagogical exercise and testing,
thus providing a social laboratory capable of detaching educational
performance from familial background. On the other hand, educational
selection provided a means to link the family more closely to the gov-
ernmental norms of the school and its apparatus of psychological
counselling and guidance (Donzelot, 1979; Rose, 1990). The adminis-
trative promise of the school system (constantly challenged) has been
that the unequal social rewards distributed by the school system will
be allocated on the basis of educational performance within the com-
mon educational environment, as registered by disinterested pastoral
observation and publicly accountable testing and selection proce-
dures. The inherently contestable validity of these claims has depended
on the extent to which educational institutions are able to defuse the
tension between limitless familial and public expectations regarding
the social rewards of education and the limited capacities of govern-
ments to meet such expectations. Here educational selection has acted
as a crude pressure valve, allowing a limited release of the build-up of
social expectations through the common acceptance of educational
norms as the passage to vocational outcomes. However, it has also
provided the statistical machinery used to plot patterns of education-
al participation and outcomes, mapped against governmental norms
of equity and the regular distribution of life chances and social risk (cf.
Ewald 1991). Such calculations have depended on a centralised insti-
tutional capacity for intense individualisation, statistical normalisa-
tion, expert analysis and pastoral concern – a combined resource that,
so far, has been exclusive to the education bureaucracies.
The patchy and incomplete project of establishing common norms
and administrative dispensations within a secular State school system
entailed significant achievements. Not the least of these is the peaceful
accommodation of civil order, private beliefs and familial ambitions.
While these settlements will no doubt fall short of the emancipatory
ideals of democratic theory – owing little to the model of the self-
governing community – they form the background to important mod-
ern conceptions of social rights and the relations between states and
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 20
citizens of a modern democracy. If we are to mount effective responses

to doctrinal enthusiasms that undermine the long-term stability and
achievements of mass education, we will need to describe and defend
the social settlements embodied in the institutional organisation of the
school system.
Limited truths
No doubt there will be those to whom the preceding analysis will
seem, at best, antiquarian and, at worst, completely redundant in the
face of the apparent rush to dismantle government in favour of mar-
kets and to wind back the state in favour of private enterprise.
Centralist planning, coordination and resourcing are hardly political
priorities for the conservative parties, at least at the level of doctrine.
Under Labor, despite the perception that this government was domi-
nated by ‘economic rationalism’, the prevailing emphasis on national
economic competitiveness was accompanied by a strong statist pro-
gram of nation-building and institutional reform, connected to the
restructuring of social security, employment, training, credentialing
and labour relations. Such programs sought to promote ‘national
goals’ of economic development and industrial competitiveness, while
seeking to avert the social risks of long-term unemployment, welfare
dependency and disaffection (Meredyth, 1997). Under the
Liberal–National Coalition, the intrusiveness of big government is
being replaced by informed rational choice, personal interest and
responsiveness to the needs of the employment and training market
place (Kemp, 1996; Vanstone, 1996). Claims of consultation, choice and
flexibility abound, but the talk of commonality and centralised plan-
ning has been reduced to a murmur. There is little consideration of the
civil capacities required to exercise rights of choice, of government’s
responsibility to build such capacities, and of government’s duty to
ensure that such choices do not undermine longer-term systemic
objectives, whether those of national security and economic perform-
ance, or of social welfare and equity.
The ambiguities of the political rationality of ‘choice’ have become
clearer as the effects of deregulation and devolution are felt within the
school system. Once, activist educationists and teachers, equipped
with enlightened attitudes and advanced theoretical instruments,
could regard themselves as acting as agents of a popular political will
thwarted by the bureaucratic and technical aspects of the school. Anti-
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 21
bureaucratic sentiment could be regarded as reflecting collectivist and

egalitarian support for community-based participation. It could be
assumed that activist teachers and parents acted in alliance. Such
assumptions no longer hold. As others in this volume have shown,
parental and community groups are now capable of characterising the
‘progressive’ values of activist teachers as tendentious and sectarian,
while pursuing their own sectional interests.
The recent public debate on civic education is a case in point
(Meredyth & Thomas, 1996). Presented with proposals to institute
courses designed to provide a minimum of political education (Civics
Expert Group, 1994), commentators spiralled either into dystopian
pronouncements that education had been overtaken by reductionist
and instrumental conceptions of knowledge and of politics, or into
visionary expectations that the revival of civic education could trans-
form Australian political culture and rebuild civil society – if only the
curriculum was both socially critical and democratic (see Yates, 1995).
To be democratic, it was urged, the curriculum should be able to
express the authentic democratic commitments of the community,
which were taken to be vested in active citizenship, dialogue and tol-
erance (e.g. National Centre for Australian Studies, 1994). It was not
hard to locate these commitments, it was contended: community con-
sultation and ‘dialogue’ would give them voice (Horne, 1994). Since
community-based ‘core values’ were enlightened, it was urged, there
should be no problem teaching and assessing them within a core and
compulsory curriculum. Not surprisingly, it did not take long for
objections to arise from less ‘enlightened’ sections of the community
(e.g. Crittenden, 1995; Knox, 1995). There was little dispute that the
school system had a responsibility to form the ethical capacities of cit-
izens and to acquaint them with points of national moral and political
arguments, however contentious. But this was seen to be quite differ-
ent from the compulsory inculcation of values, especially where these
were likely to conflict with the various allegiances and commitments
to be expected in a multi-ethnic and multi-faith society (see Kymlicka,
1995; Hindess, 1993; Milner, 1993).
At such moments the normative and bureaucratic role of the school
system clashes with popular democracy, understood as the represen-
tation of moral community. Arguably, though, opening the school door
to marginal political and moral enthusiasts who speak in the voice
of the community may undermine the secular settlements on which
mass State education was established at the turn of the twentieth
century. The risks of founding the public governance of education in
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 22
communal will are starkly apparent at points such as this, where pri-
vate morality, partisan politics or religious doctrine threaten to over-
whelm the common forms of civil intercourse created by
bureaucratically uniform schooling. The social settlements informing
civil education will become more, not less, important if the trend to
privatisation and devolution continues.
Nevertheless, the civics example cannot be taken to demonstrate
that Australian education is ‘in crisis’. After all, it involves issues that
have been with us for at least a century: the place of moral doctrines
within secular State school systems; the links between bureaucratic
reform programs and organised community representation; and the
relationship between a professional teaching corps and the education-
ally concerned parent. None of these problems is a product of the mar-
ketisation of education – although deregulation and privatisation may
exacerbate them. Each problem area shows how messy the mixture of
regulation and self-management can be. Each has a history that indi-
cates the irreducibility of educational policy to matters of general prin-
ciple. This history shows the range of purposes served by school
systems, from state-building and industrial competition to the mainte-
nance of civil accords and social settlements.
Conclusion: the role of government in education

What are the implications of this history for current doctrinal enthusi-
asms for deregulation, choice and devolution? Are the governmental
settlements described above really irrelevant to a new marketised edu-
cation system, to new communities living under the star of global cit-
izenship?
Much depends on the status of the forms of national governance
whose history we have been reviewing. To end on a speculative note,
our framework suggests that there may be inescapable limits to the
push for small government. It may be that the attempt to steer the
entire system through economic governance may be self-limiting. By
this we mean that it may be impossible for states to neglect certain
non-economic ends of government – associated with the achievement
of basic civil and social education (‘socialisation’) – in the long run.
Some of the original tasks of mass education in securing a pacific and
governable citizenry may be incapable of ‘market’ formulation and
would seem to require the permanent and large-scale governmental
planning and funding. Even if education ministries continue to
Xch1E2 15/4/04 12:11 PM Page 23
devolve the administration of school systems, education will continue

to be attached to a technical infrastructure that will statistically regis-
ter phenomena such as educational attainment, vocational destination,
unemployment rates and living standards. Familial expectations and
electoral forces will maintain the pressure on governing parties to
demonstrate their grip on the technical and distributive functions of
education and training, and their competence in negotiating with pro-
fessional educational and industry groups. Competent government
cannot afford to divorce itself from the long-standing commitment to
monitor the distribution of educational participation and training out-
comes.
This means that, even if political parties are committed to freeing
themselves from the ‘shackles of the state’, government cannot afford
to dispense with the mechanisms that monitor standard of living and
educational attainment. The concept of the educational market or of
‘rational choice’ cannot do this work (even if it is deployed as if it
could), because such heuristics or predictive models do not do the
empirical work of data collection or analysis. Nor is there any point in
imagining that statistical indices could be transformed into the per-
sonal moral understandings of students and teachers. Democratic
political discourse and the technical vocabulary of bureaucratic plan-
ning and calculation belong to different domains of reasoning.
Nevertheless, the combination of socially and numerically normative
prescription that goes into the statistical monitoring of education sys-
tems is indispensable to political reform, ‘progressive’ or ‘conserva-
tive’. Such imperatives provide powerful – albeit morally
unfashionable – arguments for the role of government in education.
Notes
1. This is not to say of course that all teaching actually takes this form. The
model of pastoral maieutics is not the only one available for structuring the
teacher–student relation. The European grammar school is the source of a
different organisation in which the student enters into a less inward and
more imitative relation to a teacher whose role is to model the rhetorical
and ethical skills needed in public life. For its part, modern mathematics
and science teaching deploys the model of expert demonstration and train-
ing in technical procedures. Nonetheless, the model of pastoral supervision
is the dominant pedagogical form in the public school systems that
emerged from the 19th Century program to provide elementary education
to the lower classes.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 24
Education and economy:

a review of
main assertions
GERALD BURKE
This chapter provides an overview of the quantitative indicators of the

changes that occurred in education and training in Australia in the
1990s within a changing economic and policy context. The main policy
instruments used were:
• putting more publicly funded education and training into compet-
itive markets;
• expansion of charges in public education;
• increased public subsidy to fee-charging private institutions;
• mandating or exhorting increased expenditure by employers;
• restraining or cutting public funds;
• developing a new structure for vocational education and training
(VET) based on competencies and the recognition of training how-
ever acquired; and
• changing the management structure of public education.
The policy reforms can be seen to be directed at four main objectives:
• To increase the levels of investment in education and training, at
limited cost to government.
24
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 25
EDUCATION AND ECONOMY: A REVIEW OF MAIN ASSERTIONS 25
• To equip both young and older Australians to be flexible members

of the workforce.
• To achieve more equitable outcomes from education and training.
• To maximise the education and training outputs achieved from the
resources involved.
This chapter focuses on these four objectives and the extent to which
they were achieved.
Following is an overview of the economic and policy context with-
in which the supply of VET has changed. The questions that are
addressed are:
• Did investment in training increase?
• At what cost to government finance?
• Were Australians better equipped for work?
• Was equity in education and training improved?
• Was the education and training delivered more efficiently?
Economic and policy context

The reforms to vocational education and training over the last decade
were made in the context of an economy increasingly exposed to inter-
national pressures and with an agenda for economic reform that
stressed smaller government and the wider establishment of competi-
tive markets.
A major factor stimulating changes in education and training at the
beginning of the 1990s was the high level of unemployment and the
poor employment prospects for school leavers and low-skilled work-
ers. The importance of training and retraining the existing workforce,
including those at the operative level, was receiving increasing recog-
nition.
The training needs of the existing workforce were emphasised by
the changes occurring in the industrial and occupational structure. The
factors contributing to this were the reduction in protection, globalisa-
tion, new technologies and changes to management, work practices
and industrial relations. The majority of the Australian workforce had
no post-school qualifications and little formal training in the work-
place. Many had literacy skills that were inadequate for the new tasks.
Supervisors and managers were viewed as lacking the skills necessary
for the satisfactory performance of the new tasks confronting them.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 26
At the same time as the need for increased training was empha-
sised, economic reform required that public outlays be contained and
that publicly funded activities demonstrate increased efficiency and
responsiveness to client needs. The policy reforms to achieve this
include measures to introduce greater competitiveness among suppli-
ers, to reform regulation and management and to increase accounta-
bility requirements.
A growing share of public funds for education and training has
been made available for competition by the private sector. In universi-
ties, where the expansion in student numbers has been greatest, stu-
dents and their families have been required to bear an increasing share
of the costs.
Support for apprenticeship includes subsidies to employers.
Reforms to the support for apprenticeships in the 1990s shifted part of
the burden of cost to the trainee by allowing the wages of trainees to
apply only to time on the job and the development of the ‘training
wage’. Support has been provided for the organisation of Group
Training companies which employ and take responsibility for training
apprentices and trainees. By 1998, Group Training Companies
employed 14 per cent of all apprentices and trainees (NCVER, 1999a).
The latest development, ‘user choice’, introduced in 1998 allows the
employer and the trainee under the New Apprenticeship system to
choose the training organisation to be funded by government for
delivery or assessment of training.
The most intense pressures to adapt to the needs of the economy
have been felt in vocational education and training. Participation of
teenagers in VET had, on the data available, been low. VET courses
that incorporated work-based training were largely confined to tradi-
tional male-dominated occupations where employment was diminish-
ing. The challenge was to extend work-based training to other areas
and create combinations of on- and off-the-job and institutional train-
ing, including training in secondary schools. VET qualifications were
to be based on industry-determined competencies, however acquired.
An enhanced role for industry in vocational education and training
was sought, including in determining competency standards. National
Industry Training Boards have been given a major role in establishing
industry competency standards. A major development of the late
1990s is the development of ‘training packages’, which focus on units
of competency and modes of assessment.
At every level of education and training there has been a move to
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 27
devolve greater responsibility for finance and staffing to provider

institutions. There have, though, been considerable differences across
the States and sectors, with the greatest level of autonomy in the uni-
versity sector.
Did investment increase?

Enrolments
Table 2.1 shows the distribution and growth of student numbers across
the major sectors of the formal education system. This shows little
change in school enrolments in recent years. There has been substan-
tial growth in higher education and VET. School enrolments have
changed largely in line with population changes. Much of the growth
in higher education is due not to demographic factors but to increased
participation. The total population aged 15–29 fell slightly in the period
1990–98 whereas the numbers of higher education students rose near-
ly 40 per cent.
The changes in VET may not be as substantial as shown in Table 1,
due to the introduction of a new classification that substantially affects
comparisons over time. The introduction of a new statistical standard
from 1994 led to the reclassification as vocational of many courses pre-
viously regarded as ‘Recreational, Leisure and Personal Enrichment’.
Combining VET with the ‘Recreational, Leisure and Personal
Enrichment’ category indicates a growth in the 1990s of somewhat less
than for higher education.
Overall access to post-secondary education has increased substan-
tially. Table 2.2 gives an indication of the size of the increase in partic-
ipation rates in Australia. The participation of those aged 17–24 in the
formal education system has increased from around 40 per cent to
over 45 per cent in the 1990s. However, Table 2.2 also indicates that
most of the increase occurred by the early 1990s. The largest increase
in participation in the 1990s is in universities, among 20–24-year-olds.
However, the TAFE system is very important for older persons. About
10 per cent of the population aged 25–29 and 6 per cent of the popula-
tion aged 30–64 were enrolled in TAFE in 1997. The very rapid growth
in the population aged 45 and over now occurring suggests that the
role of TAFE may become even more important in the future.
Xch2E2
28
Table 2.1 Students in education and training, Australia, 1990, 1993, 1998 (’000)
15/4/04
School to School years Higher VET Recreational, Total VET & TOTAL
year 10 11 & 12 education leisure and recreational,
personal leisure and
enrichment personal
enrichment
12:12 PM
% Full-time 100% nearly 100% 59% approx. 15% 0%
1506 5033
Page 28
1990 2665 376 485 967 539
1993 2701 398 576 1121 661 1782 5456
1998 2808 391 672 1535 380 1915 5785
Apparent 5% 4% 39% 59% –30% 27% 15%

growth
BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION
1990–98
Source: ABS, Catalogue No. 4221.0, DETYA (1999d), NCVER (1999c) earlier publications
Notes: VET data relate to students in streams 2100 to 4500 enrolled at any time in the year.
A new system of VET data collection was introduced for 1994 with further changes in later years.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 29
Table 2.2 Education participation rates, Australia, 1990, 1992 and 1997
(per cent)
Age 7–14 15 16 17 18 19 20–24 25–29 30–64
1990 99 100 93 77 60 49 27 15 8
1992 99 99 95 84 66 54 31 16 9
1997 99 98 95 84 65 54 33 17 9
Source: DETYA (1999a)
Training in the workplace

The data in Table 2.1 apply only to the formal education system. ABS
survey data provide a broader insight into the extent to which struc-
tured training extends beyond the formal education system. The ABS
from its 1997 survey estimated that nearly 4 million persons had
undertaken a training course in the previous 12 months.
The estimated participation in in-house training (training mainly
attended by persons working for the same employer) fell in the early
1990s and had not recovered its 1989 level by 1997. A more optimistic
note is given by looking at external training (training mainly attended
by persons not working for the same employer and only partly
financed by employers). The percentage of wage and salary earners
reporting this form of training rose from 12 per cent in 1993 to 20 per
cent in 1997.
Other data from the surveys indicate a 30 per cent decline in hours
of in-house training per employee trained: from 52 hours in the 1989
survey to 38 in 1993 to 36 in 1997 (Wooden et al., 2000). However,
because there are nearly 4 million persons being trained, this is still a
very large activity. The total of training hours delivered appears to be
about two-thirds the size of that delivered by public VET providers.
Summing up enrolments and training numbers

Overall enrolments in both VET and university have been expanding
quite rapidly. On the other hand the amount of training provided in
the workplace declined in the early 1990s and had not recovered in the
mid to late 1990s.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 30
Cost to government
One of the major concerns in recent years has been to achieve the
expansion of education and training without excessively increasing
the burden on governments. Before reviewing outlays on education
and training in Australia there is some value in making comparisons
of outlays across OECD countries. These indicate that Australia does
not have a high level of public expenditure in general and only an
average level of public outlay on education. The message from this is
that while efforts to encourage private spending and efficiency in pub-
lic spending should be pursued there is no indication that the levels of
public spending in Australia are too high by world standards.
Table 2.3 shows the changes in total government outlays on all their
activities and education outlays in the 1990s. Government outlays
were about 35 per cent of GDP at both the beginning and end of the
period. During this time there was a shift in the composition of gov-
ernment outlays. Cash benefits grew as a percentage of GDP and inter-
est payments and capital expenditures declined. Education outlays fell
slightly as a percentage of government outlays.
Table 2.3 General government total outlays and outlays on education,

Australia 1990–91 and 1997–98
Approximate As % GDP Government As % GDP
total outlay on
government education
outlay $ billion
$ billion
1990–91 139.7 35% 18.4 4.6%

1997–98 200.9 35% 25.1 4.4%
Source: ABS Catalogue Nos 5510.0, 5204.0
There has been a sustained policy to contain public sector expenditure

for the last 20 years. Australia has managed to hold back the level of
public outlays despite increased demands for cash benefits caused by
an ageing population and a sustained high level of unemployment. A
range of measures has been taken to contain public expenditure for a
given level of service, to privatise services and to privatise a range of
government trading activities. This has noticeably reduced debt and
interest payments and shifted the payment for some activities to the
private sector.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 31
It can be noted that in the comparison to other OECD countries,

Australia has a relatively low level of government outlays. This is
illustrated in Figure 2.1.
Figure 1 70
60
50
% of GDP
40
30
20
10
0
ea
lia
US
UK
da
ce
en
an
nd
pa
an
tra
an
r
na
ed
Ko
la
Ja
al
s
Fr
Sw
Ca
er
Ze
er
Au
th
G
w
Ne
Ne
Source: OECD, 1999
e
Th
Only Korea is shown to have a lower rate of total outlay than
Australia. Table 2.4 provides comparisons with a range of OECD coun-
tries for educational outlays. Australia is further up the list: there are
several countries with lower public expenditure. It is notable that
Australia has a higher rate of private expenditure than the European
countries with high levels of public expenditure. Only Korea, US and
Japan have higher rates of private expenditure.
Table 2.4 Public and private educational expenditures as percentage of

GDP, selected OECD countries, 1990 and 1995
Public Private 1995 Total 1995 Total 1990
expenditure
and subsidies
1995
Japan 3.6 1.2 4.7 4.7

Korea 3.6 2.6 6.2 m
Italy 4.6 0.1 4.7 5.8
Australia 4.7 1.0 5.6 4.9
The Netherlands 4.8 0.1 5.0 m
USA 4.9 1.7 6.6 m
France 5.8 0.5 6.3 5.6
Canada 6.3 0.7 7.0 5.7
Denmark 6.6 0.5 7.1 6.4
Sweden 6.6 0.1 6.7 m
Unweighted average 5.2 0.9 6.0 5.5

Source: OECD, 1998 and 1999
m = missing data
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 32
Table 2.4 also shows that in several of the countries listed expenditures
on education had increased in the period 1990–95. In most cases this
means a growth in public expenditures. Australia’s private spending
has been growing relative to public outlays on education.
Australia’s expenditures
The expansion of post-secondary education and training in the 1990s
required either an increase in expenditure on education by govern-
ment, reduced expenditure per student; or an increase in private
spending.
A mixture of these has occurred, though it is not easy to document
the changes precisely. Table 2.5 summarises the changes in public and
private outlays on both public and private education. It shows a
decline in public expenditure as a proportion of GDP. There is a rise in
private expenditure, though the private expenditure (net of any subsi-
dies received from government such as grants to non-government
schools) is still only about 15 per cent of total outlays on education.
Table 2.5. Government and private expenditures and outlays on educa-

tion, Australia ($billion and % of GDP)
Net private Net private Gov’t outlay Gov’t outlay Total outlays
expenditure expenditure ($ billion) as % of GDP as % of GDP
not financed as % GDP
by
government:
$ billion
1989–90 na na 16.7 4.3% na
1992–93 3.0 0.7% 20.9 4.9% 5.6%
1997–98 4.6 0.8% 25.1 4.4% 5.2%
Source: ABS Catalogue No.5510.0 and unpublished data
The percentage of GDP devoted to education, which was at a histori-

cally low level in the late 1980s, rose in the early 1990s – at the same
time that enrolments were rising quickly. Another factor pushing up
expenditures in the early 1990s was a catch-up in teacher salaries,
which had lagged in the late 1980s.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 33
The share of the GDP being spent on education is affected by:

• change in the GDP;
• change in the actual resources of teachers and other inputs to edu-
cation and training; and
• change in the prices of those inputs relative to the overall price
level.
Real growth in the GDP has averaged 4 per cent per annum since
1992–93 or about 20 per cent in the period 1992–93 to 1997–98. In these
circumstances a declining share of GDP can still represent increased
resources. However, offsetting this is the change in relative prices. The
increase in prices in the GDP averaged only about 1.5 per cent per
annum, but teacher salaries and other appear to have increased at over
3 per cent per annum. Overall it looks as if there has been an increase
in resources of about 7 per cent over the period 1992–93 to 1997–98.
Sectors
Across the whole of education and training the average picture is of
resources expanding in line with student numbers and with a small
increase in the share borne by the private sector. However, the aver-
ages hide much more diversified changes across the sectors and States.
Before considering this, note the distribution of public outlays, includ-
ing student benefits, in the main sectors. About 60 per cent goes
towards schools, nearly 20 per cent towards universities and a little
over 10 per cent towards TAFE.
School expenditures
Much of the growth in school enrolments (shown in Table 2.6), and
therefore in expenditure, has occurred in ‘Other non-government’
schools, which are largely privately funded. The savings to govern-
ments are offset to some extent by the growth in government funding
of non-government schools in recent years. The documentation of this
is a matter of current study.
There has been an apparent growth in government recurrent fund-
ing of government schools. The nominal amount increased over 40 per
cent from 1989–90 to 1997–98. If we deflate by an index of school costs,
based mainly on teachers’ salaries, then the result is an increase in
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 34
Table 2.6 School enrolments by type of school, Australia, 1990 to 1998

(’000)
Government Non-government Total
Catholic Other non- Total non-

government government
1990 2193 596 252 848 3042

1998 2239 630 329 959 3199
Change 1990–98 2% 6% 30% 13% 5%
Source: ABS Catalogue No. 4221
resources of only 7 per cent over the period. This still exceeds the
increase in enrolments.
The approximations involved in the calculations mean that we can-
not be sure whether resources per student have really risen at all in
government schools. Other information, such as student:teacher
ratios, shown in Table 7, suggests they have not risen and may even
have fallen. The average ratio of students to teachers has risen from
15.0 to 15.3 in government schools and fallen in non-government
schools from 16.1 to 15.2.
Table 2.7 School students and teachers (’000), and student-to-teacher

ratio (STR), Australia, 1990 and 1998
Government Non-government All schools
Catholic Other non- Total

government
1990
Students 2193 596 252 848 3042
Teachers 146 34 18 53 199
STR 15.0 17.4 13.7 16.1 15.3
1998
Students 2239 630 329 959 3199
Teachers 146 38.0 25.0 63.0 209
STR 15.3 16.6 13.1 15.2 15.3
Source: ABS Catalogue No. 4221.0

Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 35
There is wide variation in the changes across States. Clearly there has
been an increase in expenditure in several States. However, there have
been marked reductions in Victoria and South Australia, which had
above average expenditures at the start of the decade.
VET revenue and expenditure

Changes in the nature of the VET sector and major changes in the data
collections mean that considerable courage is needed to make com-
parisons over time. The total government share of revenues is shown
to fall from 87 per cent to 82 per cent of the total. The share of public
funds coming from the Commonwealth increased markedly, with the
various growth funds in the 1990s up to 1997. The other notable
change is the growth in ‘fee-for-service’. There has not been a marked
change in student fees, as State authorities tend to cap the level of fees
at about $1 per contact hour.
As with schools, there are very marked differences across the States
in cost per hour of teaching delivered, which reflect differences in State
management, funding and staffing policies. These need to be explored
in detail and linked to measures of quality before conclusions can be
drawn as to the relative success of different State policies.
Higher education – expenditure per EFTSU

It is in higher education that the government has achieved the greatest
expansion in enrolments for a relatively small increase in its outlays.
This has been achieved through cutting real expenditures per student
and increasing the share of the cost borne by students.
The share of expenditure borne by students was affected mainly by
the decision in 1996 to increase substantially the level of HECS charges
for certain courses, to increase the rate of repayment and to reduce the
threshold income at which the repayments had to begin.
Total Commonwealth grants per planned EFTSU minus HECS
receipts in constant prices appeared to fall by 13 per cent in the period
1990–98. However, the real fall is much greater. Since 1996, the
Commonwealth has only partially adjusted its funding for price
increases in higher education. The Commonwealth Adjustment Factor
(CAF) reflects mainly movements in the Safety Net Adjustment deter-
mined by the Industrial Relations Commission: ‘The CAF does not
measure actual movements in higher education salary and non-salary
costs’ (DETYA, 1999c, p.208). University resources provided by the
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 36
Commonwealth may have declined in real terms at 2 to 3 per cent per

annum more than indicated in the official data.
Employer expenditure
One area of private expenditure did not expand as expected. Overall,
training expenditure as a percentage of wages fell in the early to mid-
1990s, a pattern also observed in the US (Thurow, 1999). This is com-
patible with the findings on decline in the amount of in-house training
discussed above.
Despite its sluggishness the size and pattern of this expenditure are
notable. In the last quarter of 1996 employer expenditure totalled nearly
$1.2 billion or nearly 1 per cent of GDP. Three-quarters of this expen-
diture are undertaken by firms with more than 100 employers. Most
large firms undertake expenditure on training. Only about half of
employers with 20–99 employees were undertaking training in 1996,
well down on the level of 1993 when the Training Guarantee Levy was
in force. Less than a fifth of small employers with fewer than 20
employees undertake training.
Expenditures – summing up
There was a shift from public to private spending on formal education.
The private share increased in higher education mainly because of
HECS. There was also a relative increase in enrolment in private fee-
paying primary and secondary schools. In VET, fee-for-service
increased, but fee paying by students appeared to remain about the
same percentage of revenue. The data available make it difficult to
conclude what the overall change in resources per student was in VET
and schools. There is an apparent decline in resources per student in
higher education.
Is the workforce better equipped?

A major thrust of reforms in the 1990s has been to make education and
training programs more relevant to the needs of clients, particularly to
industry. In part this thrust was supported by reforms to funding,
encouragement of a training market, reforms to the curriculum, recog-
nition of learning, assessment and qualifications framework
For those likely to enter the full-time labour force from school (still
about 50 per cent of an age cohort) two main reforms have been pro-
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 37
moted for schools. The first was the attempt to identify and incorpo-
rate in schools what were called ‘employment-related key competen-
cies’. The second was the extension of recognised vocational education
into schools.
Ensuring that young people acquired employment-related key
competencies was a major recommendation of the Finn Committee
(1991) and elaborated by the Mayer Committee (1992). The integration
of key competencies with the separately developed statements and
profiles in eight key learning areas has been piloted within the States.
It included information campaigns to teachers, parents and business.
Vocational education has been expanding rapidly in the final two
years of secondary schooling. By 1999, an estimated 30 per cent of stu-
dents in years 11 and 12 were taking programs including VET modules
and many are undertaking programs involving work placements (see
Chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of vocational programs in
schools).
In the VET sector a major reform was to base certification on
industry-determined competency standards. A vocational competency
comprises the specification of the knowledge and skill and its applica-
tion to the standard of performance required in employment within an
occupation or industry. A system of State and national industry train-
ing boards, with employer and union membership, advises on indus-
try standards across occupations covered by VET sector training.
The establishment of national standards has largely been achieved.
Industry competency standards define a ‘product’ and thus are impor-
tant in the development of a training market, but there has been criti-
cism of the effects of competency-based teaching and assessment. This
centres on the application of behaviourist approaches and neglect of
more holistic approaches to competencies. ‘Training packages’ focus-
ing on assessment procedures and units of competency to be achieved
are being introduced. A particular aim is to facilitate training in the
workplace.
There has been ongoing criticism of the operation of the framework
for the recognition of training. Attempts have been made to simplify
the processes for accrediting courses and recognising providers. Also,
industry training boards have had difficulty in carrying out some of
their roles, in particular the offering of advice on the quantity of train-
ing needed for particular industries (their role is reviewed by Wooden,
1998).
Similar reforms have not been extended to higher education.
Though competency standards have been developed for some profes-
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 38
sional groups (such as nurses), universities have remained in control

of their curricula. Various schemes of collaboration of universities and
industry have been supported and universities have actively sought
industry funds for courses, consultancies and research.
For schools and VET, as well as higher education, there has been a
move to increase the specification of outcomes, set out in profile agree-
ments, and devolution of the methods by which the outcomes are
reached. Profile agreements include the broad distribution of activi-
ties, quality assurance requirements and equity objectives. In universi-
ties, financial incentives were also provided to speed up the adoption
of quality assurance procedures. Performance indicators have been
developed in higher education and VET as a means of monitoring
provider performance.
In higher education, public funding is provided by the
Commonwealth, and the universities operate as autonomous institu-
tions in raising private revenue, in allocating their expenditures and in
making contracts in Australia and internationally. The TAFE institutes,
in some States, have been given almost similar autonomy, as the role of
the State authority has changed to one of purchasing training hours
from Recognised Training Organisations, rather than managing the
TAFE sector. At school level there is also a movement to greater auton-
omy in management of government schools, again with considerable
variation across States.
Since the mid-1980s there has been growth in the tendering out of
the provision of publicly funded training in VET. In its national strate-
gies, Australia National Training Authority (ANTA) has urged the
development of a market for training as a prime means of increasing
the responsiveness of VET providers to the needs of industry. It has
encouraged State and Territory authorities to increase the proportion
of Commonwealth funds allocated by open tender. In 1998, over $240
million was paid to VET for delivery to ‘non-TAFE providers’ such as
private providers, secondary schools and independent rural colleges
(NCVER, 1999d, p.14). For the year 2000, about $440 million or over 10
per cent of public VET funds are to be contestable by public and pri-
vate providers (ANTA, 1999b). The provision of training under
Commonwealth labour market programs from the mid–1980s was also
put to tender, though most of these programs were abolished by the
Howard Government after 1996. TAFE institutes have also been
encouraged to undertake fee-for-service activities.
Following a review of training reforms that advocated greater
emphasis to the demand side (Allen Consulting, 1994), ANTA funded
pilot projects for ‘user choice’ in training. This was the basis for the
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 39
provision of training under New Apprenticeships from the beginning

of 1998, and is discussed further in Chapter 3. A report to ANTA by
KPMG noted generally favourable responses to user choice from
employers, providers, apprentices and trainees though a number of
concerns such as increased paperwork were reported (ANTA, 1999c).
An investigation of the quality of traineeships in Queensland last year
resulted in strong criticism of the current modes of operation, particu-
larly of wholly on-the-job training and of the effects of user choice in
the mode introduced in Queensland (Schofield, 1999).
Qualifications
We do not have good measures of the skill levels of the workforce. One
inadequate proxy is the level of qualifications of the workforce.
Changes in the type of qualifications and in the data collections severely
affect our capacity to measure even this over time. Table 9 shows a
growth in the proportion of the labour force who hold a post-school
qualification from 46 per cent in 1993 to 50 per cent in 1999. The great-
est growth is in the proportion with degrees, not surprising given the
rapid growth in higher education enrolments since 1988. The apparent
sharp changes in the numbers with skilled vocational and basic voca-
tional qualifications may be the result in changes in methods of data
collection.
Table 2.9 Labour force aged 15–64 by highest level of qualification,

Australia, 1993, 1996 and 1999 (May `000)
1993 1996 1999
Degree or postgraduate 1059 12% 1359 15% 1670 18%

diploma
Undergraduate and
Associate diplomas 882 10% 891 10% 823 9%
Skilled vocational 1393 16% 1482 17% 1241 13%
Basic vocational 572 7% 595 7% 864 9%
With post-school 3906 46% 4326 48% 4599 50%

qualifications
Total labour force 8551 100% 8967 100% 9212 100%
Source: ABS Catalogue No. 6227.0

Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 40
Young entrants to the labour force

The proportion of 19-year-olds who have reached year 12, are still par-
ticipating in education and training or have completed some recog-
nised training was about 70 per cent in 1990. It had risen (mostly in the
early 1990s) to over 80 per cent by 1998 (ANTA, 1999a, Vol.3, p.21). The
proportion of 22-year-olds who have attained qualifications at AQF
level 3, or are pursuing education and training towards qualifications
of that level or a higher level, has risen from a little over 40 per cent to
55 per cent. These changes are in line with the changes in participation
noted earlier.
Apprentice and trainee numbers

One indicator of the success in equipping the workforce is the extent
to which specialist needs are met. About a third of school students in
the final years of schooling – around 130 000 students – now undertake
some VET studies in school (ANTA, 1999b), leading to at least some of
the competencies required for a VET certificate. There is some infor-
mation on the destinations of such students, but very little evaluation
of the effects of such training on employment and further training has
yet become available.
A major form of special training for young persons is the appren-
ticeship system, supplemented from the mid-1980s by traineeships.
Considerable attention has been given to the fall in trade apprentice-
ship numbers and their failure to rise again to the level of the 1980s.
The rise in traineeships, which can generally be completed in a year, is
not seen by critics as compensating for the decline in apprenticeships
in relation to the skill needs of the workforce.
Against this, it should be noted that employment in some industries
such as manufacturing, where apprenticeship has been common, has
declined. The fastest growth in employment has been in a range of
service industries where apprenticeship was not common in the past.
A further factor is the decline in full-time employment for young
people. The number of persons aged 15–24 in full-time employment
was about 25 per cent lower in 1999 than in 1990, whereas apprentice-
ship numbers were only about 20 per cent lower. Also, the age
range of apprentices has moved up – largely in line with the increased
retention to the end of school up to the early 1990s. However, it is
worth noting that for young males apprenticeship remains a very
important source of jobs and training. In 1990 about 21 per cent of
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 41
19-year-old males were apprentices. In 1999, the figure was about 18

per cent.
There has been a recent rapid rise in traineeship numbers. The
effects of this on the quality of the labour force are yet to be analysed.
Some traineeships are undertaken entirely on the job, and there are
complaints about the quality of training provided in some cases
(Schofield, 1999; Smith, 1999). Completion rates for traineeships have
been about 60 per cent, but in recent years have fallen to around 56 per
cent (DETYA, 1999e, p.1).
Apprenticeships and traineeships represent an important part of
VET. However, total clients in VET exceed 1.5 million. In the TAFE sys-
tem, apprentices and trainees make up about a third of clients aged
15–24, but only a tiny fraction of older enrolments (NCVER, 1999b).
Existing members of the labour force in employment or

changing employment
Australia has a high rate of participation in the formal education and
training system for older persons in comparison with selected OECD
countries. Australia is second only to Finland in the 20–29 age group,
heads the list for the 30–39 age group, and is second to the United
States for ages 40 and over. Most of the older students are in VET.
Australia’s performance is more modest when training in the work-
place is included in the comparisons. As already discussed, employer
training expenditure and provision tended to decline in the early
1990s. There is some indication though that training for older workers
in the workplace held up better than for younger workers in the 1990s
(Wooden et al., 2000).
Have more equitable training outcomes been

achieved?
The evidence on equity is mixed. Aggregate measures for target
groups tend to show some improvement over time until the early
1990s. However, a matter for further investigation is whether the com-
bination of several forms of disadvantage means that some subgroups
are in fact more disadvantaged than a decade ago. The cause of this
may not necessarily lie in the education and training system, but
rather in the structure of employment, income and families.
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 42
Young persons
All education sectors produce data to monitor the progress of desig-
nated target groups. School data are reported by MCEETYA (1999a),
university data by DETYA (1999b), and VET data by ANTA (1999a).
Reports are made by gender for:
• persons with language background other than English;
• Indigenous peoples;
• rural and isolated persons;
• persons with a disability; and
• persons of low socioeconomic background (data for schools and
universities).
There is little indication, in aggregate, of disadvantage by gender or
of disadvantage for those with a language background other than
English. There is strong evidence of continuing disadvantage for the
other groups. Indigenous persons appear to be well represented in
TAFE, though the types of courses and module completion rates
(ANTA, 1999a, p.67) indicate disadvantage. They are clearly under-
represented in the other sectors of the education and training system
in enrolment, attendance and completion.
Persons of low socioeconomic background have a lower rate of
school completion and participation in universities. Males from low
socioeconomic backgrounds suffered the largest fall in school comple-
tion rates in the years 1993–97 (MCEETYA, 1999a, p.94). Persons of low
socioeconomic status, who comprise 25 per cent of the population,
made up 15 per cent of all university students in 1991, but 14.5 per cent
in 1997 (DETYA, 1999b, p.57). Similar data for changes in VET are not
available due to changes in the data collection. Census data for 1996
indicate that persons of low socioeconomic status are clustered within
particular parts of major cities and country towns. There is indication
too that the disparities in economic and social disadvantage in society
are widening, so the education system may have greater problems to
address.
Persons from a rural background have a slightly lower rate of com-
pletion of schooling (Productivity Commission, 1999), but a noticeably
lower rate of participation in higher education. DETYA (1999b, p.58)
notes a decline in their rate of participation in universities in the 1990s
and a particularly low rate of participation of those from an isolated
background. On the other hand, participation in VET from persons in
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 43
these groups is somewhat above their share of the population (ANTA,

1999a, p.64).
Results from longitudinal surveys of young Australians show that
for the period from the early 1980s to the early 1990s:
• differences in completion of Year 12 associated with socioeconomic
status, region, and school type declined, but the advantages of
females and students from a non-English-speaking background
were at least maintained;
• the advantages in higher education participation of young people
from a higher socioeconomic background and from urban areas
were unchanged; advantages associated with a non-English-speak-
ing background and attendance at an independent school declined;
and advantages associated with being female increased;
• attendance at a non-apprenticeship TAFE course was the most
equitable form of educational participation in Australia. Young
people from a lower socioeconomic background, rural areas or who
had attended a government school were more likely to enrol in a
non-apprenticeship TAFE course. Compared with the early 1980s,
advantages that had favoured females disappeared by the mid-
1990s; advantages that had favoured students from a higher socio-
economic background were reversed; and the advantage of
students from rural areas increased. (Long et al., 1999)
Disadvantage among older persons

Much of the data on disadvantage relates to young persons. There is a
growing concern for the education and training needs of older persons
for economic and equity reasons. Older persons have been severely
affected by economic restructuring. The workforce participation rate
of adult males over 45 has fallen notably (though the participation rate
for females has risen).
It should also be remembered that the population is ageing and that
there are increasing numbers of older persons who may seek educa-
tion and training for economic or other reasons. The population aged
45–64 increased by 25 per cent in the period 1990–98 compared with an
overall growth in population of only 10 per cent.
Australia has a large number of adults with low levels of literacy
and skills, many of whom are very disadvantaged in the labour mar-
ket. Australia compares poorly with Sweden, Germany and The
Netherlands, though better than most other OECD countries for which
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 44
data are available in the proportion of the population at the lowest

level of assessed literacy. A higher proportion of older persons than of
younger persons have low levels of literacy: about 10 per cent of
15–24-year-olds in Australia are at level 1, over 20 per cent of those
aged 45–54 and well over 30 per cent those 55 and over (ABS
Catalogue No.4228.0).
Persons with low levels of literacy are not likely to receive compen-
sating education and training in the workplace. Those with high lev-
els of literacy are much more likely to receive training. Australia does
not appear to rank well in the international comparisons in this regard.
The fact that further education and training is concentrated not on
the least educated, but on the best educated is well documented across
countries. Australia’s performance appears about the average and cer-
tainly better than Switzerland and the US. Continuing education and
training is similarly linked to higher status and full-time employment.
Output of quality education and training per unit

of resources
The aim of the reforms in vocational education and training included
maximising the returns to government outlays on education and train-
ing; in other words, improving the efficiency of the system.
There are several aspects to this. Firstly, there is the quantitative
question. Have more students been given education or training for a
given outlay? As already discussed, this appears to be the case. The
data are most clear for government outlays in universities.
Secondly, there are questions of what the students have achieved.
One measure of this is completion rates at school, VET and university.
For schools, the usual measure has been the ‘Apparent retention rate
to year 12’, which rose rapidly until 1992, but subsequently declined.
It is, however, very difficult to isolate the influence of schools, as
changes in employment prospects seem to be a major influence on
school retention. Retention rates went up in the recession of the early
1990s and declined in the following years of economic recovery.
There is now annual reporting of the completion rate for modules
in VET, though not of completion of qualifications. There is good evi-
dence that a large proportion (perhaps 50 per cent) of students in the
VET system undertake modules successfully, but do not proceed to
complete a qualification (Foyster, Hon & Shah, 2000). Module comple-
tion rates in recent years have averaged about 80 per cent; and the
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 45
changes occurring do not appear substantial (ANTA, 1999a). At uni-

versity there is some indication of a recent rise in the proportion of stu-
dents who complete undergraduate degrees, though data on a
consistent basis over time have not been analysed.
There is relatively little variation among the States now in expendi-
ture per student in government school systems (MCEETYA, 1999b).
Universities are funded by the Commonwealth and (ignoring
research-related funding) their public funding for teaching per student
varies primarily according to course mix.
There is considerable variation across the States and Territories in
cost per annual hour of curriculum in VET. The factors underlying the
cost differences need further analysis. The lower costs in particular
States largely reflect the lower provision of public funds per student
contact hour. In Victoria the higher level of devolution of control of
TAFE institutes has allowed them to seek various forms of coping with
lower levels of funds. One major method of cost saving has been the
delivery of a greater proportion of teaching by casual or sessional staff
for whom the cost per hour of teaching delivered is lower than for a
full-time ongoing staff member (Malley et al., 1999).
There is little indication of differences in the quality of the training
delivered by high- and low-cost States (ANTA, 1999a). Indicators such
as module completion rates, student and employer satisfaction and
student destinations do not seem to vary consistently among high-
and low-cost States. That is not to say there are not differences in qual-
ity that may show up over a longer time span, just that the available
data do not indicate clear differences. The recent concerns about qual-
ity, leading to reviews in Queensland and Victoria, can be noted in this
regard.
The increased use of flexible delivery modes, including training
delivered in the workplace, has the potential to reduce the cost of
training, or at least the proportion of cost borne by government. ANTA
(1998b) has reviewed recent experience. A major finding is that train-
ing delivered by distance modes or in the workplace usually involves
considerable up-front fixed-cost outlay before any training is deliv-
ered. Unit operating costs of delivery may subsequently be lower than
in conventional classroom delivery. However, there is considerable
variation in the composition of costs and in who bears the cost bur-
dens in the various forms of delivery (Symmonds et al., 1999).
Very little attention has been given to capital costs in the delivery of
education and training, although some attention has been paid to cur-
rent practices in relation to governments’ varying roles as purchaser,
asset manager and service deliverer in VET and possible future
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 46
changes (Selby Smith & Selby Smith, 1997). It may be an opportune

time to undertake a careful analysis, especially as the introduction of
accrual accounting is now making the annual cost of capital more
transparent (e.g. NCVER, 1999d).
Conclusions
The supply of formal education and training has expanded in the
1990s, but most of the expansion in participation rates occurred in the
early 1990s. The increase in provision appears to have been handled by
shifting some of the costs to the private sector and reducing the unit
cost per student. This is most evident in higher education.
Employer provision of training has not kept pace with the training
in the formal education system. It is too early to tell if the development
of training packages is leading to a revival of employer training.
There is insufficient data over time to confirm that the reforms are
leading to more relevant education and training. The decline in
apprenticeships compared with the 1980s needs to be seen against the
changing structure of employment. Apprenticeships remain a robust
form of education and training for young males. Traineeships and
vocational programs in schools have expanded, but the long-term con-
sequences are not yet clear.
The conclusions on equity are limited. There does not appear to be
much improvement and in some cases it is possible that equity has
diminished. However, this may be due primarily to economic and
social forces outside the education and training system. Those who
suffer from multiple disadvantages appear to be cause for particular
concern.
Costs per student or trainee have been contained and, in some
areas, have fallen. On the face of it, this is a valuable achievement, but
the consequences for quality are not established clearly. New develop-
ments in flexible and workplace delivery may reduce costs – especially
recurrent costs – and shift the burden among the parties who con-
tribute to the total costs of vocational education and training.
There are a number of issues identified for further research:
• the costs and quality of new forms of organisation and delivery of
VET;
• the expenditure of education and training across the various sec-
tors;
Xch2E2 15/4/04 12:12 PM Page 47
• the costs of capital facilities in education and training and potential

efficiencies;
• analysis of the effects on equity of various forms of charges for edu-
cation and training;
• the methods of providing effective incentives and learning envi-
ronments to less advantaged youth and adults;
• effectiveness of various forms of stimulus to training by enterpris-
es; and
• analysis of the needs for teachers and the appropriate forms of
training.
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 48
Competition in Australian
higher education since
1987: intended and
unintended effects
SIMON MARGINSON
Commonwealth Government reforms of 1987–89 restructured

Australian higher education as a quasi-market with expanding zones
of commercial activity. It was expected that competition, by making
higher education more contestable and contested, would lead to
improved efficiency, customer responsiveness and innovation.
However, these imaginings did not consider the segmented or ‘posi-
tional’ (Hirsch, 1976) character of education. A culture of competition
was established, yet competitive pressures and the increasing reliance
on private funding tended to strengthen the dominance of the leading
institutions and forced a greater conformity with established models
of the good university. Ironically, in this environment the incentive to
improve customer responsiveness, efficiency and innovation has actu-
ally been reduced rather than enhanced. In the even more marketised
regime that was created by the reforms since 1996, the degree of pro-
tection afforded to the leading institutions was further increased.
Overall, in the 1987–97 period it appears that in the higher education
48
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 49
COMPETITION IN AUSTRALIAN HIGHER EDUCATION SINCE 1987 49
market the eight strongest universities (‘Sandstones’) were strength-

ened in relative terms, the four leading universities of technology
(‘Utechs’) moved up the hierarchy, but most of the other ten pre-1987
universities (‘Wannabee sandstones’) lost ground.
Competition reform
During the last decade in Australia, one of the purposes of govern-
ment-driven reforms in sectors such as education has been to install or
enhance relations of competition. Higher education serves many pur-
poses and houses many and contrasting forms of subjectivity. The
behaviours of people and institutions are not predestined to be com-
petitive, or, for that matter, ‘economic’. But in competition reform, the
market and competitive aspects of higher education are brought to the
forefront. Competition is seen both as an end that must always be
striven for and as an ever-existing natural state of affairs (‘human
nature’).
‘Competition is the key to improving performance, flexibility and
productivity across the economy’, states the Productivity Commission.
‘It provides enduring incentives for firms to lift their performance and
serve their customers well’ (PC, 1996, p.59). ‘Enhanced competition’ is
an unambiguous good, states the Hilmer report. It puts producers on
their mettle; it improves efficiency, productivity and service; it reduces
prices; and makes the economy competitive. All in all, ‘the committee
is satisfied that the general desirability of permitting competition ...
[is] so well established that those who wish to restrict or inhibit com-
petition should bear the burden of demonstrating why that is justified
in the public interest’ (Hilmer, 1993, pp.xv–xxxix, 1, 18 & 26).
In these statements competition is presented as an end in itself and
the creation of a culture of market competition becomes a fundamen-
tal objective of micro-economic reform in higher education.1
Competition is also justified with reference to external objectives.
Increased competition is meant to improve responsiveness, flexibility
and innovation; to increase the diversity of what is produced and can
be market-chosen; to enhance productive and/or allocative efficiency;
to improve the volume and quality of production; and to strengthen
accountability to student-customers, employer-customers and, where
competition is for government funding, governments. There are also
indirect objectives, such as fiscal reduction, creating university–
business links, internationalisation via international marketing and so
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 50
on. But it is this imagined line of causation from competition to con-

sumer sovereignty to better efficiency and quality that is the ideal at
the core of micro-economic reform in higher education.
The assumption behind this competitive strategy is that when higher
education becomes contested, rather than operating cartel-fashion, the
effect of market pressures on producer institutions will be to generate
the desired effects automatically. In all industries competition reform
is designed to increase contestability – the capacity for new producers
to enter the game, create new approaches and place more pressure on
the existing producers – by dismantling what the Hilmer committee
called the ‘excess power’ of certain existing producers (though it must
be stated that in the university context the definition of ‘excess’ has
never been clear). Thus, one key question in analysing the effects of
competition reform in higher education is whether the strong produc-
ers are contested by existing producers or by new producers and, if so,
whether they experience the pressures imagined by competition
reform.
Forms of market and competition

‘Marketisation’ is the introduction or extension of some or all the
forms of a competitive economic market. The main elements of eco-
nomic markets – whether in the private sector, public sector or both –
are as follows:
• a defined field of production units (in this case higher education)
coupled with defined producer units (universities);
• the production of scarce commodities (courses of study, degrees,
research) with potential exchange value for customers;
• monetary exchange between producer and consumer (fees);
• competition between producer institutions (in education there is
also competition between consumers, as is discussed below);
• contestability; that is, the capacity for new producers to enter the
market; and
• market subjectivities; that is, the attributes and behaviours needed
to succeed in production, consumption and exchange (Marginson,
1997b). Markets are ‘social settings that foster specific types of per-
sonal development and penalise others’ (Bowles, 1991, p.13).
All of these characteristics are necessary for fully developed eco-
nomic markets. Newly marketised services such as education usually
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 51
exhibit some market characteristics, but not all. ‘Quasi-market’

describes this intermediate zone. In a quasi-market in higher educa-
tion, for example, there might be competition between institutions,
corporate-style management and some commercial activity, but the
number of student places may be affected by factors other than supply
and demand (for example, public funding of tuition costs and the
planning of student load) and degrees and academic standards may
remain regulated by universities, public authorities or by custom and
decree. Most OECD higher education systems, the national training
market in Australia, and some State and Territory government school
systems in Australia, are now organised in the form of quasi-markets.2
The installation or the enhancement of quasi-market competition in
education is more than a merely economic move: it also has implica-
tions for the system of government-institution relations and the role of
education in distributing social rewards. For example, in the market
framework in contrast to a system of direct public service administra-
tion governments can steer education institutions from a distance by
setting the conditions within which the autonomous institutions must
compete with each other. The installation of a market also encourages
the development of market subjectivities, thus triggering an upward
spiral of market formation in which structure and agency, the structure
of market competition and the attitudes and values needed to make
competition work, tend to catalyse each other. Hayek, doyen of mar-
ket reformers, remarked that the introduction of relations of competi-
tion made it ‘necessary for people to act rationally in order to maintain
themselves. Competition is as much a method for breeding certain
types of mind as anything else’ (Hayek, 1979, pp.75–6).
The qualities that enable ‘competitiveness’ are unequally distrib-
uted. ‘Competitiveness rests not only on attitudes but on material
resources as well. Not all parties enter the contest with the attributes
needed to compete successfully, and the game of competition between
institutions (like the game of competition between individuals) has
implications for the hierarchical relations between them. The opera-
tions of any competition tend to favour the interests of some and harm
those of others. Nevertheless, competition also constitutes a post hoc
defence of hierarchical starting points and hierarchical outcomes.
Once competition is accepted as a fair and neutral process – as a signi-
fier of justice – the outcomes of competition are easier to defend than
are the seemingly more arbitrary and interest-ridden decisions of state
officials, representative assemblies, or professional educators. It seems
that this virtue of competition (if virtue it is) applies no matter how
unequal the starting relations between the parties to the contest.
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 52
All competitions share common features such as rivalry, combat,

rules of combat, and the rank ordering of outcomes. Most competi-
tions are also subject to a primary ordering of the outcomes which is
binary in character (win/lose). On the basis of these common features,
there are many kinds of competition. Competition can be more or less
intense or relentless in character. It can be more or less ‘pure’; that is,
it varies in the degree to which competitive behaviour is ‘uncontami-
nated’ by other purposes such as altruism or cooperation to achieve
common goals. It can be more or less ‘perfect’; that is, it varies in the
degree to which the competitive market is subject only to voluntaristic
choice making that is unconstrained by government intervention
(Waters, 1995, p.410).
Competition is not always associated with economic markets. All
economic markets involve actual or potential competition to some
degree, but the reverse is not the case. Competition played a role in
pedagogies and student ordering long before economic markets
entered education. Competition between students smoothed the way
for the extension of relations of competition to the organisational rela-
tionships in and between institutions. It provided training in the
attributes of mind necessary to sustain a more broad-based, more
intense and ‘purer’ struggle for supremacy.
Positional competition in education

Micro-economic reformers have not reckoned with one crucial feature
of education that has the potential to divert the objectives and out-
comes of competition reform. That feature is the positional character of
modern educational systems and institutions (Hirsch, 1976;
Marginson, 1997a, 1997b). Education produces positional goods. These
are status goods that tend to be largely monopolised by people from
social groups with the best capacity to compete for them. The effects of
competition reform in higher education are articulated with the
already established practices of positional competition.
In orthodox neo-classical economics, competition and monopoly
are seen as mutually exclusive. But in Competition, Auerbach (1988)
explains that, in the real world, this dichotomy breaks down. Modern
capitalist economies have seen both the extension and intensification
of competition, and the centralisation of capital through mergers and
the creation of oligopolies and monopolies. At times, strong producers
use reductions in competitive pressure to protect their interests. Yet
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 53
when competition becomes fierce, it is often again the strong players

who benefit. This general point about the co-existence of economic
competition and economic concentration has a special resonance in
education because of the role education plays as a producer of posi-
tional goods.
Positional goods include places in education that provide students
with relative advantage in the competition for jobs, income, social stand-
ing and prestige (Hirsch, 1976, pp.20–2). Education institutions and
systems select people for social positions, including the upper reaches
of the professions and management. Places in elite schools and sought-
after university faculties are the most desired form of positional good
because these places are associated with a high probability of career
success. Many other places in education confer more modest compet-
itive advantages. Whether positional goods add value to the social
advantages already possessed by elite students is something research
has not settled. However, the relationship between school and home
does not determine the value of positional goods as status goods.
What matters is that positional goods are generally seen to constitute
relative advantage for those who acquire them.
Positional goods have two unusual features that shape the charac-
ter of competition in education. First, positional goods are not only
scarce, like standard economic commodities, but they are scarce in the
absolute sense. The number of positions of social leadership is inher-
ently limited by factors outside the control of the education system.
When the size of the elite is limited, person A gains admission only at
the expense of persons B, C, D etc. This is a zero-sum competition.
Only certain places in education can provide superior opportunities,
or those opportunities would cease to be superior. Thus if the number
of high-status degrees in Medicine and Law increases, their average
value falls. Positional goods cannot be expanded infinitely to meet
demand, even high fee demand. Education is therefore as much a com-
petition between student consumers as between institutional produc-
ers. This is the second critical feature of positional goods. High value
positional goods are always sold in a sellers’ market. Markets in edu-
cation operate like markets in other positional goods, such as master-
pieces by a deceased artist or waterfront properties on Sydney
Harbour. As demand increases, the number of the goods is constant so
competition intensifies and prices rise, often spectacularly.
Positional competition is not about the intrinsic content of educa-
tion, but its symbolic value. The quality of teaching and learning is
incidental to this competition, except as a post hoc rationalisation of
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 54
elite placement. In most people’s eyes, educational ‘quality’ is deter-

mined by where the status goods are found, rather than status being
determined by the quality of education found there. ‘Quality’ educa-
tion tends to be uncritically associated with the leading schools and
university faculties, with sandstone and ivy, rather than with literacy
rates or student evaluation of teaching. This does not mean that elite
institutions do not provide good education. Rather, the point is that in
elite institutions good teaching and learning are produced not by com-
petition per se but by other factors, such as the concentration of private
resources and education competent families.
Positional goods are not the only social goods or individual attrib-
utes produced in education; far from it. But the more competitive edu-
cation becomes, the more it tends to be determined by the dynamics of
position. When the private cost of fees rises, families want to secure
maximum economic value, and in this context the goal of improved
learning achievement in itself (whereby everyone could be a winner)
becomes less important than it might otherwise have been. Instead,
where that learning takes place tends to become more important than
it might otherwise have been. The elite institutions become more
sought after and more elite, and attract a growing proportion of total
educational resources.
The theory of positional goods suggests that, if the competition is
directed towards the allocation of positional advantage, an increase in
the role and intensity of competition tends to weaken the extent to
which the strongest producers are contested, and thus also to weaken
the pressures on them for improved product, efficiency and consumer
response. As competitiveness is ratcheted upwards, the sellers’ market
is enhanced for producers at the top. The leading schools and univer-
sity faculties have long waiting lists. These institutions are able to
choose the student-consumer rather than allow the student to choose
them. They do not need to become cheaper, more efficient or more
responsive to gain support, and to expand would dilute their posi-
tional value. The waiting lists become longer. Excess demand for high-
value positional goods increases, but the top segment of the education
market is not contestable. Here the barrier is not economic so much as
social-cultural. New institutions might claim that they are genuine
elite producers, but such claims are unable to convince many people
no matter how good the marketing campaign. This is because there is
no room for growth in the size of the elite, except in the distant future;
and the already existing elite institutions block the entry of would-be
new elite producers. The existing elite institutions have established
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 55
their credentials in the long, slow accumulation of social investment,

reputation and cultural authority, and they are not about to vacate
their hard-won ground. Nor are people from the most powerful and
wealthy social groups and professions likely to welcome the devalua-
tion of their own educational credentials that have typically been
awarded by the long-standing elite institutions.
It is only at the bottom of an education market-system that compe-
tition operates as the textbook suggests. Institutions that have difficulty
filling their places are contestable, and tend to compete on the basis of
efficiency and consumer focus. They spend more on marketing than
successful institutions. Nonetheless, their efforts are constantly under-
mined by the preference of students to be associated with more presti-
gious competitors. Further, real improvements that non-elite
institutions might make in learning and efficiency will tend to be
under-recognised. However good the educational programs offered
by these institutions, they are constantly being stymied by the popular
consensus that institutions with low positional status do not provide a
good-quality education.
Thus educational competition is segmented. The vertical divisions
between the segments are maintained by the character of positional
goods. In the upper segment the market does not clear and is not con-
testable. The leading institutions are market immune. The laws of sup-
ply and demand do not operate. The lower segment is tied to low
positional value and low social support, with inevitable effects on the
potential for teaching, learning and research. Thus, when competitive
pressures are stepped up there is no necessary tendency to across-the-
board educational improvements. Adam Smith’s invisible hand does
not work. The benefits of market reform that were imagined by mar-
ket reformers ‘mysteriously’ fail to appear.
The unified national market

Before the formation of the quasi-markets in higher education and
training in 1987–89 by Labor Minister John Dawkins, positional com-
petition in Australian education took an economic market form only in
elite private schooling and commercial training. In universities there
was competition for status in research and professional courses, but
tuition was free except for international students. Student enrolment
numbers were set by government and public funding was distributed
pro rata on the basis of enrolments and discipline mix. It was assumed
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 56
that all universities (though not CAEs) were doctoral institutions of

world standard with comprehensive research profiles.
From the mid-1980s onwards there was a general international
movement towards a more American model of higher education based
on market competition between institutions, mixed public and private
funding of a mixed group of public and private institutions, and a de
facto ‘Ivy League’ group of elite institutions. All the features of this
model, except for government-supported private institutions
(Marginson, 1997c), were introduced by the Australian Government
into the pre-existing higher-education system, reshaping its form and
character. Here the outcomes of market reform were shaped not only
by the dynamics of market competition itself, but also by the circum-
stances in which competition was installed. On one hand, there was a
pre-given positional hierarchy between institutions. On the other
hand, the government introduced a range of competitive policies in
1987–92, such as 42 per cent enrolment growth, abolition of the dis-
tinction between universities and CAEs in the new Unified National
System, creation of 18 new universities alongside the 18 then existing
universities, decrease in per capita public funding, and corporatisation
of institutional management.
In forming a quasi-market by the early 1990s, the then Labor
Government translated the positional competition between individual
students – grounded as it was in an informal pecking order of courses
and institutions – into a formalised national economic-positional com-
petition between the universities. The Unified National System was
explicitly designed as a competitive market. ‘Institutions will be able
to compete for teaching and research resources on the basis of institu-
tional merit and capacity,’ stated the Government (Dawkins, 1988,
p.28). The Relative Funding Model used to distribute Commonwealth
funding was designed to establish a standardised funding base, ‘a
“level playing field” to allow institutions to compete on an equal basis’
(Milligan, 1990). Institutions were encouraged to sell courses to inter-
national and vocational postgraduate students, and to raise more
research funds from industry. Following the introduction of a visa
charge for international students in 1980, a $250 Higher Education
Administration Charge in 1987, and full-fee international marketing in
higher education in 1987, the commencement of the Higher Education
Contribution Scheme (HECS) at $1800 per full-time student was the
first universal charge at a substantial level. The HECS legitimised a
general ‘user pays’ regime. The mergers of 1988–90 led to a reforging
of institutional missions and structures, quickened the growth of com-
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 57
mercial activities, and encouraged a new group of entrepreneurial

managers to emerge.
The Government stimulated the development of a culture of com-
petition by increasing its own use of national competitive mechanisms
in research funding, and by creating special funds subject to competi-
tive tender for new initiatives and investigations and improved uni-
versity teaching.3 One-off initiatives such as the piloting of Open
Learning Australia were also subject to tender. The rank ordering of
institutions in the three rounds of quality assessment in 1993–95 made
official the practice of recognising a pecking order in higher education.
This further entrenched competitive behaviours.
The capacity to raise commercial income was more crucial to some
universities than others. The Australian National University enjoyed
such high public research funding that only 25 per cent of its 1993
income came from non-government sources, compared with 45 per
cent at Macquarie University. The older universities, with their posi-
tional standing and large alumni, raised additional non-commercial
private income in endowments and donations. Nevertheless, the pro-
portion of total funds that was subject to competition increased quickly.
Between 1983 and 1993 the government share of funding of higher
education fell from 91 to 60 per cent. The HECS provided 13 per cent
of income, and commercial fees more than 7 per cent, including almost
6 per cent from international marketing and 2 per cent from postgrad-
uate and upgrading courses. Adding industry investment, the strictly
commercial element was 10–12 per cent, and rising (DEET, 1996b).
Adding non-commercial research and special government funds, the
proportion of all income subject to direct competition was about 20 per
cent.
Effects of the Labor reforms

The Labor reforms to higher education were successful in establishing
a culture of competition (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Marginson &
Considine, 2000). While there was little evidence of consumer activism
– consistent with the weakness of consumer sovereignty in a positional
market – there was a pronounced increase in competitive producer
behaviours. Competitive behaviours were more pervasive than
were relations of economic exchange. Institutions had become defined
as self-supporting economic agents rather than as government-
dependent, but their evolution was only partly determined by
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 58
textbook economic logic. This was not just because reform had
stopped at creating a quasi-market rather than a fully-fledged
economic market. Even if higher education had been made a full-fee
economic market in 1987, positional factors would still have shaped
the character of that market, especially at the top of the hierarchy.
Within the quasi-market, in which non-market public funding
remained the largest element, the commercial markets in international
education, postgraduate and continuing education, and research and
consultancy operated as expanding ‘islands’ of capitalism. These
activities were mostly linked to global markets (international educa-
tion, postgraduate business training, research and development) that
had open-ended potential for growth and market share. Prices were
affected by supply and demand, and there was some market perfec-
tionalism and consumer sovereignty. Scarcity was economic, not
administered, being regulated by price. Indeed, in his study of com-
mercialisation in Australian science, Leslie (1993) finds that market
competition generated a ‘new ethos’ and ‘great excitement’ despite the
often low levels of income it generated. The new ethos was spread
through devolution reforms that allowed departments and centres to
retain part of the income they generated.
In certain respects these new commercial markets operated differ-
ently to the market in positional goods. The positional market was
largely national and State/Territory-based rather than global, though
a global market in postgraduate business training did emerge with a
limited number of strategic opportunities in the leading global corpo-
rations. The positional market was subject to absolute scarcity, where-
as the international market was expanding in an open-ended fashion
because of the qualitative increase in international education taking
place all over the world. Overall, the national positional dynamic
tended to dominate in Australian higher education. Despite the
emerging notion that they ought to become global universities, the
leading Australian institutions were still largely focused on the domes-
tic Australian population. In any case, as Leslie notes, most universi-
ties tend to be ‘prestige maximisers’ more than ‘profit maximisers’.
Indeed, one Australian vice-chancellor told Leslie that in relation to
market activity ‘it’s not the money, it’s to make your mark as a uni-
versity’.
While ‘revenue optimalisation’ in itself is one of the sources of pres-
tige, there are also potential goal conflicts between prestige and rev-
enues. Market-generated revenues are bled for ‘prestige maximising
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 59
ventures’ rather than ploughed back into the business (Leslie, 1993). In
the Unified National System, international marketing became the pri-
mary source of discretionary income, supporting non-commercial
activities through the funding of casual teaching, academic allowances
and new developments. Commercial research led to a shift in research
priorities, yet at the same time it was also used to support basic
research. Moreover, academic prestige provided universities with an
advantage in the commercial markets. Thus the traditional academic
activities and the newer commercial activities tended to feed each
other, though the relationship varied by university. Both sets of activi-
ties, academic and commercial, contributed to the status of institu-
tions. But this mix was unstable and, with the decline in public
funding per student after 1989, the importance of commercial practices
in generating university income was increasing.4
The heightened contest between universities for students and the
entry of 18 new players in the market might suggest that performance
pressures on the existing universities greatly increased. This reckons
without the primacy of positional factors in a segmented market, in
which the leading universities have been able to monopolise high
value education while protecting themselves from the sharp end of
competition. The formation of the Unified National System led to a
sorting-out period in which a new market segmentation was estab-
lished, but the position of the leading institutions has remained
unchanged and, except for one group, new institutions have remained
low in the pecking order.
Symes (1996) maps the ‘more aggressive promotional strategies’
introduced by institutions in the wake of the Dawkins reforms. There
were two imperatives: to position themselves in the mainstream, and
to differentiate themselves from each other. The new marketing strate-
gies, expressed in student prospectuses and advertising in newspa-
pers, magazines, television, cinemas, billboards and even buses and
trams, were ‘designed to create an unambiguous image profile of a
particular university … a brand name for its educational approach’.
Increasingly, university advertising provided less information to aid
student choices, and more statements about positional value. Some
institutions also began to claim that not only did they provide career
opportunities, but also their graduates had an advantage over gradu-
ates from elsewhere (Symes, 1996; Kenway et al., 1993). At the same
time, there were no prizes for being unique. The Government’s
requirement that comprehensive universities enrol at least 8000
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 60
students, coupled with the need for universities to compete success-

fully for students and corporate funds, forced a higher level of con-
formity then ever with the recognisable models of the good university.
Institutions have tended to define themselves within three seg-
ments that are rooted in the pre-1987 positional structure. The first seg-
ment includes the older ‘Sandstone’ universities in each State and the
Australian Capital Territory (Universities of Sydney, Melbourne,
Queensland, Adelaide, Western Australia), plus the first three modern
universities (NSW, Monash and the Australian National University)
which are similar in role. The University of Tasmania could be included
in this group as a weaker ‘Sandstone’. The Labor reforms had the effect
of forcing these universities to modernise their internal operations in
order to retain their existing position, but all did this to the degree nec-
essary except Sydney, which was perhaps so strongly placed that it
was able to forgo a thorough modernisation. The ‘Sandstones’ claim
leadership in research, the academic disciplines and professional train-
ing. Their marketing emphasises cloistered campuses and academic
values. The University of Melbourne’s motto is ‘More than a
“degree”’.
The other ten pre-1987 universities trail after the ‘Sandstone’ group.
This segment includes Macquarie, New England, Newcastle,
Wollongong, La Trobe, Deakin, Griffith, James Cook, Murdoch and
Flinders Universities. These can be designated the ‘Wannabee
Sandstones’. The ‘Wannabees’ drew back from a distinctive pitch of
their own, either individually or as a group. They make the same claim
to social prestige as the ‘Sandstones’, but with less plausibility and
conviction despite their academic achievements. Some had been
founded in a determination to be different to orthodox universities –
for example Murdoch, Griffith and La Trobe – but the competitive
national market has forced on them a new conformity to orthodox
models. It is not so much that competition has penalised institutional
innovation as that it values innovation only within the terms of the
market and penalises other forms. Competitive markets are not kind
to innovations from ‘left field’.
The third segment is the four strongest of the new Universities of
Technology that were based on the largest of the former CAEs: the
University of Technology in Sydney, the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology (RMIT) in Melbourne, Queensland UT, and Curtin UT in
Western Australia. These can be designated the ‘Utechs’. The
University of South Australia is marginal to this group: it faced certain
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 61
difficulties not shared by the others, partly because of the size of the
former teachers’ college activities that it has been required to absorb.
The ‘Utechs’ had existing strong reputations in business training, the
technologies, and applied research in industry. They now emphasise
their industrial and social relevance and the employability of their
graduates. Queensland UT’s slogan is ‘A university for the real world’.
The fourth segment is the other post-1987 universities: it includes
the Universities of Western Sydney, Charles Sturt, Southern Cross,
Victoria, Ballarat, Swinburne, Southern Queensland, Central
Queensland, Edith Cowan, Canberra, Northern Territory, Australian
Catholic University and Sunshine Coast University College. These
‘New Universities’ were founded from smaller CAEs and were not
able to compete on the basis of cloisters, research or large scale
employability. They emphasise access, teaching quality, customer
friendliness and regional factors. The University of Southern
Queensland calls itself ‘A university for students’ (Symes, 1996,
pp.137–8).
Table 3.1 Positional typology of Australian universities
Sandstones Utechs Wannabee New

Sandstones universities
(older pre-1987 unis*) (largest former CAEs) (other pre-1987 unis) (other post-1987 unis)
Sydney UT Sydney New England Western Sydney

NSW RMIT [Melbourne] Macquarie Charles Sturt
Melbourne Queensland UT Newcastle Southern Cross
Monash Curtin UT [Perth] Wollongong Victoria UT
Queensland Uni of South Australia La Trobe
Ballarat
Western Australia Deakin Swinburne UT
Adelaide Griffith Southern
Queensland
ANU [Canberra] James Cook Central Queensland
Tasmania Murdoch Sunshine Coast UC
Flinders Edith Cowan
Northern Territory
Canberra Australian
Catholic
*Excluding UNE which was founded in 1954, before Monash. However, in other respects it belongs
to the ‘Wannabees’.
Italics indicate an institution that is in some respects atypical of the group.
Xch3E2
62
Table 3.2 Competitive position, individual higher education institutions 1993/1995, five different measures
Enrolled Share of Research Income Fee-pay Entrants
15/4/04
University, and ranking in

first assessment by Quality students, research quantum per unit overseas in top
Assurance Committee 1995 spending, funding, stud. Load, students, quintile 1993c
(1994) 1993 1995b 1994/95 1995
# = pre-1987 university % $million $s %

12:18 PM
Australian National [1] # 10 150 11.5 n.a. 35 265 949 74.8

NSW [1] # 26 534 9.5 23.065 20 016 3594 31.6
Page 62
Melbourne [1] # 29 905 9.4 26.643 19 163 1725 47.3

Sydney [2] # 29 600 9.3 24.924 20 849 1667 36.3
Queensland [1] # 24 891 8.4 20.616 18 605 1233 74.5
Monash [2] # 38 998 7.2 17.235 15 902 4431 34.8
WA [1] # 12 516 5.4 13.112 17 901 1286 86.2
La Trobe [3] # 20 429 4.6 5.513 13 263 560 6.3
Adelaide [1] # 13 127 4.4 14.148 20 435 1002 61.4
Macquarie [4] # 17 370 3.9 5.544 11 992 1289 8.8
BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION
New England [5] # 13 815 2.9 4.822 15 366 477 0.5

Flinders [3] # 10 919 2.2 6.864 14 870 594 16.5
Griffith [3] # 18 135 2.1 3.040 13 262 1053 5.2
Tasmania [3] # 11 892 2.0 5.396 13 971 982 n.a.
Newcastle [5] # 17 047 1.8 5.390 13 443 623 5.7
Technology, Sydney [4] 20 706 1.1 2.250 11 312 7941 5.7
Murdoch [5] # 8128 1.4 3.393 14 094 8981 2.1
Xch3E2
15/4/04
Queensland UT[4] 27 097 1.7 2.668 11 313 1435 9.3

James Cook [5] # 7859 1.6 3.345 15 453 355 5.5
Wollongong [2] # 11 641 1.5 3.311 13 386 1539 0.2
Curtin UT [5] 20 104 1.3 3.663 12 992 3123 n.a.
12:18 PM
South Australia [5] 22 185 1.3 2.173 11 725 1118 22.2

RMIT [3] 25 669 1.2 3.490 12 054 4431 5.8
Victoria [6] 14 494 1.0 0.625 11 319 1700 0.5
Deakin [4] # 24 856 0.6 1.525 11 361 983 1.8
Page 63
Swinburne UT [6] 8919 0.5 0.711 10 917 867 1.3

Edith Cowan [6] 17 546 0.5 0.306 10 478 964 1.7
Western Sydney [6] 22 803 0.4 1.319 11 367 1540 1.2
Central Queensland [5] 8357 0.3 0.384 13 322 609 1.8
Canberra [5] 8477 0.2 0.522 11 131 663 25.2
Charles Sturt [5] 18 483 0.2 0.509 10 138 945 0.1
Northern Territory [6] 4132 0.1 0.812 21 808 110 n.a.
Ballarat [6] 4160 0.1 0.163 11 017 116 0.6
Australian Catholic [6] 8868 0.1 0.140 9470 174 n.a.
Southern Queensland [6] 13 692 0.1 0.325 9300 2024 3.7
other 0.0 0.000 169 —-
total 604 177 100.0 212.878 14 716 46 520 —-
a. Minor institutions excluded. b. Additional Commonwealth grants allocated according to the quantity and quality of research outputs. The ANU Institute of
Advanced Studies is not funded as elsewhere. c. commencing students only: universities where a high proportion of entrants are school leavers are advan-
COMPETITION IN AUSTRALIAN HIGHER EDUCATION SINCE 1987
taged by this measure.

Sources: DEET, 1994; 1995b; 1996a; 1996b
63
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 64
In one respect the formation of the Unified National System (UNS)

ensured that the market became more contestable. The four ‘Utechs’
have strengthened their role and moved above the pre-1987 universi-
ties that were outside the ‘Sandstone’ group. Even so, they form a divi-
sion of labour with the elite group. The ‘Utechs’ compete with the
‘Sandstones’ in some areas, such as Engineering, Business, Computing
and Communications, but overall the ‘Utechs’ are lesser players in
research and the non-vocational academic disciplines. They have no
presence in Medicine and are of marginal importance in Law. Overall,
the formalised competition has strengthened the relative position of
the ‘Sandstones’. Table 3.2 shows their continuing presence in research
and in attracting students in the top quintile.
Competition naturally favoured the institutions that had entered
the Unified National System with the capacity to compete. In 1988,
only ten universities had significant research libraries and nine had
two-thirds of all research students (Karmel, 1992). The former colleges
received some funds for research infrastructure, but otherwise
research grants have been distributed on the basis of quality of pro-
posal and track record. In 1992, 90 per cent of Australian Research
Council project funding went to pre-1987 universities. In 1993, the
ANU, NSW, Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland accounted for 48 per
cent of funded research activities as measured by the Commonwealth
(DEET, 1995a). Funding for research infrastructure and the research
quantum were linked to competitive research performance, which has
meant that success bred success and failure bred failure. Commercial
research has also gravitated to the most prestigious institutions. The
‘Sandstones’ have actually enjoyed a higher proportion of the com-
mercial research income than they did of the Commonwealth-
provided research income.
The Liberal-National Party reforms

The first Liberal-National Party Budget (Vanstone, 1996) changed the
settings of the quasi-market, with effects on both the character of com-
petition and the position of individual institutions. The economic mar-
ket aspect was enhanced. The slope of the hierarchy was steepened. It
appears that the relative position of the ‘Sandstones’ and ‘Utechs’
again improved.
This outcome was largely the result of three decisions. First, the
Liberal–National Government reduced operating grants and decided
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 65
not to supplement those grants for expected increases in salaries. The

result was an effective 12–15 per cent cut in public funding over
1997–99. Second, the level of the HECS was raised by 35–125 per cent
depending on field of study. In Law, Business, Arts and Social science,
the HECS was fixed at more than half average costs. The annual
income level at which compulsory HECS repayments begin was low-
ered from $28,495 to $20,701. These changes reduced the cost differ-
ences between the HECS and upfront fees, and provided stronger
economic disincentives to participation in higher education than had
previously existed. All else being equal, this was certain to lead to a
decline in potential demand for higher education and, if the decline
was large enough, in some institutions and some courses actual num-
bers would fall. Third, institutions were permitted to charge upfront
fees to up to 25 per cent of students in any course, in addition to the
fees already paid by international students.
These changes were bound to have differential effects on institu-
tions, depending on the segment of the market in which they were
located and on particular circumstances affecting them, such as their
course mixes, cost structures and the patterns of local demand. No
decline in demand occurred in the prestigious institutions, where in
most courses excess demand persists. Its impact has been felt dispro-
portionately in the New Universities, especially those subject to
regional demography. Further, income from fee-paying undergradu-
ates is now more likely to be concentrated in the two strongest groups
of institutions, and especially in the professional and business faculties
of the ‘Sandstones’. Universities that had difficulty filling their funded
student load quota have been effectively excluded from the market in
fee-based undergraduate education because the Government had
specified that any institution that offered fee-based places and failed to
reach its agreed level of government-funded student load would be
fined $9000 per fee-paying undergraduate.
In the current higher education market, the status effects and eco-
nomic effects tend to reinforce each other. The ‘Sandstones’ easily raise
the most dollars from private industry, and have the most postgradu-
ates, undergraduate fee-paying students, and alumni. The increase in
tuition charges now emphasises the positional differences, while
enhanced positional prestige further increases the ‘Sandstone’ share of
all forms of private income. First, direct fee charging for undergradu-
ates has created a new measure of elitism – the capacity to charge fees
in what is still a largely HECS-based system. Second, the increases in
HECS have forced students and their families to focus more closely on
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 66
maximising value for money. This has led to a ‘flight’ of students to

what are perceived as the stronger and safer choices. There were signs
of this happening as early as 1997. In Victoria, applications for the
University of Melbourne increased although overall State applications
dropped below the 1996 figure. Longer queues outside the
‘Sandstones’ could be expected to have feedback effects, which have
increased both their positional status and their capacity to raise private
monies. At the same time, in an environment in which public funding
is declining it is possible that in future some ‘Sandstones’ might divest
themselves of less prestigious courses and even sites that are heavily
dependent on public funding. The decision of the University of NSW
to divest itself of the St George campus is a case in point.
In the new market the ‘Utechs’ also gained for similar reasons. They
were already seen by many people as a superior vocational invest-
ment, and they have used their capacity to increase income from
industry, from international students (for example at RMIT), from
postgraduates (for example at UTS), and from alumni.
In contrast, the overall position of the ‘Wannabee’ group has deteri-
orated. They had been developed as comprehensive universities with
research and doctoral programs at world-class levels. This profile was
sustainable when universities were largely publicly funded on a com-
mon basis. But when direct fees charging and other private income
generation became important, relative status came into play and, all
else being equal, the number of high-quality high-prestige institutions
was bound to fall. Economic markets rank institutions in a hierarchy,
and concentrate wealth and high-quality goods on select groups of
producers and consumers. To enhance the economic market was to
enhance these effects. The pattern has not been uniform across the
‘Wannabee’ group. Some were better placed than others. For example,
Macquarie, Griffith and Flinders are very strong in certain areas of
research. Wollongong has developed an effective role in the commer-
cial markets. But some faced a protracted crisis of role. As for the
‘Sandstone’ group, those ‘Wannabees’ that had absorbed large CAE
populations often faced more difficulties than their compatriots. For
the group as a whole, their prospects of moving up the hierarchy and
entering the ‘Sandstone’ group are now less favourable than before –
not least because their capacity to build a reputation on the basis of
innovations in disciplines and university organisation has been cir-
cumscribed. Economic markets mostly support only those innovations
that generate direct returns, and tend to penalise bold innovations that
challenge the ‘Sandstone’ norms. This conservatising effect of markets
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 67
undermines the course of development followed by the more organi-

sationally creative ‘Wannabees’, notably Griffith and Murdoch and to
a lesser extent La Trobe, Deakin and James Cook.
In the post-1996 system, the ‘New Universities’ have been con-
firmed in their junior status, and in many, if not most, cases their rela-
tive position has deteriorated. These institutions have been
particularly hard hit by reductions in public funding because they had
not had sufficient time to establish student numbers, much less to con-
solidate their academic reputations. Few are likely to make much
money from undergraduate or postgraduate fees. Some will need to
work hard to maintain their university status by grounding them-
selves in their localities while incorporating aspects of TAFE provi-
sion, or by developing niche specialities.
Conclusion: consolidation at the top

The problems faced by the ‘Wannabees’ in the post-1996 market do not
derive from a decline in the quality of their teaching and/or research.
These problems are the consequence of heightened competition with-
in an already segmented market. By the same token – regardless of
their product quality, efficiency, or sensitivity to student-customers –
the competitive position of the ‘Sandstones’ and the ‘Utechs’ appears
to have improved simply as a result of system redesign. It is a striking
illustration of the manner in which intensified competition – rather
than placing the market leaders on notice and opening up the system
in a meritocratic fashion – leads to a ‘flight’ of students, money and
prestige to the top institutions. Because it is a zero-sum contest, these
institutions have been reinforced at the expense of other institutions,
their staff and their students.
The full evidence is yet to be gathered, but there is every sign that
market segmentation in higher education has become more deeply
entrenched. With direct fee charging of undergraduates, the leading
institutions are able to function in the manner of elite private schools
and cater to a similar financially selected clientele (See Gronn, Chapter 4,
this collection). In this context, price and status barriers coincide, and
the local ‘Ivy League’ becomes better protected from consumer sover-
eignty. The competition is also developing a global dimension, and it
is the ‘Sandstones’ and ‘Utechs’ that have the best prospects of becom-
ing global players, alone or in concert with other institutions. It has
become increasingly difficult for the newer universities to challenge
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 68
the top 12 institutions. In such a system the climate might be compet-

itive but the market leaders are relatively secure and the market in
high-value education is scarcely contestable.
Research has yet to determine the effects of reform on trends in effi-
ciency and consumer responsiveness. What this chapter has argued is
that improvements in productivity, efficiency and consumer respon-
siveness in the leading institutions are incidental to competition reform
– which suggests that any credit for such improvements should be
claimed, not by government, but by the institutions. While the spirit
and the mechanisms of competition have become entrenched, the
automatic effects intended by reform have not. At the bottom end of
the market, institutions find themselves cutting costs and marketing
harder, but this does not lead to any improvement in their status and
it probably takes place at the expense of teaching and learning quality.
What of the unintended outcomes of a decade of formal competi-
tion? The positional element has become more important than before
in determining the quality of education. The social position of the
leading universities is stronger, which pleases some and causes con-
cern to others. Despite the 18 new universities, with the significant
exception of the ‘Utechs’ the meritocratic element in institutional per-
formance is in decline. This parallels the history of competition in
American higher education where, despite the vast growth in that sys-
tem, there has been little change in the composition of the Ivy League
since the 1920s. These unintended outcomes are not incidental. They
are the direct and predictable result of the splicing together of positional
competition and market economy.
In sites other than education, market competition is welcomed by
liberals, but opposed by many conservatives because of the potential
of market relations to corrode tradition and property. There seems a
paradox here, for in education hyper-competition and market reform
tend to be strongly supported by most conservatives. But this support
is a paradox only if the outcomes of competition reform are seen as
unintended. For classical conservatives, the conservation of hierarchy
and social power are ends in themselves. This suggests that the para-
dox lies in the support of liberals and meritocrats for the competition
reform agenda.
Xch3E2 15/4/04 12:18 PM Page 69
Notes
1. It can be noted only in passing here that given the central role of higher
education in allocating social rewards and forming subjectivities, the move
to a competitive culture in the universities has immense long-term impli-
cations for all social relations (see Marginson, 1997b).
2. Niklasson (1996) defines quasi-markets in terms of the degree of govern-
ment intervention. By contrast in this article ‘quasi-market’ is understood
as an economic rather than political definition: it is simply a market that is
only partly formed. The problem created by Niklasson’s definition is that
governments may intervene even in fully developed capitalist economic
markets. (For more discussion see Marginson 1997b, ch.2 & 8.) In the real
world there is no such thing as perfect competition uncontaminated by sec-
ular influences (and if there has to be an imaginary utopia, it’s not clear
why anyone should prefer that one).
3. The Priority (Reserve) Fund, the Evaluations and Investigations Program,
the Commonwealth Staff Development Scheme, and grants from the
Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching.
4. If HECS payments are counted as private expenditure, between 1975–76
and 1992–93, government final consumption expenditure per unit of stu-
dent load fell by one-third (Marginson, 1997a, pp.218–20). The average stu-
dent:staff ratio deteriorated from 12:1 in 1987 to 18:1 in 1994 (ABS, 4224.0).
Universities had to strengthen activities capable of generating commercial
income, relative to activities that were not. ‘All production aimed at direct
use value decreases the number of those engaged in exchange, as well as
the sum of exchange values thrown into circulation,’ notes Marx. Hence the
tendency of capital to ‘continually enlarge the periphery of circulation’, and
to ‘transform it at all points into production spurred on by capital’ (Marx,
1973, p.408).
Xch4E2rev.qxd 15/4/04 12:19 PM Page 70
From lucky country to clever

country: leadership,
schooling and the formation
of Australian elites
PETER GRONN
Elites play an important social leadership role in the political, eco-

nomic and cultural sectors of a society. The focus of this discussion is
the emergence and consolidation of Australia’s meritocratic elite, and
the role played by schooling systems in the allocation and distribution
of elite membership. Meritocratic elites are defined by their member-
ships’ access to and control over the production and transmission of
specialised knowledge. In this chapter, studies of Australian elite for-
mation, recruitment and reproduction are reviewed and synthesised.
These sources highlight the dominant representation of two States
(New South Wales and Victoria) among key sectors of the national
elite, and the significance of a handful of prestigious non-government
and selective State high schools as nurseries of the meritocracy. The
discussion shows that residues of pre-meritocratic social norms (e.g.
family connections, social status and position) continue to be influen-
tial in securing elite membership. But with knowledge capital and new
leadership norms increasingly providing the standards by which elite
performance in a globalised world is judged, those schools which have
70
FROM LUCKY COUNTRY TO CLEVER COUNTRY 71
been able traditionally to guarantee admission and passage to desired

career locations continue to prosper. Emerging benchmark compar-
isons of national elite performance, however, highlight the inherent
danger and dysfunctional consequences of narrowly based elite mem-
bership, and caution against the reproduction of elites as concentra-
tions of closed, almost guild-like strata.
In explaining the meritocratic evolution of Australian sectoral elites
and the crucial role played by schooling, this chapter does three
things: Firstly, it synthesises recent research data on the educational
background of Australian elites. Secondly, it shows how educational
institutions have acted as nurseries of elite formation and as conveyor
belts for elite recruitment. Thirdly, it documents the historic emer-
gence of credentialing programs for managerial elites in key institu-
tional sectors and the recent emergence of desired prototypes of
leaders.
It is argued that during periods of economic restructuring and insti-
tutional redesign the process of elite formation – and therefore school
systems as moulders of elite dispositions – assumes increasing signif-
icance and warrants close scrutiny. This attention is justified because
the adequacy of – and the consequences of long-standing adherence to
– particular cultural values, and the connection between culture,
advantageous global market positioning and the performance of
national elites, have become the subjects of considerable interest
among commentators. Thus, in the UK the alleged adverse effects
of a post-imperial cultural and economic malaise – labelled ‘the
British disease’ – were fuelled by conservative elements of the political
establishment in the 1980s, and then used to justify the dismantling
of the welfare state (Cockett, 1995; Collins & Robbins, 1990). With
the emphasis on intensified international economic competitiveness,
the attempted re-shaping by elites of the collective consciousness of
recruited cohorts according to preferred styles and models can be
expected to increase. In Australia a portent of this trend is neatly cap-
tured by the symbol of the nation as a clever country.
The transition from feudalism to modernity and the era of nation-
state pre-eminence saw the emergence of three contending, super-
ordinate principles by which to politically regulate civil societies and
to institutionalise the allocation of valued but scarce economic
resources. These mechanisms – which succeeded inherited privilege
and class patronage (‘Old Corruption’) – were:
• collectivism, represented by varieties of public ownership, monop-
oly, distribution or regulation;
• markets, expressed in the reliance on private ownership, entrepre-

neurialism, contract and market forces of supply and demand to
regulate exchange; and
• professionalism, represented by the utilisation of knowledge and
technical expertise to solve social problems (Perkin, 1990).
Varieties of collectivism and market theories have constituted the
broad polar ideological underpinnings which defined and legitimised
political partisanship and conflict in nation-states, particularly in
regard to whether desired economic and social outcomes are best
delivered by government policies of intervention or deregulation.
Cutting across this cleavage, the rise of various professional strata
reflected the evolution of service-based economies, and the increasing
dependence of the wealth and prosperity of developed societies on
merit-based elites. Meritocratic professionalism found institutional
expression in public and private sector career hierarchies, and in
salaried and fee-for-service occupations. The 1980s, however, saw
the collapse of the broad Western political consensus that had lasted
nearly 50 years. The hallmark of this consensus was a reliance on
Keynesian-welfarist, demand-management intervention policies
(compared with command society statism) which was shattered by the
re-emergence of individualist, laissez-faire and economic rationalist
doctrines that privilege various forms of marketisation. A significant
element in this trend has been an increased emphasis on international
economic competitiveness as part of a globalised economy. A re-
assessment of the role of national sectoral elites and their contribution
to the relative international standing of competitor nations is currently
underway (Fukuyama, 1995; Perkin, 1996a, 1996b). Against this
broad canvas, then, this chapter considers the formation and composi-
tion of Australia’s elite and leadership strata, as the nation grapples
with institutional and sectoral redesign under the impress of market
principles.
Elites and elitism

An elite is an aggregation of strategically positioned, well-connected
and privileged individuals who have effective veto power and control
over institutionalised resources to an extent disproportionate to their
small, minority numerical size. Elites are located across a range of sec-
tors (e.g. corporate, human service, government) and at all levels (vil-
lage, neighbourhood, community, nation etc.). Elite rule ranges in

quality from benevolence to hegemony and tyranny, and is grounded
in combinations of political power, inherited wealth, social status,
expertise, psycho-personal resources or various forms of capital
(financial, social, cultural etc.). Effective elite rule depends on the
extent of intra-elite value consensus or dissensus, the nature of elite-
mass tutelage and the circumstances of elite evolution and consolida-
tion (e.g. revolution, coups, postcolonial struggles or
parliamentarism). A traditional, significant basis of elite power and
control has been knowledge. In England – generally acknowledged by
economic historians as the first modern nation – recognition of this
importance began with civil service reform in the 1850s. Reliance on
talent rather than social class or status of origin represents recruitment
by merit. To the extent that a society maximises the exploitation of sys-
tematically codified knowledge in its key sectors, relies on institution-
alised expertise in the form of career hierarchies, and employs
accompanying processes of remuneration and reward, then it may be
deemed a meritocratic society. The apotheosis of meritocratic elitism
occurs during the transition to a predominantly service-based economy.
Elitism is one form taken by ruling groups. The two most important
approaches to understanding the reproduction, circulation and trans-
formation of ruling groups have been class theory and elite theory.
Both approaches have been invoked to account for the emergence of,
and shape assumed by, national and subnational institutional power
and leadership structures. Elite theory has had a chequered history:
explanations of institutional power and status have surfaced, disap-
peared, resurfaced and then disappeared again, and have not been
subjected to the kind of progressive elaboration, refinement and
sophistication that has typified class theory. This irregular develop-
ment is partly due to the historically close association between nor-
mative elite theories and neo-elitist understandings of democracy.
That is, revisionist, neo-elitist, Schumpeterian-style political theories
have been juxtaposed to rival classical or traditional democratic theo-
ries and cast by proponents of the latter as legitimising oligarchic ten-
dencies within modern democratic regimes. However, some
commentators (e.g. Wintrop, 1992) have argued that democratic and
elite theory is not inherently antagonistic.
Few other ideas in social and political theory so readily coalesce or
collapse normative (or prescriptive) and empirical (or descriptive) lev-
els of understanding as does elite theory. This tendency occurs because
to describe a national systemic or sectoral elite is to be readily drawn
into wider concerns about elite function and purpose. One preoccupa-
tion of Cold War era, end-of-ideology theorists, for example, was to try
to ascertain the necessary and sufficient conditions for the stability and
persistence of democratic regimes, and the role played by (either
monolithic unitary or competing plural) elites in the maintenance of
that stability. The recent post-Communist, neo-Hegelian end-of-
history thesis (Fukuyama, 1992) expresses similar concerns about
stability and elitism – particularly the relationship of elites to civil
society and the state, and their normative contribution to national
integration and competitive international advantage (Fukuyama,
1995). Indeed, the overriding normative agenda of contemporary elite
theorists is a historicist concern with democratisation – that is, with as
wide, speedy and painless an evolution and diffusion of democratic
norms, institutions and values beyond the Anglo-European–North
American theatre as possible. A variety of strategies to resolve intra-
elite power struggles (e.g. elite contestation, consolidation and settle-
ments) and to assist mass political participation (e.g. autonomous elite
plurality to countervail government power) has been identified by
elite theorists (e.g. Cammack, 1990; Etzioni-Halevy, 1993). Such factors
tend to be cited by proponents as either barriers or bridges in an
inevitable transition from command regimes (Eastern Europe) and
authoritarian regimes (East Asia) towards full democratic nationhood.
An important but neglected dimension of elite theory is formation:
the socialisation role played by formative agencies – especially schools
– in moulding the collective consciousness of various leadership and
elite sectors. Within elite theory, formation is typically subsumed
under elite recruitment but it merits separate treatment. Concentration
on the recruitment mechanisms thought to be essential to the attain-
ment of elite positions (Pakulski, 1982, p.21), for example, leaves the
dynamics of formative institutional preparation undisclosed. Yet,
given the increasing propensity of political regimes and sectoral agen-
cies to emphasise the role of preferred leader prototypes in the deliv-
ery of desired economic outcomes (see below), this neglect of
formation represents a significant knowledge lacuna.
The traditional leadership of Australian elites

One of the earliest appraisals of the quality of Australia’s elites was
Horne’s (1964) The Lucky Country. Published during the unparalleled
affluence of the ‘Ming Dynasty’ (the Menzies era) – the halcyon years
for Western political elites (Field & Higley, 1986) – Horne argued that,
despite its overall prosperity, such character traits as lethargy and
complacency pervaded the outlook of those who had headed
Australia’s key social institutions during the period of European set-
tlement. Australia’s manufacturing leadership, for example, lacked
enterprise and resisted the need for training (Horne, 1964, p.129–30).
Likewise, federal civil servants, Horne (pp.165, 166) thought, com-
prised conservative, orthodox men ‘self-taught in practicality’ and
over-concerned with ‘the subtleties of administrative finesse’. The
Treasury, in particular, although highly qualified and responsible, was
‘cautious and conventional, Canberra-proud, academic [and] remote’
in style. Horne (p.183) concluded that, for the most part, those who ran
Australia were mediocre, conservative, paternalistic, imitative and
boring. The nation’s strategic elites comprised second-rate people who
were largely uninterested in talent, and ‘who cling to power but fail to
lead’ (Horne, p.73). Two or so decades later, Stretton (1986, p.210) also
attacked mediocre leadership in the business and government sectors.
He detected a historical trend of unimaginative elite performance and
argued that innovative Australian leadership tended to be exhibited
by first-generation immigrants while largely unadventurous, native-
born Australians chose to play safe.
One of the more benign ways in which the timid, conservative elites
assailed by Horne and Stretton endeavoured to institutionalise their
values was through moral exhortation. A good illustration of the self-
proclaimed moral leadership of national elite came at mid-century
when Australians celebrated the jubilee year of the Commonwealth of
Australia. On Remembrance Day (11 November) 1951, leading judges
and religious leaders issued a rather loftily worded document, entitled
A Call to the People of Australia, that was given wide coverage in the
daily press and read over the ABC. Nearly 1.5 million copies of this
plea for moral order were printed and distributed. The Call railed
against the evil of moral and intellectual apathy. Its authors were partly
concerned with Cold War threats of ‘evil designs and aggression’, but
the document focused mostly on an individual citizen’s duties: fair
dealing and honest work for ‘the development of true community’.
Half a century later, on the eve of the centenary of Federation, what
strikes the reader is less the Call’s gravitas – its paternalism and its uni-
versalistic, absolutist moral pretensions – than its emphasis on the
sinews of tribe and community. Its authors invoked the language of
citizenship, commonweal values and responsibility – a far cry from
the contemporary governmental emphasis on choice, efficiency,
outsourcing, downsizing, contracting-out and privatisation associated

with an atomised model of society as an aggregation of individually
defined interests, and the pursuit of so-called market solutions. In its
affirmation of robust nationhood, and a vigorous civil society and cul-
ture, the Call is a useful indicator of the ideological gulf between the
public rhetoric of mid-century and the new millennium. Despite criti-
cism (e.g. Wolfsohn, 1964) of the efforts of the 12 signatories as a self-
styled supra-national elite which invited ridicule or indifference, a
nationwide network of organising committees sponsored similar
annual Call-related activities before fading from the public gaze
(Hilliard, 1997).
Like ‘tyranny of distance’ and ‘cultural cringe’, Horne’s ‘lucky
country’ symbol has become part of Australian public discourse; so
too has the former Prime Minister Bob Hawke’s 1990 electoral slogan
claiming that Australia needed to become a ‘clever country’. Implicit
in the meritocratic overtones in this metaphor was an acknowledg-
ment that more than luck was required to best position Australia in a
globalised era of competitive free trade. ‘Clever’ signified that
Australia needed to explicitly foster its reserves of talent as it
approached the second millennium (Melleuish, 1997). This symbolic
switch from ‘lucky’ to ‘clever’ prompts the question of whether, more
than three decades after Horne’s review, anything has changed? Can it
be claimed, for example, that the alleged sluggishness and laziness
which Horne attributed to the nation’s elite strata are things of the
past? Next, what made it possible for the native-born timidity detected
by Stretton to take hold in the first place? Finally, to what extent is the
situation described by both commentators to be explained by regu-
larised patterns of leader and elite formation? Answers to these ques-
tions are provided in the next two sections.
Recruiting Australian elites

Elites sustain their privileged status and rank against rival claimants,
in the face of threats (from within and without) to usurp their position
or to subvert and dilute their power, by reproducing themselves.
There is a twofold reproductive concern: first, to guarantee an ongoing
flow of replacements and then, second, to ensure that each genera-
tional cohort recruited conforms to a requisite type. To deal with these
succession problems elites rely on institutionalised processes of
intergenerational leadership recruitment and formation (Gerth &
Mills, 1953, p.173), particularly schooling and higher education

(Armstrong, 1973).
Systematic treatments of Australia’s meritocracy began with Encel
(1970) who concluded that Australia was run neither by a ruling class,
nor a power elite, but instead by ‘a loose collection of elite groups
linked together by what may be called a governing consensus’ (Encel,
1970, p.4, original emphasis). Meritocracy was not Encel’s prime focus
but, in a comprehensive study of social stratification, he synthesised a
disparate body of data on sectoral elite membership and schooling
backgrounds. This corpus shows persuasively the increasing domi-
nance of highly educated professional occupational groups, a tendency
which had begun during what Encel (1970, p.69) termed the ‘bureau-
cratic revolution’ ushered in by the expansion of Commonwealth
Government activity during wartime. Talent was especially evident in
the Department of Post-War Reconstruction where about 30 people
were employed in research and policy (Encel, 1970, p.72). Whitwell’s
(1986, pp.61–79) data on the academic economists recruited by the
Commonwealth (Mills, Walker, Madgwick, Melville, Coombs, Giblin
etc.) – virtually all of them avowed Keynesians – confirm the growing
extent of meritocratic influence at the highest levels of policy at
that time.
Against the backdrop of the prevailing national ideology of egali-
tarianism, Encel (1970, pp.102–8) ranked education third (after occu-
pation, and ownership and control) among nine factors which
differentiated Australian society on the basis of class, status and
power. These three strata interlocked closely in the case of the profes-
sions – especially Medicine and Law – ‘with high correlation between
income, education, social role, and occupational prestige’ (Encel, 1970,
p.103). His six-class system included the elite of the medical and legal
professions in Class I, and professional men and women, managers
and administrators in Class II (Encel, 1970, pp.106–7). Between the
Census of 1921 and of 1966, the professions as a whole had nearly tre-
bled in size and the most highly regarded occupational groups were
‘professional occupations requiring university education’ (Encel, 1970,
p.119). Closer scrutiny of the highly esteemed legal profession showed
that the judiciary was dominated by the Victorian and NSW bars, and
by former pupils of ‘the exclusive Protestant private [i.e. fee-paying]
schools’. Moreover, 80 of 104 judges of the seven superior courts
between 1930–62 had attended these same schools – although there
was also some overlapping of enrolments for these 80 in Catholic and
State schools which they had also attended (Encel, 1970, pp.76–7).
Encel’s data were mostly obtained from postal questionnaires, sur-

veys and Who’s Who. By the mid-1960s, Who’s Who entries confirmed
the expansion of the professions for, in the space of just 40 years, the
listings of entrants’ professional occupational backgrounds had tre-
bled to 20 per cent overall. Encel also noted the increasing reliance of
State bureaucracies on experts and argued that, after a slow start
employing graduates – only 80 in Commonwealth Public Service
(CPS) in 1940 – ‘the triumph of meritocracy’ was complete by the
1960s. Regardless of sector, the educational backgrounds of each elite
were predominantly Protestant private schooling, and then within that
grouping were concentrated within a small number of older estab-
lished Associated (Victoria) or Greater (NSW) Public Schools. Thus, of
148 federal, non-Labor Cabinet ministers 85 attended private schools –
36 of these from APS or GPS schools, with just 11 schools accounting
for 42 ministers (Encel, 1970, p.238). And of First and Second Division
CPS officers, 72 of 280 surveyed in 1956, and 79 of 278 in 1961, had
attended Headmasters’ Conference schools (a select group within the
non-government sector), with six schools of the GPS-APS category in
1956 accounting for 42, and for 57 of the 79 in 1961 (Encel, 1970, p.279).
Particularly noteworthy was recruitment to the diplomatic service
(including senior Department of External Affairs officials). Of 201
entrants between 1942–62, 70 were from Victoria – 62 of these from pri-
vate schools. Nearly 50 (or one-quarter) of the 201 were from just four
private schools, one of which, Geelong Grammar School, provided 22
(about 10 per cent overall). Melbourne Grammar School supplied 11,
and Shore (Sydney) and Scotch College (Melbourne) eight each. Of the
65 NSW recruits, 35 were private-school educated, with the highest
representation coming from academically selective State schools: 11
from Sydney Boys High School (a GPS school) and nine from North
Sydney Boys High School. Encel (1970, p.280) noted that Geelong
Grammar ‘appears to have particular success in producing the charac-
teristics which the Department seeks among its applicants’ (see also
Gronn, 1992, and the discussion below).
The 1975 interview survey of 370 strategically placed individuals
across eight elite sectors conducted by Higley et al. (1979) confirmed
Encel’s picture. Across the business, trade union, political (State and
federal), public service, media, voluntary association and academic
sectors, the elites identified were overwhelmingly male, WASP-ish,
salaried, comfortably affluent and aged in their early 50s (Higley et al.,
1979, pp.64–9). These sectors interlocked among themselves through
multiple position-holding and through extensive personal familiarity,
as well as through connections with non-elite groups (Higley et al.,

1979, p.72), all of which suggested ‘a substantial concentration of
organisational power in a comparatively small number of hands’, but
with the concentration greater within sectors than between them, and
with no one elite supreme over the others.
Most elite members were found to have ascended to their positions
of leadership and influence after a lengthy climb through large
bureaucratic hierarchies, although so-called ‘pre-modern’ characteris-
tics (such as attachments to pre-World War II position-holders formed
through family membership and school friendships) ‘appeared to
advantage a relatively small number of persons inordinately’, accord-
ing to Higley et al. (1979, p.106). Encel’s ‘scions’ of already powerful
position-holders signalled a similar lingering, residual ‘who-you-
know’ ascription criterion overlaying the progressive trend towards
meritocratic achievement (see Armstrong, 1973). The persistence of
such personal connections was sufficient ‘to exclude most Australians
from the recruitment process at or near its beginning’ (Higley et al.,
1979, p.106). In addition, Higley et al. (p.171) affirmed the meritocratic
competition among their respondents as well as a readiness among the
business and voluntary association sectors to appeal to liberal, self-
help virtues. This Australian Leadership Study also confirmed the pat-
tern of educational concentration and segregation established by
Encel. Thus, ‘43 per cent of all the Australian-educated elites [in the
eight sectors] attended a mere 23 of the several hundred secondary
schools that were operating during the 1930s and 1940s [i.e. the form-
ative years of their elite sample]’ – 18 of these non-government (Scotch
College, Geelong Grammar School and St Peters, Adelaide, producing
40 elite members between them), and five of them State schools, all
academically selective (Higley et al., 1979, p.87).
The most detailed analysis of the schooling of elites was undertaken
by Peel and McCalman (1992) who processed nearly 9000 entries in the
1988 edition of Who’s Who. Here they followed Encel, and also Hansen
(1971) who, in an analysis of Victoria’s six APS boys’ schools, had
processed 1962 Who’s Who entries. Hansen discovered that the six APS
schools alone educated 10 per cent (or 903) of all the entries, which was
about half the entire Victorian entries – of which 40 per cent came from
just three schools: Scotch College (the highest number), Melbourne
Grammar and Wesley College.
Peel and McCalman undertook a State by State comparison. Their
most significant finding was that there was an extraordinary differ-
ence between the schooling of Victorian and NSW sectoral elites.
‘Selective high schools dominate the education of Sydney’s elite’, they

noted (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.12). Thus, of 2096 NSW men listed in
Who’s Who in 1988, 1146 (or 54.7 per cent) attended State schools, 1027
of them selective State high schools. Indeed, more attended selective
State high schools than Catholic and Protestant independent schools
combined (i.e. 920 or 43.9 per cent). The two largest NSW entries in
Who’s Who for non-government schools were Shore (138 and eighth
ranked nationally) and Sydney Grammar (117 and ranked eleventh).
Sydney Boys’ High was the highest ranked NSW school (169 entries
and sixth overall ranking), Fort Street Boys’ High (132) was immedi-
ately behind Shore in ninth place, while North Sydney Boys’ High (127
entries) just pipped Sydney Grammar for tenth place nationally. Apart
from St Peter’s, Adelaide (173 and ranked fifth), the other five places
in the highest ranked ten schools were all from Melbourne: Scotch
College (247) first, Melbourne Grammar School (222) second,
Melbourne Boys’ High (209) third, Geelong Grammar (178) fourth and
Wesley College (142) seventh (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.93). On these
figures the strength of the Sydney selective high schools is clear. On
the other hand, Peel and McCalman detected a declining number of
male NSW State school entrants in Who’s Who who were born after
World War II. While Fort Street Boys’ High, Sydney Boys’ and North
Sydney Boys’ High between them provided 21 per cent of the elite
educated in Sydney and born before 1945, they provided only eight
per cent of those born after 1945 (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.19).
Breaking down the NSW and Victorian entries by profession makes
the Sydney–Melbourne contrast even more dramatic. Peel and
McCalman took six profession categories (Medicine, Academic,
Judiciary, Business, Public Service and Law) and compared the schools
of their entrants. In NSW, the highest number of entrants from all six
occupations was educated in State schools; and in three occupations
(Academic, Business and Public Service) the percentage from State
schools was higher than Protestant and Catholic schools combined.
But in Victoria the picture was almost exactly the reverse: in five of the
six professional occupations (all except for the Public Service) more
entrants were educated at Protestant schools. And, in each of those
five professions (i.e. Medicine, Academic, Judiciary, Business and
Law) Protestant enrolments outnumbered the combined Catholic and
State figures (Peel & McCalman, 1992, p.24). This ‘Victorian
Ascendancy’, comment Peel and McCalman (pp. 25, 27), ‘is very much
a Protestant one’ concentrated in the five APS schools of Melbourne
and Geelong (i.e. over 40 per cent of the Victorian elite). Finally, this
ascendancy is overwhelmingly male: the school with the highest num-

ber of female entries in Who’s Who was Presbyterian Ladies’ College
(PLC), Melbourne with 18, which would have ranked it equal seven-
ty-third with Manly Boys’ High among the male entrants. Sydney
CEGS, the second highest girls’ school with 15 entries, would have
been further down in equal eighty-second place (Peel & McCalman,
1992, p.100).
To this point the summary of data has highlighted the dominant
role of Victorian and NSW schools (located especially in Melbourne
and Sydney) as sources of elite recruitment, while the overall picture
highlights the historical educational pre-eminence of a handful of
socially prestigious schools as nurseries for recruitment to the profes-
sions. Like Higley et al. (1979), Hansen (1971, p.269) pointed to the lin-
gering importance of pre-modern ascriptive factors such as the ‘right’
social background. But is there any direct evidence about the kinds of
within-school processes which have formed or shaped the schools’
products by seeking to capitalise on such factors?
Forming Australia’s elites

Of 2221 Victorian male entries in Who’s Who for 1980, McCalman (1989,
p.79) concluded that Geelong Grammar was (along with the Jesuit
Xavier College) the ‘great improver’ since Hansen’s 1962 summary of
the entries, and that in 1980 16 diplomatic heads of mission had been
educated at Geelong Grammar, compared with Scotch College and
Melbourne Grammar’s five apiece. The 1930s was the formative period
for the 1980 Who’s Who cohort; so what was happening on the shores
of Corio Bay in that Great Depression decade which, 30–40 years later,
was to lift Geelong Grammar’s numerical profile in the nation’s only
social register?
Except for Hansen (1971) – who used a battery of surveys of teach-
ing, interviews with pupils and ex-pupils, school records, school mag-
azines, and personal observations – researchers into elites have mostly
ignored the dynamics of teaching and learning in accounting for elite
recruitment. Two other neglected sources have been admission records
and school heads’ correspondence files. Combined with alumni or ex-
student records, however, enrolment register data make possible a
comparison of the social class and family origins of enrolment cohorts
and their occupational destinations, and of intergenerational mobility
patterns, both within and between school families (Gronn, 1992).
Using similar records, and extensive surveys and oral history inter-
viewing, McCalman (1993) has broadened the potential of this com-
parison to encompass a number of geographically contiguous elite
Melbourne schools and generations of their former pupils.
Similar sorts of information as these indicate what was happening
at Geelong Grammar School after February 1930.1 They show that a
very young, English-born headmaster, James Darling – the embodi-
ment of the first-generation innovative immigrant identified by
Stretton – was given a free hand by the school council to expand the
school, to raise its national profile and to institute a veritable educa-
tional renaissance. By the eve of World War II, a decade after Darling’s
appointment, Geelong Grammar had been completely reorganised. An
extensive building program, undertaken despite the Depression, had
provided upgraded classrooms, new laboratories, a proper library and
general amenities. Enrolments were lifted and a new boarding house
constructed. Separate art and music schools were built. School clubs
and societies multiplied and flourished. The school produced three
Rhodes Scholars in that decade. Huge-scale pageant plays were per-
formed. Dignitaries and public figures flocked to the school, and every
conceivable speaker of note or international visitor to Australia was
ushered down to Corio by Darling to meet and converse with the boys.
The school timetable was completely restructured and, most impor-
tant of all, in 1935 the curriculum was given a major overhaul.
Darling’s curriculum reforms were decidedly meritocratic. Briefly, he
instituted specialist curriculum tracks (defined according to the antic-
ipated career destinations of the boys: business, land and the profes-
sions), broadened the range of senior secondary subjects, extended the
Leaving Certificate curriculum over two years and created a Sixth
Specialist Form to foster preparation for university entry.
One of Encel’s (1970, p.155) claims about Geelong Grammar is that,
like the King’s School, Parramatta, it has always been the cradle of
landed wealth. While there can be no disputing the long-standing con-
nection between Victoria’s Western District and the school – only the
extent and significance of it – Darling never intended to sever this link
but constantly encouraged boys to seek alternative career options to
landed pursuits and to direct their talents towards community service,
particularly in the professions. In this policy he had some success.
Boys from landed backgrounds comprised only a third of the enrol-
ments in the 1930s and in fact the largest percentage of boys came from
families with fathers employed in professional occupations followed
by those from business backgrounds. Furthermore, there was a mar-
ginal overall decrease for the decade in the percentage of sons return-
ing to the land (31 per cent from landed families enrolled; 29 per cent
of all exiting students returned), and a small increase in the proportion
of boys entering the professions upon leaving school compared with
the proportion originally enrolling from professional backgrounds (39
per cent leaving as against 35 per cent enrolling).
But these details are evidence of success with internal school meas-
ures. In other external matters Darling’s success was mixed. Central to
the instilling of the character at which – in conformity with English
precedent – elite schools like Geelong Grammar aimed was inter-
house and inter-school sport. Perhaps the elite competition within
the elite school community was (and still is) the annual APS Head of
the River. And here, in an effort to curb what he viewed as the exces-
sive publicity and euphoria surrounding the event, and the over-
enthusiasm of the old boys, Darling’s only genuine success lay in
diverting the gate-takings on boatrace day away from the traditional
charity distribution mechanism of the Lord Mayor’s Fund towards a
social service project jointly sponsored by the six headmasters. Even
here, his fellow heads’ enthusiasm for his new scheme was at best
lukewarm. Much more fruitful for Darling, on the other hand, were his
efforts to encourage Geelong Grammar boys to enter the public serv-
ice. Central to this initiative was his attempt (along with his fellow
school heads) to secure a federal legislative amendment (finally forth-
coming in late 1933) to provide for graduate entry to the CPS. Sixteen
Geelong Grammar boys who enrolled at Corio in the 1930s eventually
entered the CPS, eight of these going into the Department of External
Affairs (which is confirmation of Encel’s observation about the texture
of the diplomatic corps, cited above).
Beyond building on the kinds of pre-existing attributes of the pupils
highlighted by Hansen and providing an enriched curriculum to
secure admission to, and passage for, their pupils within their chosen
careers, the fundamental task for the kinds of schools discussed here
was to ensure that formal university entry requirements were met.
Once out of the clutches of the educational institutions which have cra-
dled them, elite recruits cross over and begin to be subjected to the
rigours of occupational socialisation. These vary from profession to
profession, depending on the degree of skill precision and uniformity
of outlook desired for their graduates. But some professional occupa-
tional groups in Australia have been slow to institutionalise university
level training or credentialing programs. Neither have they had an
agreed-upon, tightly defined profile of their ideal practitioner. One
such group for whom this observation remained true until fairly
recently – the one highlighted by Horne – has been management. This
sector is discussed below: firstly, because the above data (particularly
Encel’s) have indicated a steady flow of elite school recruits into this
sphere; secondly, because public schoolboys were always expected to
become business and community leaders (relying on their character,
rather than formal training, to act in ways consistent with the kinds of
sentiments in the Call); and thirdly, because of the increasing attention
now accorded formal preparation for leadership and management, in
an effort to replace previous ad hoc approaches.
Institutionalising leadership and elite succession

Historically, elites have provided for their succession by seeking to
institutionalise processes of leader formation in which educational
agencies have figured prominently. During the transition from pre-
industrial to industrial Europe, for example, the typical pattern of elite
socialisation and recruitment was maximum ascription, broadly a sys-
tem in which, at an early age, a small male cohort was selected in
accordance with parental and family status, and for top administrative
or leadership posts. Part of this ascriptive pattern of grooming included
prolonged education at exclusive boarding schools, universities and
academies, as exemplified by the English boys’ public school (see
Gronn, 1999, pp.46–57). An alternative to ascription has been a pro-
gressive equal attrition model in which a formally qualified cohort of
eligible recruits is credentialed, but remains in reserve and available
for elite replacement when and if required (Armstrong, 1973,
pp.15–23). Unlike ascription (the norm in Europe) attrition is a much
more typical recruitment pattern in new world societies.
One indicator of the transition from ascription or sponsored elite
mobility to a meritocratic, contest or attrition-based achievement ori-
entation is the establishment of formal post-secondary school voca-
tional training. Attrition approaches quickly assumed importance in
the sphere of management in the USA (where university business
management courses were available at the turn of the century: see
Bendix, 1956). In Australia, however, where the self-made tradition
was strong, formal training for the private sector, managerial elite
emerged only slowly. While it is possible to distinguish an antipodean
version of the heroic age of laissez-faire capitalism in Australia – during
which there were occasional strong pockets of entrepreneurialism –
there were few wealthy fortunes comparable to those of the US robber

barons to be made (and then mainly in pastoralism, woollen exports
and retailing). In fact, there were only 30 Australian millionaires in the
150 years to 1939, whereas in the US there were 7500 in 1914 alone
(Rubinstein, 1983, 1984). Apart from a few entrepreneurial, founder,
owner-managers, many Australian career managers (as currently
understood) were employed in state public instrumentalities, for
example Peter Board and Frank Tate (education), Sir John Monash
(State Electricity Commission of Victoria) and William Calder
(Country Roads Board, Victoria) – and most learned their craft on the
job in a robust practical-man tradition.
The take-off for professionalised, meritocratic management in
Australia, then, was somewhat delayed. A nascent professional mana-
gerial culture among Australian businessmen was first detectable
between the two world wars (Spierings, 1990). F.W. Taylor’s theories
of scientific management and efficiency – a key component in the
development of ideologies of professional management (Bendix, 1956)
– were circulating in management circles before 1920, for example, and
employer groups and peak associations were invoking these in their
lobbying of the Bruce-Page Government (Blackburn, 1996). Instances
of a new career managerial type were beginning to emerge – the stock-
broker Staniforth Ricketson, of J.B. Were, was a good example.
Spierings (1990) notes how acceptance by the Australian commercial
elite of the significance of training in industry for the redesign of work
and production methods came in the 1920s. The Victorian Employers
Federation, the Victorian Chamber of Manufacturers and other peak
councils, for example, lobbied successfully for the establishment of a
Commerce Faculty at the University of Melbourne in 1924. The first
professor was Douglas Berry Copland, a 30-year-old New Zealander,
then Dean of Commerce at the University of Tasmania. Copland was a
free trader (although he later became sympathetic to Keynesianism:
see Whitwell, 1986, p.62) and he developed close links with Melbourne
businessmen. Commerce Faculty courses were well patronised, with
rarely less than 400 students enrolled annually until early in World
War II (Harper, 1986, p.42).
Later developments in the formalising of education for managers in
Australia included the establishment in Melbourne in 1941 of the
Institute of Industrial Management, following the introduction of a
popular course on foremanship at the Melbourne Technical College in
1938. The Institute – forerunner of the national body, the Australian
Institute of Management (1949) – functioned as a discussion clearing-
house and provided short courses on management. A handful of com-

panies had already begun to undertake their own internal staff train-
ing programs, but in the 1950s there were moves in Sydney and
Melbourne ‘to provide something more prestigious than the technical
college programs and the evening courses at the Institutes of
Management and other professional bodies’ (Byrt, 1989, p.82). The
University of Melbourne began six-week residential summer schools
in business administration in 1956 and, in the same year, Copland was
appointed foundation Principal of the new Australian Administrative
Staff College at Mt Eliza – a provider of advanced management courses
modelled on the original staff college at Henley-on-Thames, England.
It was only in the early 1960s, just before the publication of Horne’s
Lucky Country, that Master of Business Administration degrees along
US lines were provided by some Australian universities (Byrt, 1989,
pp.87–92). By the late 1950s, then, the idea of formal professional
preparation was replacing ad hoc, on the job learning for Australia’s
managerial elite.
At about this time, in other parts of the broad managerial sector,
such as educational administration, professionalisation – as evidenced
by the provision of university preparation programs – was also com-
mencing. A Diploma of Educational Administration, for example,
commenced in 1959 at the University of New England (Cunningham
& Radford, 1963, p.20). A parallel development in the professionalisa-
tion of educational managers and leaders, known as the ‘Theory
Movement’, began in North American university-based programs in
educational administration at about this time. In the absence of post-
graduate research degrees in educational leadership in Australia,
waves of senior systems administrators and research students flocked
to North American campuses (particularly the University of Alberta,
Canada) throughout the 1970s to undertake doctoral studies in pro-
grams influenced by the Theory Movement. In 1977, the Victorian
Government established its own statutory provider of short course,
residential in-house programs, the Institute of Educational
Administration. Higher education courses in educational administra-
tion finally began in earnest in a number of Australian universities in
the mid-1970s, initially in the form of postgraduate diplomas, fol-
lowed by masters coursework degrees and higher degree research in
the 1980s.
Courses such as these just outlined which have been intended to
professionalise the preparation and practice of educational adminis-
tration, have been characterised as a form of batch processing (Khleif,
1975). This term describes the production of intensely experienced

training outcomes in hothouse-style management programs, demand-
ing full-time study, a tightly defined, coherent structure and in-house
residential delivery. Yet, because many Australian universities have
mostly operated on the model of core curriculum subjects plus elec-
tives (or have even provided entire smorgasbords of electives) for a
substantially mature-age, part-time student clientele, they have often
been unable to replicate such approaches. But that situation may be
about to change. The recent report, Enterprising Nation (Industry Task
Force on Leadership and Management Skills, 1995),2 promotes the
idea of a desired managerial profile for the year 2010 – ‘The
Leader/Enabler’ – and recommends that ‘the seeds of change, and the
imperatives of the new paradigm [of management], have to be incul-
cated in the generation of managers who are undertaking postgraduate
education and/or holding junior management positions in 1995’
(Industry Task Force, 1995, p.xi, emphasis added). For possibly the
very first time in Australia, a prototype of a desired elite leadership
model for managers has received official endorsement as part of the
national training agenda (see Gronn, 1999, pp.61–3).
The thrust of Enterprising Nation is to discredit as outmoded extended
campus-based programs that are intended to facilitate personal pro-
fessional development and to better equip students to rise through
predefined and predetermined career roles. Management is claimed to
be moving away from ‘a structural model of organisations’ and there
has been too much emphasis on ‘the more analytical areas of business’
in existing programs (Industry Task Force, 1995, pp.x, xvii). Instead, a
new focus is needed on strategic management skills for medium-size
business units – that is, entrepreneurialism, a global orientation, soft
skills, strategic skills and management development, but particularly
teamwork skills. Why? Because ‘Australia is sliding down the league
table of economic performance’ (Industry Task Force, 1995, p.xii). With
this kind of assertion a direct connection is being made between the
nation’s global standing, and the quality and contribution of the man-
agerial elite to that performance – one of the themes signalled at the
outset of this chapter. Enterprising Nation asserts that, to enhance inter-
national competitive advantage, enterprise and entrepreneurship sub-
jects should be taught in schools, and in the vocational and tertiary
sectors, in order to ‘promote the need for individuals to pro-actively
take charge of their own future, including their own economic future’
(Industry Task Force, 1995, p.xxii). Such is the flavour of the new
thinking: customised, continuous learning, role adaptability, mobility,
flexible styles and workplace diversity in ostensibly down-sized and

flattened organisational structures (Industry Task force, 1995, p.xxxviii).
The keystone of Enterprising Nation’s proposed new enterprise culture
is a new national leadership program to operate nationally and at State
level under industry sponsorship, and through inter-linked, compe-
tency-based and networked program offerings (Industry Task Force,
1995, pp.xxvi–xxv).
Conclusion: the elite prospect

In this chapter I have documented the genesis and composition of
some of Australia’s key sectoral elites, and have analysed the role
played by schooling in leadership and elite formation. The pattern
revealed by the research evidence from a number of elite theorists is
clear: historically, the leadership of Australia’s major institutions has
been drawn mainly from, and shows every indication of continuing to
be drawn from, a small group of academically and socially selective
schools located in the two major metropolitan centres of the two
largest States. On the other hand, the research evidence reviewed is far
from complete, and the overall picture of elite composition would ben-
efit from further fine-grained research: e.g., regular or periodic updat-
ing of the Who’s Who analysis conducted by Peel and McCalman, in
conjunction with small-scale intensive archival investigations of
school records to bring to light within-school processes and their con-
nection with macro level trend data. Further, citing the example of pri-
vate and public sector management, I have also drawn attention to the
evolution of professionalisation – the most decisive indicator of meri-
tocracy – in the form of university-level preparation and development
courses among Australian managers. I have represented the transition
to meritocratic professionalism with the switch in national awareness
from luck to cleverness. Moreover, so serious has the attention given at
senior political levels been to the need to produce a requisite manage-
rial cadre that for the first time in Australia a prototypical leader
model, and an accompanying nationwide training regime, have
received quasi-official endorsement as in the national interest.
In parallel with these trends, however, and throughout the world,
professionalised managerial elites have recently been under attack.
Field and Higley (1986, p 6), for example, have insisted that ‘virtually
without exception’, Western elites grew complacent amidst the afflu-
ence and relative domestic political quiescence of the Cold War years
and mistook temporary circumstances conducive to economic growth

and underwriting of the welfare state as being permanent. Others,
such as Perkin (1990), have detected a backlash against ‘professional-
ism and the corporate state it inspired’, which has split the meritocracy:
‘[this was] not a reaction against professional society but a rounding of
the private sector professionals who ran the great corporations and
their academic and journalistic supporters upon the public sector pro-
fessionals’ (Perkin, 1990, p.473, original emphasis). Finally, the very
idea of a meritocratic elite – embodied, in the view of critics, by US
upper middle-class liberals – is attacked as a betrayal of democracy
because ‘it drains talent away from the lower classes and thus deprives
them of effective leadership’ (Lasch, 1995, p. 44).
When Donald Horne criticised Australia’s elites in The Lucky
Country for their reliance on luck rather than good measure, the impli-
cation was that they lacked appropriate leadership training and that
the country had not properly utilised its pool of potential leadership
talent. But now that the nation seeks to represent itself in its symbols
as having become cleverer, the evidence surveyed in this chapter of the
dominance of a small clutch of selective schools as nurseries for elite
replenishment suggests that it may still have much to learn. Perkin (as
well as others before him) has shown how England – for so long
Australia’s main cultural point of reference for models of leadership –
has paid a high price in respect of betrayal of the social contract as a
result of the class-based nature of its elite strata, and because, histori-
cally, family and school connections created a closed recruitment sys-
tem. Likewise, while European and Asian nations have also recruited
their leadership elites off a very narrow social base, and may seem his-
torically to have got away with doing so, biased recruitment process-
es carry with them potentially dysfunctional consequences. For Perkin
(1996b, p.196) the biggest threat to the kinds of advantages bestowed
by the meritocratic ideal (i.e. the maximisation of talent in the interests
of all) is the tendency of professionalised elites to self-destruct by tak-
ing advantage of the relative autonomy and trust bestowed by those
societies that they are intended to serve.
In the light of these experiences, consolidation of an already skewed
pattern of elite recruitment in a society like Australia, therefore – given
the patterns of schooling described above – would appear to be ques-
tionable. Yet some commentators (e.g. Anderson, 1991) have pointed
to public policy trends which seem calculated to further consolidate
the pattern of Australian schooling outlined in the chapter. Thus, the
recent financial squeeze on school education by parsimonious State
authorities, as part of self-management and self-governing schools, is

likely to strengthen the popularity of elite schools. For many parents,
the fee-paying non-government sector – already well within reach of
many middle-class families as a result of generous fee subsidies – has
become a more attractive option than State schooling. And a federal
policy which has further liberalised the conditions under which pub-
lic funding can be obtained to establish new schools, and which also
provides incentives for the States to further run down school educa-
tion by, in effect, encouraging the transfer of families out of their sys-
tems for purposes of financial savings, only exacerbates such
tendencies. Viewed against the lessons of the history of elites, this out-
come seems far from clever and even represents unsound cultural
stewardship by elites. And if, as Fukuyama (1995) has suggested, it is
trust, and the strength of their civil institutions and sociability net-
works which determine the competitive edge of nations in a globalised
economy, then it will be on their custodianship of the cultural and
social fabric on which the leadership of Australian elites will be
judged.
Notes
1. This section draws on Gronn (1991, 1992 & 1994) and unpublished work-in-
progress.
2. Abbreviated hereafter to Industry Task Force (1995).
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 91
Competition, education and

class formation
MARK WESTERN
In this chapter I draw on the previous two chapters, by Peter Gronn

and Simon Marginson, in order to critique and build upon their argu-
ments in relation to competition, elite institutions and elite formation.
My central point is that educational institutions continue to play a cen-
tral role in processes of class formation and the distribution of social
inequality. In fact, I shall argue, education reforms since the mid-1980s
have contributed to the exacerbation of class inequality in Australia.
With the publication of Economic Rationalism in Canberra in 1991,
Michael Pusey introduced a new term into the lexicon of Australian
public life. Pusey argued that since the early 1980s key public sector
economic agencies had increasingly been dominated by an ideology of
economic rationalism born of neo-classical free-market economics.
Economic rationalism, in Pusey’s view, became the basis for trans-
forming not only the direction of public policy, but also the machinery
of government, the institutional apparatuses of the state themselves.
At the core of the ideology of economic rationalism is the view that
competition among actors within freely operating markets is the opti-
mal way to secure economic outcomes. The chapters by Gronn and
Marginson in this collection parallel arguments raised by Pusey (1991)
and are united by a concern with the impact of marketisation and com-
petition on educational institutions and on processes of educational
provision.
91
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 92
Analyses of marketisation are clearly important to understand the

conditions under which educational institutions now operate. But,
from the point of view of class analysis, institutions of education are
key sites for the reproduction and potential transformation of class
inequalities. The analyses of Gronn and Marginson implicitly high-
light some of the ways in which educational institutions figure in
processes of class formation and indicate how, under conditions of
institutional redesign, the links between education systems, class for-
mation and class inequality are themselves reshaped. In this chapter, I
take Gronn and Marginson’s work as a starting point to reflect more
generally on the role educational institutions play in shaping class for-
mation and class inequality, and to consider how the processes of insti-
tutional redesign they highlight may affect class reproduction and
class inequality in Australia in the short-term. Competition is arguably
the unifying theme in Gronn and Marginson’s work, and competitive
processes also figure centrally in class analytical arguments. Thus I
begin by considering how competition figures in the work of Gronn
and Marginson, before examining what their arguments imply for
class formation and class inequality.
Competition in Australian education:

the arguments of Gronn and Marginson
Marginson’s chapter addresses ‘reform’ in the Australian higher edu-
cation sector since 1987. According to Marginson, the central objective
of educational reform has been to establish market competition as the
governing principle of activity in the sector. Market competition in
higher education has a number of ostensible goals: to improve the
responsiveness, flexibility and innovation of higher educational insti-
tutions; to make offerings more diverse; to increase efficiency; to
improve the quality of teaching and research; and to increase account-
ability to students, employers and governments. However, in
Marginson’s view, marketisation has not had these outcomes because
the higher-education market is segmented and, in one segment, pro-
duces positional goods under a different set of rules than free-market
orthodoxy assumes. In particular, within the market segment domi-
nated by the established ‘Sandstone’ universities, higher education is
primarily concerned with formally qualifying people for scarce privi-
leged professional and managerial jobs and their attendant material
and symbolic rewards.
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 93
COMPETITION, EDUCATION AND CLASS FORMATION 93
In the ‘Sandstone’ universities, student demand dramatically

exceeds the supply of available places. Since both places at these uni-
versities and middle-class managerial and professional jobs are limited,
and since there is a high level of correspondence between the two,
competition between students to enter institutions and faculties with a
high positional value drives up the price of education in the
‘Sandstone’ universities. Excess demand shelters the ‘Sandstones’
from simple price competition and frees them from the need to be
accountable in the manner neo-classical economic theory predicts.
Thus the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s to institutionalise market
competition in the sector have increasingly stratified higher education.
Under the new rules, the old established universities at the top of the
hierarchy have been able to consolidate and improve their positions.
The universities of technology have been able to exploit niche market-
ing around vocationalism and applied research to improve their rela-
tive status. But the ‘Wannabe sandstone’ and remaining post-1987
universities, which could be argued to be the only ones that genuinely
operate in a competitive market, are the major losers.
Competition also figures in Peter Gronn’s account of elite formation
in Australia. However, Gronn is less critical of the consequences of
competition than Marginson, and has a different view of what elite
education actually provides. For Gronn, the emergence of Australian
elites is an essentially meritocratic process. Modernisation and indus-
trialisation increasingly require educated workforces and education
consequently becomes an increasingly important vehicle for occupa-
tional attainment. With the shift from industralisation to service-based
and knowledge-based economies, professional expertise becomes an
increasingly important class resource, and educational institutions
that qualify people for elite professional occupations (elite public and
especially private secondary schools, and elite universities) conse-
quently become increasingly important for elite reproduction.
Whereas for Marginson perceptions of high quality at the ‘Sandstone’
universities explain their market advantages, for Gronn, elite schools
are ‘nurseries’ of elite formation that really do provide high-quality
educational experiences that are a precondition for entry into elite
occupations. Despite the selective recruitment, Gronn notes, to elite
secondary schools, higher educational institutions and occupations,
postindustrial service-based economies like Australia are fundamen-
tally meritocratic, because they depend primarily on the mobilisation
of expert knowledge and they reward experts accordingly. Where
expertise is particularly valued, the importance of education as a
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 94
vehicle for social attainment justifies the claim that elites are essentially
meritocratic.
Both chapters therefore agree that education shapes access to
socially privileged positions, but Gronn explicitly infers from this
process that professional elites are meritocratic, because education,
rather than social background, qualifies individuals for elite recruit-
ment. He convincingly makes the case that certain influential second-
ary schools provided vehicles for elite recruitment and socialisation;
his account of Darling’s reforms at Geelong Grammar is also impor-
tant in providing insight into how elite socialisation occurs, and he is
also, I think, correct, in arguing that Australian managers have been
much slower to institutionalise elite recruitment around post-second-
ary education than have the traditional professions.1
Nonetheless, I think it is mistaken to identify Australian profes-
sional elites as meritocratic simply because the most immediate deter-
minant of elite recruitment is elite education and because elites are
now importantly constituted on the basis of expert knowledge, rather
than, for example, property ownership, race or gender. For succession
to elite social positions to be genuinely meritocratic, there must be
both equal opportunity for all to compete and social positions and their
associated rewards must be allocated solely on the basis of abilities
and effort (Marshall, Swift & Roberts, 1997; Weakliem, McQuillan &
Schauer, 1995). It is extremely clear on the evidence cited by Gronn,
and previously Pusey (1991, ch.2) in relation to members of the Senior
Executive Service in the Commonwealth Public Service, that
Australian elites have not been meritocratic because they were not and
are not meritocratically recruited.
For a start, recruitment to elite schools has overwhelmingly been
male, WASP and from privileged socioeconomic backgrounds, as
Gronn notes. Indeed Gronn’s (1992, 1994) own work on Geelong
Grammar in the 1930s shows that boys there essentially came from one
of three backgrounds – the land, the professions, or business – and that
they largely returned to these backgrounds on exiting from school.
Viewed from the perspective of class analysis, landed backgrounds
and business were ascendant privileged classes, while professional
occupations were an ascending or rising privileged new middle class.
According to most contemporary class theorists, professionals are one
extremely influential arm of a privileged new middle class, who enjoy
substantial advantages in life chances and access to socially desirable
rewards, like health, leisure, consumption and the like (Butler &
Savage, 1996; Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Wright, 1997). To say that
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 95
professional elites are meritocratic because educational qualifications

determine entry to elite positions, is to miss the point that institutions
of elite reproduction, privileged secondary schools, and, to a greater
extent, universities, tend to recruit selectively from particular privi-
leged sections of the population. Thus, whatever one thinks about the
meritocratic nature of competition within elite educational institu-
tions, competition to enter them is both unfair and unmeritocratic
because recruitment is highly selective.2
Higher education and class formation

Gronn’s chapter in this volume, and his other research (Gronn, 1992,
1994), focus upon secondary schooling as the primary educational
channel into elite professional occupations. However, the fundamental
educational requirement for entry to these occupations is an appropri-
ate university degree. Access to higher education is therefore particu-
larly important for elite professional recruitment.
Australian studies (Carpenter & Western, 1989; Lamb, 1997) and
overseas research (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993) repeatedly confirm that
access to higher education is stratified by class and socioeconomic sta-
tus, with university students being drawn disproportionately from
privileged social backgrounds. Moreover, in almost all countries for
which empirical research has been conducted, socioeconomic differen-
tials in access to higher education have remained remarkably stable,
despite in some cases dramatic increases in the proportion of relevant
age cohorts going on to university.
Academic studies of educational stratification in countries as
diverse as the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany,
England and Wales, Switzerland, Taiwan, Japan, Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Hungary and Israel all show unchanged class and socioeco-
nomic differentials in university access despite major expansion of the
higher-education sector (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1993). This finding is so
robust that sociologists of education have even proposed a name for it,
‘Maximally Maintained Inequality’ or MMI (Raftery & Hout, 1993).
MMI has several components but the relevant one is that growth in the
number of places in the education system will only offset class differ-
entials in access to education when the demand for education in priv-
ileged classes approaches saturation level (effectively close to 100 per
cent of middle-class students going on to university). On its own,
expanding the number of places available in education improves the
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 96
educational opportunities of formerly disadvantaged students by

passing more of them on to higher levels, but it does not change the
selection criteria that enable people to enter higher education. We
therefore see increased opportunities for higher education among less
privileged groups because there are increased opportunities for every-
one when the higher education sector expands. But without specific
interventions to ameliorate the effects of social background, class rela-
tivities do not decline (Blossfeld & Shavit, 1993; Hout, Raftery & Bell,
1993; Raftery & Hout, 1993).
On the current Australian evidence (Chapman, 1996; Lamb, 1997),
the dramatic increase in retention rates to year 12 of secondary school
through the 1980s, and the subsequent expansion of higher education,
have increased the proportion of students from working-class and
lower SES backgrounds attending university, but has not changed
class differentials in access (at the tertiary level). This is likely because
middle-class demand for higher education has not yet been saturated.
From the point of view of class analysis, class differentials in access
to tertiary education matter for at least two reasons. First, tertiary
qualifications are a prerequisite for access to privileged professional
and, increasingly, managerial jobs, as both Gronn and Marginson note.
But second, overall patterns of social mobility through the class and
occupational structure can largely be accounted for by social closure
processes at the top of the class structure; that is, among professional
and managerial positions. The first point that access to professional
and managerial jobs is governed by credentials is self-evident. But the
other characteristic of professional and managerial jobs in most west-
ern industrial societies is that they are marked by typically high
levels of social closure, or by disproportionately high levels of self-
recruitment. Australian and overseas research into intergenerational
class mobility consistently finds that professionals and managers are
disproportionately likely to come from professional and managerial
families of origin, largely because of the success with which upper
middle-class parents transmit educational qualifications and cultural
capital to their offspring (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Jones & Davis,
1986; Western, 1994; Western & Wright, 1994).
However, disproportionate self-recruitment among professionals
and managers not only explains the inheritance of class advantage
from one generation to the next, but also largely explains the intergen-
erational reproduction of class disadvantage. Professional and mana-
gerial jobs are scarce, and offspring from professional and managerial
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 97
backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have the tertiary qualifi-

cations required for such privileged middle-class jobs. But the scarcity
of middle-class positions and employer preferences for suitably quali-
fied/credentialed employees mean that they overwhelmingly recruit
from managerial- and professional-class backgrounds. This process
not only advantages those from middle-class families, it also limits
access to middle-class jobs to those from working-class origins.
Immobility at the top of the class structure consequently also accounts
for the immobility within the working class, as well as for limited
exchange between the lower-middle and working classes. The blocked
opportunities of working-class children for upward mobility therefore
arise largely because of the success with which people from profes-
sional and managerial origins enter professional and managerial
jobs, thereby closing off these positions to offspring from working-
class families (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992; Jones & Davis, 1986;
Western, 1994).
Class differentials in access to higher education therefore matter
because access to higher education accounts not only for mobility clo-
sure among the middle class, but also for the overall level of societal
openness from one generation to the next. This pattern holds true for
many Western industrial countries, including Australia, even though
Australia is more open to intergenerational mobility than some other
western industrial countries (Jones & Davis, 1986; Western, 1994). If
talent or ability is equally distributed throughout the class structure, as
class analysts have tended to assume, inequalities in access to higher
education are not only unfair, they are also economically wasteful,
because they do not optimise on the abilities of offspring from
working-class families, while they advantage less able children from
middle-class families.3
Current education policy and implications for

class formation
Unequal access to higher education therefore matters, because class
differentials in access largely explain how much social mobility exists
in a society from one generation to the next. Moreover, current gov-
ernment policy on higher education appears likely to worsen class dif-
ferentials in university access in the short to medium term. Other
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 98
things being equal, this will increase the impact of social origins on
socioeconomic outcomes, like good jobs and earnings, and will pro-
duce more mobility closure within the class structure.
Class-based educational inequality is likely to increase for several
reasons. At present levels, educational expansion does not saturate
middle-lass demand, and is therefore unlikely to offset existing class
differentials in access. As marketisation of the higher education sector
proceeds more aggressively, positional competition between institu-
tions will increase and the stratification of the sector will become more
marked, as Marginson points out. The ‘Sandstone’ universities, in par-
ticular, will be able to capitalise on government initiatives such as the
opportunity to charge full fees for undergraduate degrees, and
demand for places in these institutions is likely to rise. Students from
privileged class backgrounds will be particularly well placed to take
advantage of fee-paying places in undergraduate degrees, which will
have a particularly regressive effect on access to higher education in
the ‘Sandstone’ universities.
Coalition changes to HECS, to increase repayments and lower the
salary levels at which repayments become compulsory, are also having
a regressive effect on higher-education access. Marginson notes that
HECS changes have already strengthened the disincentive effect for
higher education, with a consequent lessening of overall demand in
the sector. A situation of declining overall demand for places makes it
harder to equalise educational access because, according to the theory
and evidence of maximally maintained inequality, middle-class
demand must first be fully satisfied before people from working-class
backgrounds begin to catch up. This condition cannot be met when
the higher-education sector is contracting from a position in which
middle-class demand has not yet been saturated.
At best, then, changes to HECS by the Howard Government imply
that class differentials in university access will remain unchanged. It
seems more likely, however, that the HECS changes will exacerbate
class differentials rather than simply maintaining them. Under the
Liberal-National Party Government the similarity between HECS and
upfront fees for education has increased. Originally, HECS was delib-
erately conceived to be different from a system of upfront fees which
create a significant barrier to entry to higher education for the socio-
economically disadvantaged who do not have alternative sources of
funding with which to meet fees (Chapman, 1996). By tying compul-
sory repayments to average earnings, HECS effectively translated into
an interest-free loan to students until their earnings capacity crossed
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 99
some threshold. The connection between a student’s current financial

circumstances and her/his capacity to afford higher education was
comparatively weak under the first version of the scheme, and thus
one would not have expected the scheme to be particularly regressive
in its effect on class differentials in educational access. Although the
original HECS scheme clearly did not improve access to higher educa-
tion for students from disadvantaged class backgrounds (nobody
expected it to), it did not worsen it (Chapman, 1996). Under the
current version of the scheme, however, students in difficult financial
circumstances are likely to see HECS repayment as a more serious
burden, and thus the disincentive effect associated with the
changes is particularly strong for those who are socioeconomically
disadvantaged.
In addition to strengthening disincentives for socioeconomically
disadvantaged students entering higher education, Coalition policy
arguably creates greater uncertainties about the value of higher edu-
cation in the wider community and thus contributes more broadly to
declining overall demand. Such a context is also disproportionately
likely to affect students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds,
because sociological evidence suggests that parents and students from
disadvantaged social backgrounds tend to have weaker preferences
for higher education than parents and students from privileged back-
grounds in the first place (Carpenter & Western, 1989). Students and
parents from working-class origins are less likely to aspire to higher
education for at least two reasons: they value its intrinsic benefits less
highly; and they perceive it to be more costly than middle-class people
do, both in terms of the opportunity costs of wages foregone, and
direct financial costs of remaining in education. Their weaker prefer-
ences mean that it is easier to discourage potential working-class stu-
dents from entering higher education than potential middle-class
students, and perceptions of prohibitive cost figure more strongly in
the calculations of working-class than middle-class students. In a situ-
ation where increasing uncertainty about higher education combines
with perceptions of increased cost, working-class families with a com-
paratively marginal commitment to higher education will be more
likely to withdraw from the sector than privileged professional and
managerial middle-class families. The likely result is that class differ-
entials in higher-educational access will worsen.
The decline in the demand for higher education that is associated
with increased positional competition between institutions under the
Coalition Government HECS policy has particularly affected the
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 100
newer universities, as Marginson indicates. Under these policies,

demand that shifts away from the new universities may well go in two
directions. Students drawn from the newer universities to the
‘Sandstones’ will primarily be those who can take advantage of new-
market initiatives like upfront fees. Students who cannot afford the
‘Sandstone’ route may well be drawn to the increasingly competitive
TAFE sector given its marked vocational focus and relatively low cost.
This process will again worsen class inequalities in university access.
The marketisation of higher education that began under Labor in
the 1980s continues rapidly under the Coalition, and embodies a num-
ber of tendencies that are likely to aggravate socioeconomic inequali-
ties in access to higher education, with consequent implications for
rigidifying mobility boundaries between classes. Many of these
processes impact particularly on access to professional middle-class
occupations rather than managerial middle-class ones, because, as
Gronn notes in Chapter 4, the professions have traditionally empha-
sised postcompulsory university education to a greater extent than
management has. In contemporary capitalist societies, the privileged
new middle class comprises both those in professional occupations
and individuals in managerial organisational positions (Erikson &
Goldthorpe, 1992; Butler & Savage, 1996; Wright, 1997). The mobility
closure at the top of the class structure that I referred to earlier largely
reflects disproportionate class self-recruitment among professionals
and large proprietors rather than managers (Western, 1994; Western &
Wright, 1994).4 Because access to managerial jobs in countries like
Australia has typically not been credentialised to the same extent as
professional occupations, parents in managerial jobs have not had a
simple class mechanism (investment in their children’s higher educa-
tion) which they could use to secure their children’s future access to
management.
However, as Gronn notes, new initiatives in managerial education
mimic processes of professional credentialing in that formal educa-
tional qualifications increasingly determine access to managerial jobs.
To the extent that this process becomes institutionalised, it is likely that
managerial jobs will eventually demonstrate the same levels of mobil-
ity closure from one generation to the next as professional jobs cur-
rently do. This tendency will further heighten immobility at the top of
the class structure because, at the moment, the comparative absence of
managerial self-recruitment actually weakens immobility tendencies
within the middle class. However, as managers come to look more like
professionals in their processes of occupational recruitment, intergen-
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 101
erational mobility patterns of managers and professionals will also

converge because of increased self-recruitment within the managerial
fraction of the new middle class.
Conclusion: credentials, class and inequality

In the absence of countervailing factors, increased educational
inequality will arguably be associated with an increasing impact of
social origins on socioeconomic outcomes (a likely scenario because
overall demand for higher education is falling and the declining
effects of class origins on social outcomes are largely a function of edu-
cational expansion) and a consequent hardening of mobility bound-
aries between classes. Australian society will, in other words, be less
open to class mobility from one generation to the next, and inequality
that is directly linked to social origins will likely increase.
However, there are some potentially countervailing tendencies to
these patterns. These tendencies reflect the increasing insecurity of cer-
tain professional and managerial jobs – a result of the same competi-
tive pressures that propelled the marketisation of higher education in
the 1980s. Organisational analyses in Australia and overseas have
highlighted the effects of increased competition on people in manage-
rial jobs in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to this research,
increased market competition throughout western industrialised
economies in the 1980s and 1990s encouraged substantial organisa-
tional restructuring in the form of managerial downsizing and de-
layering. During that period, organisations progressively shed
managerial and, to a lesser extent, professional employees, and moved
to flatter, less hierarchical structures, in a bid to increase competitive
efficiency (Litter, Dunford, Bramble & Hede, 1996; Scase & Goffee,
1989). Organisational restructuring in the face of increased competi-
tion has arguably been associated with a dissolution of traditional,
predictable bureaucratic career paths, and has contributed to increased
volatility over the worklife for professional and managerial employees
(Leicht & Fennell, 1997; Halford & Savage, 1996). These processes
potentially weaken the linkage between credentials, secure income
streams and economic welfare. Arguments about the impact of
increasing class differentials in access to higher education on social
inequality therefore potentially lose some of their bite as the relative
economic circumstances of middle-class people worsen (assuming
of course that working-class people do not themselves become
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 102
increasingly economically vulnerable – an untenable assumption

given other changes occurring in the economies of advanced western
capitalist countries).
An alternative possibility is that in times of economic insecurity cre-
dentials matter more, not less, for economic welfare as individuals
attempt to ‘insure’ themselves against the exigencies of the labour
market through a process of credentialing and continuous reskilling.
Under this latter scenario, class differences in access to higher educa-
tion – and, equally importantly, to opportunities for training over
one’s working life – will have further consequences for socioeconomic
inequality and consolidate boundaries between privileged primary,
and disadvantaged secondary, labour markets.
The empirical evidence that might enable us to predict which of
these scenarios is more likely to be realised is somewhat equivocal. It
may in fact be too early to tell. In Australia, like many other western
industrial societies in the 1980s and 1990s, earnings inequality
increased (OECD 1993, 1996). In itself, this finding tends to contradict
arguments that the economic circumstances of middle-class and work-
ing-class people are becoming more similar, because if this were hap-
pening we would expect earnings inequality to diminish rather than
increase. In Australia, the largest increase in inequality during the
period occurred among male employees (Borland & Wilkins, 1996;
Gregory, 1993), and essentially went through two stages. Initially (in
the late 1970s and early 1980s) earnings inequality in the bottom half
of the earnings distribution worsened. More recently, inequality in the
top half of the distribution has increased (Borland & Wilkins, 1996). If
credentials increasingly determine economic welfare in a time of eco-
nomic restructuring, we might expect that the rise in earnings inequal-
ity is due to an increase in the economic returns to education. Earnings
inequality rises when the economic rewards for education, particularly
higher education, increase – perhaps because economic restructuring
increases the demand for expert labour more quickly than supply can
keep up. While this argument seems to explain rising earnings
inequality in the United States and the United Kingdom between the
1970s and 1990s (Borland & Wilkins, 1996), it does not appear to apply
strongly in Australia. In Australia, earnings inequality worsened
because the spread of earnings within educational groups (such as
those possessing university degrees) increased. This result suggests, at
least among full-time male employees, that education and earnings in
Australia have become uncoupled to some extent, but in a way that
exacerbates economic inequality rather than diminishes it.
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 103
For Borland and Wilkins (1996) increased earnings dispersion within

educational groups reflects the growing importance of unmeasured
skills; that is, skills that are not captured by explicitly measuring edu-
cation and experience. Recent research in class analysis, however, sug-
gests other candidate factors. Martin (1998) has recently shown that,
for those in professional and managerial middle-class jobs, earnings
inequalities between public- and private-sector employees have gen-
erally increased, to the detriment of public-sector employees, while the
relative position of managers with respect to professionals has essen-
tially improved. The second of these findings suggests that the balance
of middle-class power, at least as it relates to earnings, may be shifting
partly away from those with professional expertise towards those with
organisational or managerial authority. If this is the case, and manage-
ment becomes credentialised in the manner Gronn describes, there
may be some re-alignment in overall demand for entry to professional
and managerial courses at universities. While this process would
potentially re-order the positional value of managerial and professional
qualifications within educational institutions, it would not re-stratify
the institutions of higher education themselves.
Moreover, if economic returns to organisational authority are rising
at a time when universities increasingly determine access to manage-
rial jobs, the central role of educational institutions in processes of
class formation and inequality is guaranteed, even as those processes
themselves change. The centrality of educational institutions in shap-
ing processes of class formation and class inequality thus appears to be
one of the enduring features of the contemporary period.
Notes
1. There is some ambiguity in Gronn’s treatment of elite socialisation. His
analysis is closely informed by elite theory and associated arguments about
meritocratic processes of elite recruitment and succession. Nonetheless, his
conclusion clearly recognises that elite recruitment in Australia and Britain
has been selective and thus unmeritocratic.
2. It is important to distinguish between considerations of fairness and con-
siderations of merit when talking about elite recruitment processes (and
social selection processes more generally). A genuinely meritocratic system
of social selection allows everyone equal opportunity to compete for social
positions, but individual ‘success’ and the rewards that flow from this,
depend partly on abilities and talents that are genetically randomly dis-
tributed. Since the initial distribution is unfair, so are the unequal outcomes
that flow from a meritocratic process (Marshall et al., 1997, ch.2).
Xch5E2 15/4/04 12:20 PM Page 104
3. With the publication of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray (1994) have
recently challenged the view that ability is equally distributed across classes,
at least in the United States. Herrnstein and Murray (1994) argue that cog-
nitive ability is increasingly important for job performance in the US so that
the link between ability (measured by IQ) and occupational level is becom-
ing stronger over time. In addition, assortative mating means that people
tend to marry others with similar characteristics to themselves (occupation,
education, IQ and so on) and, given the genetic heritability of IQ, to have
children whose IQs closely reflect those of their parents. These processes
combine to ensure that cognitive differences will come to map more direct-
ly onto class differences and also imply that class differences in cognitive
ability will increase over time. In Britain, Saunders (1997, 1995) has simi-
larly (and correctly) pointed out that recent class mobility research has neg-
lected the possibility that class mobility patterns might reflect differences in
ability rather than processes of class advantage and disadvantage. The
work of Saunders, and of Herrnstein and Murray has aroused considerable
critical response. In response to Herrnstein and Murray, Fischer et al. (1996)
have convincingly shown that ability and social origin matter for a range of
social outcomes, while Weakliem et al. (1995) have shown contra The Bell
Curve, that US class differences in intellectual ability are actually smaller in
younger cohorts, not larger. The more compelling rebuttal of cognitive
stratification arguments, however, is that differences in intellectual ability
actually matter very little for overall levels of inequality. Eliminating dif-
ferences in cognitive ability would diminish household income inequality
in the US by at most about 10 per cent (Fischer et al., 1996; Fig.1.2) and strat-
ification by cognitive ability cannot possibly explain the increases in
income inequality that occurred in many OECD countries in the 1980s and
1990s.
4. This point is admittedly contentious. (See Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992;
Jones & Davis, 1986 for a contrary view.)
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 105
Institutions with designs:

consuming school
children1
JANE KENWAY AND LINDSAY FITZCLARENCE
Compulsory education is one of the defining characteristics of modern

childhood: to a degree therefore, any politics of schooling is also a poli-
tics of childhood, with inevitable implications for the lives that children
lead and for the way that childhood itself is understood. (Wagg, 1996,
p.8)
This chapter is concerned with the marketisation of schools in

Australia and the manner in which students are inscribed within the
marketisation process. It focuses specifically on the ways in which a
group of working-class/under-class students in both primary and sec-
ondary schools read their schools’ commodification practices and
write themselves within and around them. The first section provides
some brief information on the main features of the marketisation of
Australian schools, the gaps in the international research and the
research projects which inform the chapter. The remainder of the chap-
ter draws on ideas from the advertising industry and from cultural
theorists’ discussions of advertising and commodification to interpret
the marketisation of schooling and its implications for students’ iden-
tities and for adult/child and social class relationships. An under-
standing of such matters leads to the question ‘Is this the sort of
education we want for our children?’
105
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 106
Policy developments, frames of analysis,

strange silences
Australian governments have spent the last decade redesigning edu-
cational institutions and education systems and schools have been
reshaped in quite profound ways. They have been steered towards
‘free’-market mores, manners and morals but within the tight rein of
State and Federal government policies which now imply that school
systems are primarily investments in human and political capital and
national and State identity. School systems and schools have been
stripped of finance, staff, assets and previous educational ethics.
Schools now are expected not only to operate within the tight and nar-
row frameworks developed by State and national governments, but
also to operate as ‘free’ agents within such frameworks.
A range of practices associated with such ‘devolution’ and with
deregulation, dezoning, and deliberate disaggregation, have encour-
aged schools to see themselves as free-standing entrepreneurial small
businesses. They are increasingly competing with each other for
‘clients’; namely parents and sponsors, and the money that flows from
them. Parents and students are encouraged to adopt a consumerist
stance to schools and to knowledge. In their governance, schools are
expected to, and often do, draw inspiration from industry manage-
ment models. Further, many are importing expertise from marketing
and fundraising experts, developing marketing plans, establishing
sponsorship/fundraising committees and undertaking advertising
programs. Educational language is being subsumed by marketing lan-
guage. Many businesses are now advertising in schools, using them
for the production of brand loyalty and reputation. This broad set of
changes is now commonly referred to as marketisation. Although with
somewhat different manifestations, marketisation is now a feature
of public schooling systems in the US, UK, New Zealand and much
of Canada.
The marketisation of schools in such countries has attracted a great
deal of critical research. However, the focus has largely been on gov-
ernment policy, principals and parents and on associated issues of
school choice, school management and, more broadly, social, economic
and philosophical imperatives and implications. Such studies privi-
lege the role of the economy, governments and educational systems
and institutions and rely heavily on political, institutional and eco-
nomic theories in their analyses. The cultural seems to be reduced to
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 107
INSTITUTIONS WITH DESIGNS: CONSUMING SCHOOL CHILDREN 107
the political and institutional. These foci imply that such changes have
little connection to changing cultures more broadly – that the marketi-
sation of school education is unconnected to the rise of the commodity
and the image in the 1990s and beyond. We believe that studies of mar-
ketisation require a richer understanding of the relationship between
the economy and cultural forms of commodification and that current
understanding can be greatly enhanced if they are complemented by
insights from cultural studies. Cultural studies have the capacity to
help us identify some of the more subtle educational and identity
effects of such changes.
Because so little attention has been paid to the cultural in associa-
tion with the economic and social contexts of marketisation, we have
very little sense of the ways in which schools’ marketing practices map
onto other marketing practices, and how educational consumerism
maps onto broader patterns of consumer culture. For example, it could
be argued that the marketisation of education is an indicator of what
Lee (1993, p.135) calls the:
‘dematerialisation’ of the commodity form, where the act of exchange
centres upon those commodities which are time, rather than substance,
based.
He suggests that there has been a rapid growth in the development of

such ‘experiential commodities’ in recent times and that this repre-
sents ‘the push to accelerate commodity values and turnovers’ and is
part of the more general ‘move to make more flexible and fluid the
various opportunities and moments of consumption’ (1993, p.137).
Relatively little serious attention has been paid to the semiotic and
identity aspects of schools’ marketing practices. Further, until recently,
little attention had been paid to the ways in which children/students
are constructed within the discourses of marketisation despite the fact
that the traditional family is placed quite centrally. Indeed, as
Oppenheim and Lister (1996) point out, on such family/market mat-
ters there is a dual and somewhat contradictory emphasis within New
Right thinking. On the one hand we see the individual ‘consumer and
economic actor’ involved in maximising self-interest and, on the other,
we see the family unit with all its incumbent gendered traditions of
male/female, adult/child responsibility and obligation.
Social conservatism is in strange juxtaposition to neo-liberalism.
Nonetheless, the research literature does not show how parents’ edu-
cational consumption maps onto and accelerates their other habits of
consumption and the implications for the construction of the family.
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 108
Further, students themselves and the ways in which they participate in

the market culture of their schools are also largely absent from this
body of research. This reflects the more general marginalisation of chil-
dren in the recent discourses of education policy. We have very little
research on the implications for the construction of young people as
educational consumers, the ways in which students’ educational con-
sumption connects with the specificity of their other consumption pat-
terns. Finally, we have few explorations of the consequences and
implications of such matters for schools’ educational purposes as
opposed to their management practices.
Research program
Such matters have been central to a set of research projects we have
conducted over several years.2 This chapter draws from those aspects
that are concerned particularly with the semiotic work involved in
schools’ marketing practices, with the identities offered to students
and with the different desires, fears and fantasies such marketing prac-
tices produce and ignore. In considering the standpoint of students we
go beyond well-known accounts of ‘choice’. We point both to the man-
ner in which schools construct students as educational consumers and
commodities, and to the manner in which students construct them-
selves as consumers and producers of schools’ semiotic value by
drawing on the ‘worldliness’ they have developed through their
engagements with consumer/media culture (Kenway et al., 1996).
There is then a link to earlier work that has recognised students’
agency in ‘shaping’ the school culture in order to achieve particular,
personal, ends. For example, Paul Willis (1977) in his study titled
‘Learning to Labour’ employed a socially critical and constructivist
logic to explain how the subjects of his study were agential in their
attempts to influence and shape their immediate social environment.
For our purposes here, in examining consumer/media culture of the
1990s, it is pertinent to note that this culture has created a cohort of
semi-sophisticates, prompting Guber and Berry (1993, p.14) to assert
that ‘kids are worldly’. Holland (1996) calls them the ‘supermarket
generation’. In part, their worldliness comes from access to the mass
media and its reconstructions of children as active consumers of cul-
ture, partly through their direct engagement in consumption through
ownership of disposable income, but mainly by virtue of their influ-
ence on their parents’ consumption behaviour. However, this
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 109
worldliness is not politically neutral. It develops within a context of

market relations that is deeply ideological. Market relations – or what
Ball (1997) refers to as ‘the politics of choice’ – are ideological in the
sense that responsibility for the positive and/or negative conse-
quences of choice is directed back at individuals and their families.
Ball (1997, p.9) elaborates:
Education itself is commodified and the values and practices in which it
is embedded are commercialized. Educational provision is increasingly
made susceptible to profit and educational processes play their part in
the creation of the enterprise culture and cultivation of enterprising sub-
jects. Again the market and new managerialism are central to the active
transformation of the practices and the meaning of education.
This chapter arises from interview and participant observation

research conducted during 1994–95 in seven (anonymised here)
schools in Geelong, a provincial Australian city. The students come
from different primary and secondary school age groups, different
sociocultural backgrounds and schools with different orientations to
the marketing of education. However, the student data is mostly from
a selected group of students (years 3/4, 5/6, 7, 10, 12) and three
schools (primary, middle/ secondary and senior/college) in a suburb
fictionally called Willis. The suburb is part of an area that is surrounded
by heavy industry and which has been subject to intense industrial
restructuring over the last few years. Several of the major industries of
the area have recently closed down, while several smaller industries
have set up. The overall unemployment rates are high on a local and
regional basis and the suburb is stigmatised by those outside it. So,
what are the marketing practices of these schools and what are their
implications for our research students?
Advertising
Direct advertising is now considered a normal and uncontroversial
practice through which schools seek to attract students, finance and
reputation. They mount billboards in schoolgrounds, sometimes sup-
ported by sponsors. They advertise in newspapers, on radio, in
increasingly glossy brochures/prospectuses and at education fairs.
Schools distribute professionally produced, multicoloured glossy
booklets and folders complete with numerous colour photos. These
usually depict attractive, happy, busy, often multi-cultural groups of
children actively engaged in learning or play – usually uniformly uni-
formed.
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Let us go beyond description of such practices and seek to develop

a deeper understanding of the processes at work here by drawing on
cultural analyses of advertising. There are several points to be made.
Firstly, advertising is central to the process of market exchange, so as
soon as schools entered market relationships with each other it was
virtually inevitable that they would advertise. Secondly, advertising is
not only a key element of a market culture, but also pivotal to the
growth of such cultures. At the same time, it establishes its own
momentum – it feeds on itself and takes on a life of its own. Thus the
more schools advertise, the more they will become absorbed within a
market culture, and the more they will have to advertise. It is therefore
predictable that an increasing proportion of school budgets will be
diverted towards advertising and away from educational matters.
Clearly then, advertising is a key element in institutional redesign.
Thirdly, advertising is a complex type of communication. It is selec-
tive and strategic; it advocates and seeks to persuade. As Young (1990,
p.291) says, ‘Advertising is a particular form of discourse where only
the best side of a case is put forward, so that the virtues of the topic are
presented to the relative neglect of the vices’. It is about ‘face value’
and ‘best face’. It thus stands in direct opposition to education in the
sense that education, in its best forms, encourages students to consider
issues from many angles and to look beneath the surface, to examine
assumptions. Fourth, advertisements and the commodities they pro-
mote are bearers of the values of production and exchange. In this
sense, school advertisements set certain educational agendas, establish
priorities and seek symbolic closure around them. Fifth, advertising’s
‘art of social influence’ involves an understanding not only of the
utility role of goods and services in the lives of consumers, but also
the social and cultural value of goods and services to the consumer
(sign value). As Lee (1993) argues, goods and services are used as a
form of cultural expression by the consumer. However, the matter
does not stop there because advertisements also ‘produce dream-
scapes, collective fantasies and facades’ (Zukin, 1991, p.219). Through
their advertisements, schools are constructing educational dreams –
they tap into a whole range of fantasies, many of which are only
indirectly connected to education.
Enrolment times in Geelong result in a rash of advertisements in the
local press. Schools are constantly on the lookout to identify the best
value to add. Hence, their advertising is not just about the matters
noted above or the communication of information, but also about
product differentiation. Schools are now searching for their differences
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 111
rather than their commonalities and thinking in terms of market share.

They are searching for the right market signal – the key word, image
or slogan that will mark them out as distinctive and attractive. The
schools’ slogans published in local newspapers during the first period
of our research in 1994 included: Quality Education; Latest
Technology; Caring Community; New VCE Campus; International
Reputation; Girls Set for Future; A Career Pathway; Preparing for Life.
When reading such advertisements our research students responded
in two ways, both worldly. First, they commented on the quality of the
advertisements’ semiotics; on the pictures and the size and the struc-
ture of the message and the amount and type of information. The fol-
lowing remark was typical:
That one is the best. Geelong College – because it tells you about it and
it’s got a photo and it’s got some information here and the heading
stands out. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)
Secondly, students remarked on the slogans which attract them and

why. They preferred the following:
SG: ‘Latest Technology’, ‘New VCE Campus’ and ‘Securing the Future’.
SG: I reckon ‘Career Pathway’, ‘Latest Technology’ and ‘Preparing for

Life’ because you have to always pass VCE to get a job.
SG: ‘Caring Community’ – that if you can’t cope with that school they
care for you, like they understand what you are going through. (Willis
Primary, Year 5/6)3
Advertising depends on touching something deep in the con-

sumer’s psyche. As Williams (1974) observes, advertising is a social
narrative which inscribes goods with a ‘narrative capacity’. It tells fic-
tional tales about social identities and relationships and implies that
the purchase of goods will fulfil the story’s promise. However, adver-
tisements are not expected to fulfil their promises but rather to connect
to their readers’ fantasies about themselves and their futures. Drawing
on Berger and Haug, Lee (1993, p.19) argues that advertising is judged
by the spectator/viewer according to its relevance to fantasies or
yearnings, rather than its capacity to fulfil its promises or its connec-
tion to reality. ‘Seductive illusion’ is what sells. Advertisements also
have the potential to provoke plaisir – the pleasure which is derived
from a recognition that ‘the text’ acknowledges a group’s distinctive
values and aspirations (Barthes, 1975). All three can be seen in the stu-
dents’ responses.
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Recurring themes emerge from discussions with children about the

desirable features of school life. Students of all ages were most respon-
sive to themes about social dynamics, the new and the future. They
showed a marked preference for advertisements that stressed caring
relationships. Such foci are not surprising. Further, the anxiety gener-
ated by social and political change is registered in the students’ con-
cerns that schools are secure and safe environments. Accordingly, the
way schools ‘appear’ (friendly/safe/pleasant compared with hos-
tile/unsafe/alien) is fundamental. As Mackay (1993) and others make
clear, young people are being educated during a period of massive
social uncertainty and redefinition. Schools are integral in their search
for security; but security is elusive, particularly for students from
Willis. At the same time, the students indicated preferences about mat-
ters that were deemed to be technological. These students are the
‘Nintendo generation’. Growing up with computers and video games
sets many parameters of expectation and hope.
Identifying problems and anxieties and offering them solutions
through consumption is a standard advertising ploy and school adver-
tisements are no different. They tap into parents’ and students’ fears of
the present and the future (employment and unemployment) and
promise them a consumerist solution – ‘success, happiness and well-
being’ through the right choice of school. Students implicitly under-
stand that advertising works in this manner, as the following response
demonstrates:
INT: If you made an advertisement for this school, what pictures would
you use?
SB: The new bike shed, the library, sporting facilities, artwork display,
computer room, with kids playing football and netball. They would be
having fun. People reading the books in the Library. Cooking. The kids
would be in uniform or their sport’s uniform. A display of teachers read-
ing books to the kids. The words they would use would be ‘good edu-
cation’. Lost-property box, the stuff in the canteen. They want to hear
that you have good discipline, a good range of subjects, happy students,
safe. ... Secure, we have lunch passes, you can go only to your own
house and then back to school. (Hall, Year 9)
Impression management
Marketing, as opposed to advertising, involves a wide range of con-
trived semiotic practices, or, what Gewirtz et al. (1995, p.121) refer to
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 113
as ‘symbolic production’. These include such things as product design

packaging and imagery, product differentiation/positioning and repo-
sitioning when necessary, and product renewal involving redesign
and redefinition. It may involve market segmentation and associated
population targeting and ‘impression management’ associated with
such concrete matters as location, architectural design, floor layout,
and display.
All schools promote themselves through a variety of impression
management activities and techniques. These include open days for
prospective students, open nights for parents, good-news stories in the
local press, the ‘glossification’ (Gerwitz, 1995, p.127) of foyer/school
entrances, and the ‘look’ of the school and logos on stationery. These
times also require many schools to redesign themselves.
In the context of interschool competition, those schools with histor-
ically poor reputations usually seek image redesign and repositioning.
This is the case with Willis Senior College, the senior school of the
group of schools that are the focus of this chapter. It was previously a
trades-oriented technical school and attracted all the usual stigma of
such schools. It now has a program catering specifically for year 11 and
12 students, with a dual focus on professional and trade subjects. The
school is part of an amalgamated multi-site campus that combines
three schools. There are two middle-level feeder schools. Hall is one
of these.
Features of Willis Senior College connect strongly with the needs of
the local area and include a wide subject range, a focus on information
technology, no uniform and free movement for students. The school is
making a concerted effort to create a changed public awareness
through such activities as advertisements in local
newspapers/newsletters, students on radio talking about different
programs offered at the school and displays in the local shopping cen-
tre about courses and classes. It has identified its niche and now seeks
to persuade both insiders and outsiders of the school’s merits. This is
no easy matter given the suburb’s bad reputation, even among some
who live there.
The emerging quasi-corporate style of schools is not addressed to
students so much as to parents and potential sponsors. Nonetheless,
students understood the importance of ‘the look’. They explain teach-
ers’ apparent obsession with tidiness in terms of the school image and
agree that such material factors are important for this reason. At Hall
they said ‘they want to sell the place by making it look swish’ and ‘the
school needs painting and dressing up a bit’. They are disgusted that
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 114
‘some of the schools around don’t even have grass’ and observed that
‘having gardens is important’. The older students at Willis Senior
College are particularly aware of the connections between a school’s
physical appearance and its reputation and feel aggrieved at the way
their school looks. They comment forcefully on the need to improve
the grounds.
For our research students in their final years of schooling, school
visits and information nights had not figured prominently in their
educational histories. Times have changed greatly in the intervening
years and the reverse is true for the younger students. As Gewirtz et al.
(1995, p.128) say of similar events in England, such events are ‘becom-
ing slicker and are geared towards selling the school in a much more
thrusting way’. When asked about the impact of school visits on them
all students were articulate and thoughtful:
INT: When you visit the schools on Open Day what would make you
think ‘I would like to come here’?
SB: I am going to Hall High because we went there with the school ...
they had some good stuff there – the dark room where they do the video
and the cooking and they have got a big library, for when you do proj-
ects. And the cooking and the computer groups. And they’ve got this
room where when you want a job you can go and ask ... and they can
look for a job for you.
SG: I decided to go to Brunsdon Heights because they’ve got everything
set out, like, there is a big hallway and they’ve got what is down that
hallway, like, it says Technology and Maths, it’s a smaller school and
you won’t get lost. And they’ve got tennis courts and basketball courts
and they’ve got a big gym and they’ve got good stuff. At the other end
of the school they’ve got a primary school and they use their oval as
well. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)
The school visits are geared directly to students, in various ways.

Some schools seek to establish strict standards right from the outset,
others seek to create an attractive atmosphere, and others seek to blend
both. Our students enjoyed visits to schools that offered them hands-
on activities, where obvious care was given to planning the day, where
the teachers were friendly. They particularly appreciated being given
food and drink. Their comments make it clear that such brief encoun-
ters count to some extent, although they are not necessarily the decid-
ing factor in choice of school. The older students emphasised friendly
relationships with peers and teachers. However, as the following
remarks indicate, they usually wanted a friendly controlled environ-
ment, not one where kids were out of control.
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SB: I went to the Johnston Park Open Day ... you looked sideways and
you’d get into trouble. You come here and can be chatting away and it
seemed like a breeze. I wanted to come here.
SG: I didn’t like the teachers at the other schools and the classes were out
of control. I expected to see the teachers in control. (Hall, Year 10)
Students were also aware, however, that the schools were trying to
make a good impression and commented with some bitterness about
being sold out when the school did not live up to its image in the fol-
lowing years.
Other school-image work includes making success visible and con-
cealing ‘failure’. ‘Best face’ involves publicising successes in sporting
and cultural competitions and in public exams, and making visible
high-achieving students. While schools like to emphasise academic
achievements, the students noticed sport and culture most. The Rock
Eisteddfod, a national performing arts competition, had a particular
impact. It performed a powerful marketing function for the winning
school and was remembered long after by students from a range of
schools. Winning was equated with being a good school, even when it
was understood that resources were implicated. Indeed, good educa-
tion was implicitly associated with resources in the students’ minds.
Working for the image

And what of the school labour that goes into the production of the
image of the school, but which is so frequently concealed beneath the
smoothness of the school’s surface: its uniforms, its conformist behav-
iour? According to the edicts of the education market, all members of
the school community are to play their part in the schools’ image
work.
Principals are expected to hustle for customers, reputation and
resources – cultivating clients, seeking sponsors, they are now educa-
tional entrepreneurs. School councils are to accept the responsibility
for favourably positioning the school so it can gain a competitive edge
over other schools. School charters and image audits help them to ful-
fil this function – their audience is external, not internal. Teachers are
expected to do their share of image work by devoting extra time and
effort to those things that count in the educational market place.
Again, this means teaching to the outside rather than the inside – to
the image.
In the educational market place, teachers are rather paradoxical fig-
ures for students. While students’ long-term and most heart-felt
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 116
comments on their schooling are tied up with the quality of teachers,

school advertisements almost never mention teachers. Until their sen-
ior years, most students believe that ‘strict teachers’ enhance the image
of the school.
A common view of a school with a good name includes strict teach-
ers, good students and tidy grounds. Teachers who are not strict are
seen as uncaring. Lifting the image is associated with teachers becom-
ing more strict. Interestingly, students do not necessarily value and
enjoy such teachers. As the year 12 students said of Willis Senior
College:
SG: We have better rapport with teachers here. There are not two levels.
SB: There is not so much discipline so we can all relax.
While at one level students say they prefer their teachers to be ‘lov-
ing and caring’, they know that adults value discipline and that it pays
off in enhancing the school’s name, which has flow-on benefits to
them. It is ironic, however, in our bigger study that the schools with
the worst reputations were those where the senior students spoke
most favourably about their teachers, their relationships with them
and their enjoyment of the atmosphere of the school. The better the
reputation, the more critical the students were of the teachers and the
atmosphere.
Marketing provides the vital link between production and con-
sumption. Thus it facilitates, mediates and arbitrates culture. As Kline
(1993, pp.30–1) argues, advertising ‘forcefully communicates about the
nature of social relations and ultimately asserts its place in shaping
those relations’. He continues:
By amplifying, augmenting, recycling and re-interpreting established
social mores, values, attitudes and customs, marketing communication
legitimates, guides and sets priorities for particular relations of con-
sumption.
Clearly the education market reflects and refracts the power rela-
tions between adults and children. It also has important implications
for the ways in which children construct themselves as learners.
Children who, outside school, are actively encouraged to self-define as
active consumers with a keen sense of what forms a desirable market
identity, are placed in a contradictory position when they encounter
strict teachers who position them as non-autonomous learners. In this
sense the skills of ‘marketing communication’ learned outside school
emerge as sources of contradiction inside schools.
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Parents and students as/and educational commodities

In the market context of schooling, parents and students have become
commodities. They are both consumers of the school’s use value, and
producers of its exchange value; they have a double role, the second
aspect of which is usually overlooked in the literature. Parents (usually
mothers) are told to ‘shop around’. In this process there are complex
psychological forces at work. At one level the task of choosing a school
operates through the conventional discourse of education, including a
focus on such issues as school facilities, appearance and ‘performance
ratings’. On the other hand, this task activates a non-rational sphere of
desires, fears and fantasies (commensurate with everyday shopping
practices?).(See for example, David, West & Ribbens, 1994.)
Within consumer culture, people’s lives are saturated with com-
modities and images that have the potential to generate dreams and
desires, fears and fantasies, repressions and displacements. In this con-
text, advertisers seek to ensure not only that consumption becomes a
primary source of identity, but also that desire to consume becomes
a primary motivating force. According to Lasch, such desire involves
a restless narcissistic pursuit of pleasure, of self-indulgence – it pro-
motes the id of society. And, as Seiter (1994, p.40) explains, because
women and children are cast as the main consumers they are also cast
as the irresponsible id.
Educational marketing takes such levels of consciousness into
account but, at the same time, implies that it does not. Having assessed
all the market indicators, parents (mothers) and, by implication, stu-
dents are to make an informed rational ‘choice’. Promoters of educa-
tional markets imply that such ‘choices’ are made on educational as
opposed to other grounds, and that they represent a statement about
the quality of the school. However, there are many non-educational
reasons for school selection and, indeed, many intuitive and non-
‘rational’ reasons.
Students at Willis point out that usually the decision about which
school they will attend is predetermined by the range of schools within
the immediate locality, by finance, or by the choices of friends. It is
often made over a long period. The students point out that informa-
tion evenings will therefore not necessarily have a major influence on
their parents. Many reported that their parents did not attend them.
However, they indicated that when there was a possibility of ‘choice’,
such events could hold sway, but again for an interesting range of rea-
sons. For example:
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 118
My parents didn’t want me to go to McRobbie because when they went

there they saw girls spitting on the table and rubbing it in. (Girl, Year 10,
Hall)
Having made their choice/investment, parents are then expected to

protect it by adding to their school’s resources and by advancing its
reputation. Parents are expected to work hard at making their children
work hard and to invest time and money in the school or, at least, to
invest time and/or money in their child’s schooling. Despite their lim-
ited funds, parents in Willis pour many additional resources into the
education of their children. At home, many students have encyclope-
dias, desks and computers. Many also attend dance, gymnastics,
music, drama and tennis classes. In contrast with schools on the other
side (up-side) of town, few have extra tutoring, but they say that their
teachers give them extra help if they need it.
Those parents who do not invest in these ways are increasingly
regarded by all our research schools as negligent. All participants tend
to believe that ‘best value’ parents (usually fathers) are those who
deliver the following: networks into sponsorship circles, financial and
other capital, including the appropriate intellectual capital for school
governance – legal, accountancy and management skills are highly
prized. Those who are prepared to offer other unpaid labour (e.g.
mothers in school canteens) are also ‘appreciated’ but not necessarily
prized. By implication, single parents, parents in poverty or, indeed,
any parents who do not fit the middle-class WASP norm or who expect
something different from the norm, are seen to add negative value. This
suggests that critical analyses of education markets must account
for power relations as constituted across a range of different axes. Let
us elaborate.
It is widely recognised that advertisements and commodities are
used by both producers and consumers to ‘construct and articulate’
(Kline, 1993, p.12) the social relationships between social classes, races
and the sexes. For example, gender identities and relationships are a
central feature of consumer culture and of educational markets.
Research has pointed to the ways in which school shopping adds to
mothers’ consumption work and confirms the domestic and familial
ideologies in households (David et al., 1994; Discourse, 1996, Vol.17,
No.3). However, the point needs to be made that it also confirms the
idea of the household as a consumption unit. It is clear from this liter-
ature that markets in schooling ‘construct and articulate’ the gendered
power relationships within families. What is less evident in this litera-
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 119
ture is the ways in which such markets ‘construct and articulate’ the
social power relationships between adults (parents and teachers) and
children. We suggest that while it does involve a certain level of nego-
tiated reading, ultimately it does not involve much ‘semiotic demo-
cracy’ (Fisk, 1987).
An understanding of broader marketing practices with regard to
children is useful in coming to grips with the commodification of
school education. The commodity and the media have been central in
the social construction of the child/consumer, changing family forms,
gender and age relations, and the connections between them. With the
aid of advertising and new media forms, the market has increasingly
separated children from adults and from each other, offering them
identities based along a consumption grid. It has offered children con-
sumption as a primary motivating force, and offered them cultural
artefacts with which to construct their dreams, set their priorities and
solve their problems They build their groups’ commonalities and dif-
ferences, and establish their personhood, around such priorities. All of
this has implications for the commodification of schooling and for stu-
dents’ perceptions of it.
In school education, children are implicitly defined as powerless
and dependent, and the commercialisation of schooling reinforces this.
Selling children’s school education to parents offers a strong message
to children about who is in control and what matters. Advertising in
consumer/media culture ‘promotes informality, impulsiveness and
lack of deference to authority’ (Holland, 1996, p.164), and offers auton-
omy and pleasure. In contrast with the child of consumer/media cul-
ture, the child of school advertising is compliant and serious,
attending constantly to the needs of the school and implicitly to those
of adults. We do not know of anyone in the literature who has consid-
ered this, yet even students as young as years 3/4 know what parents
want in a school. They do not want a ‘children’s space’ but rather one
like the unattractive world of education constructed on the screen –
serious, controlled, old-fashioned, puritanical, and disciplined; a place
in which children must be restrained for their own good.
INT: What do you think parents would look for in a school? What do
you think they would see as important?
SG: What type of people you will be mixing with. Like if they are nice.
SG: Discipline system, whatever that is.
SG: The behaviour. (Willis Primary, Year 5/6)
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Value-added students, those with ‘face value’, are those who lift the
school’s academic, sporting or cultural performance and image, and
who conform to the school’s and the teachers’ educational norms –
only the good are good for the school. As a year 10 girl at Hall says,
‘Our school stresses on getting high marks. If you don’t get high marks
you are gone and you are just a person that sits up the back.’ All stu-
dents have similar perceptions and invariably the smart/dumb cate-
gory is mobilised. Clearly this is an old story but with a market gloss.
Low performing and/or badly behaved students, or those who
place extra demands on the school, are also seen to add ‘negative
value’. This is something that the students understand very well
indeed. Again we see the students’ terms and the likely school’s terms
alongside each other, but we also see that the students believe that
they too have a vested interest in closing the gates on certain students.
SG: Bad students, they kick people.
SG: They tease people.
SG: Punch you.
SG: Without them it would be better because everyone would be up to
the same standard and then they wouldn’t have to slow down that
much. They could go at their own speed.
SG: And learn more things because if they don’t know how to do one
thing they can’t learn to do other things.
INT: So you think the less brights would hold the others back a bit?
SG: Yes. And all the naughty kids would make their grade miss out on
all the good stuff. (Willis, Years 5/6)
Sociological and cultural, as opposed to economic, analyses of mar-

kets point to the various social and cultural uses to which all sorts of
consumer goods and services are put: ‘consumed symbolically, as a
social meaning or as a cultural good’ (Lee, 1993, p.17). They point to
the dual nature of such commodities as both objects and symbols. For
consumers, consumption performs a number of purposes above and
beyond necessity. It plays an important role in group formation, iden-
tity, distinctions, differentiations and relationships. Consumption also
works as a form of displacement and social control, and as indicated
with regard to adults and children, relationships of power are refracted
through practices and patterns of consumption. While there may not
be a perfect fit between production/representation and consumption,
unruly patterns do emerge and change, although less often.
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Style and reputation

Style is a key ingredient of consumption and arguably in these image-
conscious ‘designer decades’ (Lee, 1993, p.115), style has assumed an
increased importance as we see ‘a shift away from notions of sub-
stance and content and towards packaging, aesthetic form and “the
look”’(Lee, 1993, p.ix). Style can be understood in a range of ways. It
‘is a way that the human values, structures and assumptions in a given
society are aesthetically expressed’ (Ewen, 1984, p.3). It can be seen to
provide the impetus for markets in appearances, surfaces and mystifi-
cations. But style can also be understood as providing tools for ‘con-
structing personhood’, as a statement about who one is and wishes to
be. Style allows people to imagine themselves differently; it provides
an opportunity to define and redefine themselves. To quote Barthes, it
can be ‘a dream of identity’, even a ‘dream of wholeness’ in an age of
fragmentation and alienation. For all these reasons consumption is
very closely connected to the world of the emotions.
Even if they are not the schools’ most valued students, all students
are expected to perform their part in the school’s circuit of exchange
by being well behaved, ‘doing their best’, showing ‘pride in the school’
and not holding others back. They are to contribute to its semiotics; its
style or tone. Indeed, school style has become a major marketing tool,
another product which is implicated in the school’s system of commun-
ications. While, as noted, style can be seen as providing a tool for ‘con-
structing personhood’ it can also be seen as a tool for constructing the
identity of the school and for constructing marketable power relations
between adult and child. It often means an emphasis on the school’s
appearance, its surface, and involves a form of mystification or mythi-
fication.
Students’ behaviour is a major feature of school style and functions
as a sign to adults. On matters of style, ‘hope and anxiety are never
very far apart’ (Ewan, 1984, p.159). Good behaviour points to issues of
order, discipline and adult authority over children, as distinct from the
more permissive and unruly behaviour often associated with popular
culture. Compliant and docile behaviour is taken as a sign that a
school is functioning in a manner that fosters traditional and stable
values, and producing ‘good’ students who:
SG: Finish their work on time ... listen to the teacher.
SG: Doesn’t do stupid things.
SG: Have manners. (Willis, Year 5/6)
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In contrast, behaviour such as ‘back-chatting the teacher’ (Willis, Year

5/6) is what characterises a ‘bad student’.
Most schools are obsessed with students’ appearance, and the uni-
form is a central feature of this obsession. Many students’ comments
on the uniform show good cost sense and an understanding of its sym-
bolic value.
SG: I prefer a uniform because the other kids think that a uniform is
pretty good and they might count that as a thing that they are look-
ing for.
SG: I would prefer not to have a uniform so your parents don’t have to
pay more money with all the books and that.
SG: We didn’t [used to have] a uniform but we got one this year because
Mrs Scatty said that people were putting people’s clothes down.
SG: The bad part about having a uniform is that if you lose it people can
just take it home and if you bring your own clothes then you know
whose is whose. (Willis, Year 5/6)
But school style is not only a matter of the uniform; it also relates to
length and cut of hair, make-up and jewellery. Students, at work in
constructing their identity through style, are frequently told to cut
their hair, take off their make-up and jewellery, have a shave. This
intrusion into students’ construction of person-hood has intensified
along with marketisation.
Going against the trend, Willis Senior College treats its students as
adults when it comes to their choice of self-presentation, and has no
uniform. Some of the students think this would be a positive feature of
the school were it not for the following problem.
SG: Parents don’t like a school with no uniform.
SB: They think no uniform, no discipline.
SG: I’d rather have the uniform. We seem too scruffy when we’re out
and about, it’s feeding the reputation.
Reputation is an elusive thing, but everyone seems to know when

a school has a bad reputation, and the fall-out for the school is
significant.
SG: I didn’t want to go to Willis Tech because it is not a good school and
has a bad reputation.
SG: It had a bad reputation when I was in grade 6 and Hall High had
a better reputation so Mum wanted me to come here, I didn’t have
any say.
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 123
SB: I was going to go to Willis Tech but it had a bad name, drugs and all
that. It was up to me and I chose here.
SB: I was going to go to Willis Tech but it had a bad name so I came here.
It was up to me to choose.
It is not easy to separate matters of style and reputation from students’

subcultures and information networks. Schools’ advertising and
image management practices have difficulty dealing with the informal
information systems about schools – the talk among parents and par-
ticularly among students, the rumours and gossip, the exaggerations
and the innuendo which make and break reputation. Reputation is not
easy to manipulate and control and, either negative or positive, has a
tendency to feed on itself and fulfil its own prophecies. The students’
impressions and information networks are formed everywhere – in the
cracks and crevices of the social and sporting life of the city and in the
stories that family members tell each other.
INT: How do schools get good and bad names?
SF: If you meet a friend in town that goes to another school they tell you
about it and you tell your friends and it gets around.
SF: We get these ideas from other students and friends that go to differ-
ent schools. We talk to them at weekends, holidays and after schools. We
see them at sport and youth groups. We also hear from our brothers and
sisters. (Hall, Year 10)
Sadly, for Willis Senior College (WSC), many younger residents with-
in Willis have accepted the view that WSC is a bad place with bad peo-
ple. The following comments were made by year 3/4 students about
the school they will most likely attend in their final years of schooling.
The implications of these views for the ways in which these children
will anticipate and participate in their schools of the future look bleak.
SG: Willis Secondary College hasn’t got a very good name because all
these people, they walk past our school and they throw chips and call
people swear words and that.
SG: That one over the hill hasn’t got a very good reputation because of
the type of children that go there and the teachers aren’t that strict.
INT: What type of students go there?
SG: There used to be people from our school and they were real naughty
and they have all gone there.
INT: What other sort of students go there?
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SG: Maybe a few good ones might be there, but …

SG: They are all bad people there.
For students, a school’s bad reputation often centres on drugs, alco-
hol, female sexuality (‘young girls get pregnant’, ‘girls in short skirts’),
troublemakers, and fighting and knives. Aware of this sort of thing,
some students point to the safety of Hall as a selling point. ‘It is pretty
safe, there is no one carrying knives and you don’t feel threatened
walking around.’ But reputation is also intimately connected with the
suburb and the habits and styles of consumption associated with it. As
those outside this suburb imply, suburbs have ‘sign value’:
SB: Schools are relative to the area. The schools in Highton are termed
snobby, Willis is not the best place to live and the schools are judged
accordingly.
SB: From what I have seen there appears to be three classes of schools.
Morley High is in the middle, the lowest is McRobbie. I say that from
being on a bus with McRobbie kids and that is the only time I have been
proud of this school, they were so rough and so below us. ... The other
class is the private Colleges. If you know someone from College and say
you go to Morley High you feel inferior. (Morley High, Year 12)
Particular and general identities are sometimes linked to the own-

ership of different commodities. Therefore, ‘nice’ suburbs go with
‘nice’ people. This logic extends to the impressions about schools in
different districts. For instance, students from other schools and sub-
urbs refer to Willis as ‘tough’ and ‘feral’. Students from Willis Senior
College are aware of this type of stigmatisation and labelling.
SG: We know that other kids say we are bad.
SB: My friend at another school in town says that people there bag Willis.
SG: Even people at Hall look down on us because of the area – Willis.
Most year 10 students from Hall, our middle school, understand the
connections between their school, consumption and social class.
INT: What type of a store would you suggest to represent this school?
SG: A shop selling clothes. A casual style of clothing like jeans. A good
quality basic.
SG: A Reject shop.
SG: Something cheap like Target, a department store like K Mart, noth-
ing too flash.
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Lifestyle and consumer goods are representations of the personal and

social characteristics of the owner. One of the reasons students at Willis
Senior College actually do not mind uniforms is that ‘you don’t get
comments on whether your shoes are Nike or Adidas’. Choice classi-
fies, and classifies the classifier, argues Bourdieu in Distinction (1984).
It is not possible to keep aesthetics, style and socially constructed
meanings out of a consideration of the exchange process of schooling.
Neither is it possible to ignore the connections between educational
consumption and networks of social power relations.
Social class relations

The literature about the role that education markets play in class forma-
tion, differentiation, distinction and mobility shows how parents in a
position to exercise ‘choice’ use schools as positional goods in the class
interests of their children and themselves (e.g. Gewirtz et al., 1995;
Kenway, 1991). It implies that choice of school is more about parental
ambitions, hopes and anxieties than those of their children. School-
change in the interests of marketing is implicitly built on this under-
standing and is often characterised by a process of ‘emulation’. Seiter
(1994, p.48) points out that emulation involves a double movement; an
imitation of those richer as well as differentiation from those poorer or
less refined. Many schools model themselves on those perceived as
better (usually private schools or State schools serving the ‘comfort-
able’ or privileged classes), and distance themselves from the ideas
associated with schools of lesser standing (those usually serving those
of lesser standing). For example, the principal at Willis Primary School
says:
My entrepreneurial dream is that some day somebody from the ‘other
side of the river’ is going to walk in here and say ‘I want to send my
child to your school’.
Further, the following comment is typical of the views expressed by

students about private schools:
SG: The private schools are really snobby and the rich people go there,
the upper class people, so we are just like the Hall scum I suppose, we
are the poor people that can only afford the uniforms.
SB: You get a better education and the school looks better and you get a
job easier if you’ve been to Geelong Grammar; you get preference over
someone that had been to Hall.
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These students did not even consider going to a private school.

Financially such schools are too far out of their league. Most Hall stu-
dents were very positive about their own school, yet, if given the
money, over half of them said they would move to a private school.
A second feature of emulation is a process of ‘chase and flight’
(Seiter, 1994, p.46, quoting Simmel). In a socially mobile endeavour,
the ‘lower orders’ copy, and are expected to copy, the ‘higher orders’,
but, in order to maintain their distinctiveness and superiority, the
higher orders move to establish new benchmarks for consumption
practices. This results in an unending cycle of consumer desire. It is a
brave school that seeks to break this emulation cycle, but Willis Senior
College is one such school. It is trying to respond to the idea of a
segmented educational market. It is too early to tell how successful it
will be.
Conclusions
Conventional analyses of marketised forms of schooling have tended
to ignore the perspectives of students. In this chapter we have
explained and interpreted some of the main features associated with
the marketisation of schools and, as much as possible, adopted the
stand-point of students. We have suggested that students are con-
strained but discerning, sophisticated but cynical participants caught
on the horns of many dilemmas in the Janus-faced world of school
marketing. This world celebrates surfaces, encourages conformity,
hypocrisy and repression, and encourages a view of education which
favours the interests of adults over children.
Redefining the student as a consumer of schooling, maps onto and
capitalises on some of the wider redefinitions of childhood introduced
by consumer/media culture. However, it ignores those aspects that
celebrate childhood and challenge asymmetrical adult/child power
relations. Indeed, as we have demonstrated, consumerism in school-
ing can be used to re-instate traditional and oppressive educational
practices. We have shown that educational consumption works as a
form of displacement, and that social control and relationships of
power are refracted through it.
Generally, in putting themselves on the market, schools seem to
make little attempt to connect to the interests, pleasures and yearnings
of all students. It seems that those of the many are put in the service
of the few ‘smart people’ and the ‘rich people’. Students clearly have
Xch6E2 15/4/04 12:23 PM Page 127
difficulty articulating their desires in a market context that promises

them reputation and advancement in exchange for their conformity.
And, as they go through school, they learn that schools can deliver
their promises only to some students. The students are informed and
agential in this context, partly because they draw on the consumption
skills learned outside of schools. They know how to put on ‘best face’,
they know what the education market values, and they know that it
does not value differences and genuine student agency – they know it
is ‘two-faced’. They know what they have to sell and give away in
exchange for the image and reputation necessary for school success;
they know how to comply with illusion. However, as they go through
school and become more sophisticated, disenchanted and cynical, they
learn that more things are lost than gained in this process.
It is our view that cruel dilemmas are posed for schools like those in
Willis and the students that attend them. Such students are generally
likely to accept that the education market rules in order to best survive
in a system that makes their success difficult. However, our research
also suggests that they turn elsewhere to construct their personhood;
schools are on the margins of their identities.
The general silence about the implications of marketisation for
young people, and especially for young people from suburbs like
Willis, is a disturbing feature of contemporary analyses. This issue is
not a matter that should concern educators alone. The vagaries of the
global market pose enormous policy dilemmas for nation states.
Traditional policy logics were predicated on an assumption that the
state is able to effect quite strong control over its citizens and is there-
fore able to intervene directly in shaping the patterns and directions of
young people’s lives through the schooling/labour market nexus. As
these conditions have changed – as witnessed by controversies sur-
rounding how to control the flow of undesirable information on the
World Wide Web – it has become apparent that new approaches to
policy-making are needed if schools are to retain a primary position in
the social process of shaping a sound and stable sense of citizenry. We
therefore conclude with a direct assertion that what is required is a
new form of debate, not just about the functional purposes of school-
ing but also about the form of education needed to foster a strong
sense of democratic sensibility in the upcoming generation of globally
interconnected citizens.
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Notes
1. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in the Journal of Education Policy,
1998, Vol.13, No.6, pp. 661–77. The paper is reproduced here with permis-
sion.
2. All data and analyses come from Marketing Education in the Information Age
(1992–94) and the Consuming Education: Contemporary education through the
eyes of students (1995) research projects (Australian Research Council and
Deakin University ). Other researchers were Chris Bigum, Janine Collier
and Karen Tregenza.
3. SB = male students; SG = female students.
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 129
Gender, teaching and

institutional change:
an historical perspective
MARJORIE THEOBALD
In November 1866, Mrs Mary Jenvey, respected headmistress of the

prestigious St Mark’s Church of England Girls’ School in Fitzroy,
received from her governing local committee a terse notice of dis-
missal.1 As St Mark’s was an elementary Common School con-
ducted in partnership with the state, this local palace coup had to
receive the imprimatur of the central Board of Education. Mrs
Jenvey was widely considered to be ‘one of the best … teachers in
our schools’, and the powerful permanent secretary to the Board,
Benjamin Kane, was clearly discomforted; he minuted the corres-
pondence: ‘Unless the Board take some decided measures at once
this school, which has hitherto been one of the best under the
Board, is very likely to become seriously injured by the unwarranted
interference of the Local Committee with the duties of the head
teacher.’2 Kane’s discomfort was no doubt exacerbated by the fact
that Mary Jenvey was due to give evidence before the Higinbotham
Royal Commission on public education within days of his belated
intervention.3 Jenvey’s standing in the educational community of
early Melbourne is underscored by the fact that only four other
head teachers were to appear, all of them men. Kane’s concern over
129
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 130
the future of St Mark’s was not misplaced; by December, attendance

had fallen from 110 to 34, as parents, who were not at that time com-
pelled to send their children to school, withdrew their daughters in
protest at the local committee’s action. The Fitzroy ‘community’ was
by no means a monolith.
The dispute between head teacher and local committee was at one
level a straightforward struggle for control of the lucrative weekly fees
paid by children in the Common Schools of the 1860s, exacerbated by
a palpable dislike between Mrs Jenvey and the secretary to the com-
mittee, Robert Haig. Jenvey had been in the habit of collecting the fees
and distributing them as she saw fit between herself and her staff,
before handing over the residue to the committee for the upkeep of the
school and other expenses. She complained before the Higinbotham
Commission that her school – which consisted of one large room 60 ft
× 25 ft – was in a very rundown condition. Like many schools inherited
by the Board, it was used as a Sunday school by St Mark’s Church of
England and the furniture was badly damaged from constant
rearrangement. Jenvey was disillusioned by the failure of the church
and the local committee to keep her school in good repair. In 1866 a
largely new committee demanded that the fees be paid in toto to them
for distribution under a formula less advantageous to the head-
mistress. Jenvey and her local committee were assiduous in their
efforts to misunderstand each other, both appealing to the Board of
Education in highly emotive language. In October, Jenvey wrote to
Benjamin Kane:
I wish to state that I have been employed as a teacher in public schools
for 20 years (half of that time in this colony) and that until placed under
the control of this committee I have always met with the approval and
commendation of those with whom I have been engaged; but that the
unjust and harsh treatment which I now constantly experience distracts
me from my proper avocation and has of late seriously impaired
my health, and that therefore I feel impelled to appeal against its con-
tinuance.4
There were other points of contention. Jenvey had no control over

the staffing of her school. In 1866, the local committee appointed Mrs
Maria Watts to a vacancy on the staff, over Jenvey’s preferred candi-
date. Jenvey and Watts were soon at loggerheads. Within months of
her appointment Watts had resigned, writing to the local committee:
I consider that the work and position of the assistantship … is such that
none but a junior and half-qualified teacher could put up with except
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GENDER, TEACHING AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE 131
from necessity; while the bearing of the head teacher to her fellow work-
ers is most arbitrary, and altogether such as no experienced teacher
would bear from one whose superiority, perhaps, consists chiefly in her
position in the school.5
In her evidence before the Higinbotham Commission Jenvey referred

to a previous dispute with a member of staff in which she believed that
her authority had been compromised:
One morning I desired her to perform some duty … and she told me she
would be directed by the committee not by me … This was said in the
school, therefore it was known by the other teachers. I told her I must
suspend her from duty, and I did so, and wrote immediately to the com-
mittee, and begged their support … but instead of being supported one
of them came into the room that afternoon and spoke very rudely and
loudly indeed, and asked me how I dared to dismiss an assistant, which
was the power of the committee alone, and ordered me immediately to
replace the assistant.6
On that occasion Jenvey was also served with a notice of dismissal

unless she consented to apologise; in her account of the incident she
refused to do so but continued to teach at the school. Local control of
staffing also had its pitfalls.
At another level the Jenvey affair opens up the politics which had
developed around the provision of elementary schools under the
Common Schools Act of 1862 – a politics which involved the central
Board of Education constituted by the Act, the local committees
attached to each school, the churches, the parents, and a powerful
group of urban head teachers who had emerged by the 1860s. To these
intricacies we must add the politics of gender. The St Mark’s case cap-
tures in microcosm a particular configuration of educational arrange-
ments, its stake holders and their shifting alliances, its winners and its
losers.
Entrepreneurial schooling
in the 19th Century
An experienced teacher of some years standing when she arrived in
the colony, Mary Jenvey was recruited by the local committee and
taught under a series of one-year contracts which could be terminated
at a month’s notice on either side. The Local Committee was not above
holding this over her head when disputes arose. Both her appointment
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 132
and her dismissal had to be ‘sanctioned’ by the Board of Education, a

term which was to prove slippery in the extreme. Jenvey’s base salary
was paid by the central Board. This ill-defined division of powers was
to engulf the Board in endless squabbles and costly litigation in the
1860s.7 By the mid-1860s it was clear to all concerned that, in the
absence of compulsory attendance legislation, the success or failure of
any school depended upon the ability of the head teacher to attract
and hold a clientele. These relationships of the market place were
especially marked in the case of girls, for whom links between bread-
winning and school attendance were not apparent to parents. In her
evidence before the Royal Commission, given as the Board dithered
over her dismissal by the local committee, Jenvey made it clear that
she considered herself to be in an entrepreneurial role at St Mark’s.
When I took St Mark’s school it was very small indeed. It was attended
by a very large number of free [destitute] children, and it was a kind of
speculation that as soon as I could make it a profitable school the prof-
its should be mine; but as soon as it became profitable, first one per-
centage and then another was taken off and then a larger one, so that I
feel myself very much ill-used indeed.8
Jenvey also made it clear to the commissioners that her base salary of
£80 was small change compared with the additional ‘performance’
rewards heaped upon the head teachers of large urban schools: weekly
fees which placed a premium upon recruiting children and keeping
them in regular attendance; State subsidies for destitute children; per
capita payment for the results of her pupils at twice-yearly examina-
tions; and a bonus for her classification in second-class honours, a classi-
fication which she shared with only sixteen other women in the
service. The all-male Higinbotham Commissioners were bemused to
hear that Jenvey’s net salary for 1865 was £316, roughly three times the
average salary earned by male assistant teachers in the Common
Schools era. In stark contrast were the salaries earned by her staff. At
the time of her dismissal, Jenvey had two assistants and three pupil
teachers, all female; the first assistant, Miss Watson, earned a base
salary of £60, a payment of £3.15s as a percentage of the fees, and an
additional small sum for ‘results’.
Jenvey’s access to this state-subsidised education market rested
precariously upon official policy to allow separate schools (or ‘divi-
sions’) for boys and girls in the major centres of population. Her school
was officially one of three ‘divisions’ – boys, girls and infants – which
went under the name of St Mark’s Common School 563 in the records
of the Board of Education. Not surprisingly, she defended single-sex
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 133
schooling vigorously before the Higinbotham Commission. When

asked to describe the relationship between the girls’ and boys’ school
she replied: ‘We are entirely separated. My school is separate from the
boys’ school, and my income is separate: the school is separate in
every respect, except that they are called by the same number on the
books of the Board of Education.’9 Jenvey insisted that girls in co-edu-
cational schools were in grave moral danger (the word ‘unsexed’ was
used by one of the commissioners) and that if the sexes must be taught
together, a mistress should be in charge of the school.
Mary Jenvey’s standing in the eyes of the Board of Education and
her alliance with the parents of Fitzroy ensured that a face-saving com-
promise was eventually devised to retain her services at St Mark’s. She
retired in August 1883, aged 58 after 27 years of service. By that time
Victoria’s educational institutions had been reconfigured in ways
which had changed her professional life out of all recognition. Her
career as the revered and highly paid head teacher of a prestigious city
girls’ school came to an end as a result of the Education Act of 1872.
Faced with the withdrawal of state aid to denominational schools, the
Church of England made the decision to close its elementary schools
and St Mark’s closed in March 1874. Mary Jenvey went into the newly
constituted system of state co-educational schools, first at Hoddle
Street, East Melbourne, then at Faraday Street, Carlton, but was
demoted to first assistant, with catastrophic loss of salary and profes-
sional autonomy.
The quasi-free market of educational provision which had shaped
Jenvey’s sense of herself as a professional woman has been obscured
in mainstream historiography of education by a focus on the long
regime of the centralised bureaucratic institutions ushered in by the
Act of 1872. Yet the educational arrangements which Jenvey colonised
with such conspicuous success in many ways pre-figure the mar-
ket/client arrangements in the 1990s, which are the focus of this col-
lection. In the next section I examine the quasi-free market which grew
up in the 1850s and 1860s, and trace its demise after the Education Act
of 1872. My focus is on the fortunes of women teachers and on the
intersections of gender and the institutions of education.
Education in colonial Victoria

In the 1850s the sanctity of the marketplace as an ideology underpinning
everyday understandings was opaque: it was not under systematic
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 134
intellectual challenge of the kind which is the starting point for this
collection. With respect to education, the very notion of government-
provided schools, let alone suggestions that children should be forced
to attend, was bitterly contested in the parent culture of England in the
middle decades of the century. In the Australian colonies, interven-
tions into market forces were a pragmatic response by a military gov-
ernor in a society not far removed from its convict origins. These
realities were reflected in Governor Fitzroy’s ‘compromise’ education
legislation of 1848 inherited by Victoria upon its elevation to colony
status in 1851; schools for the people were to emerge from a partner-
ship between parents, churches and, only where necessary, the state.10
As there was no compulsion to attend, the power of parents was
assured. Fees were payable on the assumption that a service given for
nothing would engender the mentality of the pauper. In practice, this
cautious State intervention into the schooling of the people fostered a
quasi-free market of education in which anybody could offer services
and nobody was obliged to buy. Two parallel systems of state-assisted
schooling, that controlled by the National School Board and that con-
trolled by the Denominational School Board, competed with each
other, though they were never intended to do so. They were also
obliged to compete with private entrepreneurs, from the child-mind-
ing school serving the very poor, to the select ladies’ school serving the
daughters of the colony’s governing class. Though the urge to acquire
literacy was strong, especially in a migrant society, links between
school attendance and life chances were weak. The emergence of a
teaching profession under these ground rules has received little atten-
tion from historians of education.
At mid-century, there was no profession of teaching, though there
were people who taught at some time in their lives and in a variety of
settings. With the 19th Century dream of a literate and schooled soci-
ety, two conflicting discourses concerning the identity of the teacher
began to emerge.11 The first derived from the traditional notion of the
educated gentleman who could turn his hand to the business of ruling
in a multitude of ways. Such men could only be enticed into school
teaching by lateral recruitment, that is, by creating the administrative
possibility of entry at the top, privileging literary qualifications over
what came to be known as the ‘art of teaching’. The first generation of
school inspectors and administrators were also ‘gentlemen’ with no
necessary expertise in education. The second discourse imagined the
teacher as a secular missionary figure, enculturated as a pupil-teacher
within a closed system of teacher training; this notion elevated the ‘art
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 135
of teaching’ over literary qualifications. This imagined teacher was a

more recent invention and was sufficiently related to the agenda of the
educational state to entice a new and more humble clientele into
school. This in-house recruitment of child-teachers, minimally educated
in the state system, was to triumph by the end of the century. These
discourses concerning the teacher carried with them the differing
social purposes which were present in the free market of the 1850s,
and both were to have profound implications for the gender of teach-
ing in the colony of Victoria.
Lateral recruitment was the main source of teacher supply in the
1850s and 1860s. A witness before the Royal Commission of 1866, R.H.
Budd, Inspector-General of Schools, looked back nostalgically upon
the ‘large influx of educated men and women’ who came to Victoria
during the gold rushes and ‘fell back upon the schools’.12 It is salutary
to realise that in the first two decades of its existence, the Victorian
teaching service had more highly educated, idiosyncratic and
ungovernable teachers, male and female, than at any other time in its
history. As late as the 1870s, inspectors were still remarking upon the
leavening influence of these men and women, middle-class migrants
willing to re-establish themselves in an occupation which they might
not have considered at home. The inability of the two Boards to col-
laborate in the establishment of a training institution, the reluctance of
young men and women to enrol, the proclivity of male graduates to
enter other occupations, and the periodic cutbacks in expenditure suf-
fered under successive regimes, forced into existence a ‘stop/start’
policy of teacher training which characterised Victoria throughout the
19th Century. Under these circumstances, lateral recruitment of teach-
ers was forced upon both the Boards by the exigencies of crafting a
profession out of whoever was to hand. Both Boards also recruited
overseas. In 1853, with the Melbourne Model School nearing comple-
tion, Benjamin Kane, then secretary to the National School Board,
sought the help of the Education Office in Dublin in the selection of
Arthur and Ellen Davitt as master and mistress of the new Model and
Training Institution at a combined salary of £700. The National School
Board also recruited through E.C. Tufnell, Inspector of Schools to the
Committee of Council on Education in England, and David Stow,
founder of the Glasgow Normal Schools.
Lateral recruitment of teachers was not only a pragmatic response
to an urgent need for teachers, it was also an artifact of local control
and therefore of social purpose. Before 1872, the local governing com-
mittees attached to each school had considerable influence over the
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 136
hiring and firing of teachers, a prerogative Catholic Archbishop Goold

regarded as not negotiable. For highly qualified teachers like Mary
Jenvey there were considerable rewards in local alliances, as clergy,
local committees and parents could (and did) map their own agendas
onto government policy. This close interweaving of state, denomina-
tional and family strategies had implications for the staffing and cur-
riculum of schools. Regardless of religious affiliation, differing
expectations for daughters and sons could more easily be accommo-
dated with local control. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish the
state-assisted denominational school for girls, where highly educated
women and visiting masters taught modern languages, music and art,
from that most conspicuously successful player in the free market, the
middle-class ladies’ academy. For the sake of their sons’ education,
middle-class parents colluded with local committees to appoint teachers
who could offer Latin, mathematics, the modern languages and com-
mercial subjects. Dublin graduate Patrick Whyte, the archetypal later-
al recruit into the service, argued before the Higinbotham
commissioners in 1866 that these alliances frequently undercut
denominational affiliations by which he meant Catholic affiliations.13
The most successful of these de facto State grammar schools were
Whyte’s own Model School and the Geelong National Grammar
School, the only government-funded ‘elementary’ school to exclude
girls. The lucrative teaching of these ‘higher’ subjects was not codified
until the Education Act of 1872, when the government sought to dis-
courage the practice. Nevertheless, this pipeline from the state-funded
elementary school into the civil service, the commercial houses of
Melbourne, the university and the professions, has been largely over-
looked in the historiography of Australian education.
The differing social purposes which characterised educational pro-
vision in the 1850s and 1860s meant that teachers with eminently
saleable skills operated within a market place which made the creation
of an orderly teaching profession difficult. Educational boundaries
were permeable in ways which became unthinkable later in the century.
Professor Martin Howy Irving went from the University of
Melbourne to Wesley College as headmaster, and later became owner-
principal of the private Hawthorn Grammar School. He was offered,
but declined, the permanent headship of the new Victorian Education
Department when Benjamin Kane died a matter of weeks before taking
up the position in January 1873. Accustomed as they were to more
democratic educational provision, the Scots in early Melbourne were
among the most mobile of the school masters. George Morrison went
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 137
from Scotch College to the headship of Geelong National Grammar

School and in 1861 established the Presbyterian Geelong College. As
R.J.W. Selleck’s study of the Miller teaching family reveals, this game
of musical chairs was accessible to less illustrious players, as teachers
played the two Boards off against each other.14 ‘For sale’ notices for
schools in receipt of public funding were not unknown and teachers
moved freely between funded and private schools. Indeed, the
National School Board, which became increasingly frustrated in its
efforts to wean parents away from denominationalism, crossed the
border between public and private provision when it began to tempt
into its stable private entrepreneurs of high repute, including the
Mattingleys of North Melbourne and the Templetons of Fitzroy.
The state could not remove itself from this market place until it leg-
islated for compulsory attendance in 1872. In the meantime, its schools
were obliged to compete for teachers and clientele; this early pushing
and shoving in the marketplace is basic to an understanding of the
staffing policies which may be traced through the successive regimes.
With some perspicacity, the educational State became convinced that
in the absence of compulsion, attendance depended in large measure
upon the quality of the individual school and the exertions of its head
teacher. These understandings were reflected in the low base salaries
and ‘flat’ professional structure of the service before 1872, with an
elaborate superstructure of performance-based rewards which have
been noted in the case of Mary Jenvey, and which rewarded the head
disproportionately to the staff. Successive administrations refined the
‘star teacher’ system, begun in the 1850s with the lateral recruitment of
the educated middle classes, into a system which set rural teacher
against urban teacher, assistant teacher against head teacher, and
female teacher against male teacher. The system also created an under-
class of poorly paid and disaffected teachers, and an underclass of
schools in which nobody wanted to teach. When in 1866 the
Higinbotham commissioners circularised the rank and file of teachers
about their preference for local or central control of their labour, they
were almost unanimously in favour of the latter.15
Women teachers and moral responsibility

As the career of Mary Jenvey suggests, in the same decades there were
no regulations excluding women teachers from the rewards of the free
market and government-subsidised entrepreneurship. The presence of
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 138
women in the teaching force configured the institutions of govern-

ment, education and gender in new and complex ways. Women’s tra-
ditional relationship with children was acknowledged for the first
time in the public sphere; their teaching labour was embedded in an
embryonic career structure and endowed with the status of waged
labour. Yet at mid-century the institutions of gender remained patri-
archal: married women had no rights to property, no separate exis-
tence before the law, and no rights to the custody of their own
children. Women, married or single, had no rights to citizenship;
indeed their exclusion from the democratic institutions called into
existence in Australia in the 1850s further diminished their status in
relation to men of their own social class. It is crucial to an understand-
ing of women’s historic experience of teaching to appreciate that their
labour entered the marketplace when the newly dominant middle-
class culture of separate spheres articulated an understanding that a
‘lady’ did not work for a living.
The employment of women signalled more than a sullen acceptance
of the ‘lady teacher’ where no man could be found to fill the post.
Victoria’s women teachers too were subject to the market forces which
shaped the policies of the educational state, but they were positioned
differently from men. The discourses which surrounded their presence
in the schools at mid-century had little to say about their natural
endowments as teachers or their availability as cheap labour. The edu-
cational state forged its alliance with women on other grounds entirely.
The presence of women in classrooms was legitimated by a persistent
discourse of moral danger, at odds with the official discourse which
insisted that the state-funded elementary school was productive of
public and private morality.
Dissonance between women and the public sphere ensured that,
throughout the 19th Century, there were more boys than girls in
the state schools, even after compulsory attendance undermined
parental choice.16 While sons might be committed to the rough-and-
tumble of the publicly funded school, daughters were a different mat-
ter. It was girls who were withdrawn at the slightest hint of moral
transgression and moral transgression was routinely detected in the
arrival of an unmarried male teacher.17 The lady teacher too had her
market value and the educational state was obliged to purchase
respectability through a female presence in its classrooms. The prefer-
ence of colonial parents for the teaching family began early and
it tapped into deeply held beliefs about the relationships between
the sexes.
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The mutual colonisation of the educational state and the teaching

family facilitated the transition of women’s teaching labour into the
public domain and preserved the ‘as of right’ precedence of the hus-
band over the wife. Parental preference for the teaching family
explains why marriage, child-bearing and domestic duties were not at
first constituted as incompatible with duties of the school teacher.
Maternity leave was never codified, although in practice women were
given confinement leave of three weeks on condition that they paid a
substitute teacher. The lure of the aggregated family income, invisible
in the official calculations of teachers’ incomes, made teaching more
attractive in the 19th Century. The first report of the new Education
Department, published in 1874, contained an appendix which listed
staff by individual school.18 Of the 1113 schools listed, 275 were small
schools staffed by a headmaster and sewing mistress of the same sur-
name. A further 122 schools were staffed by a headmaster and a female
assistant of the same surname. And a further 87 schools had pupil-
teachers of the same surname as the head or first assistant.
This crude head count does not reveal other relationships among
the staff, as for example at Walhalla where Henry and Lucy Tisdall
were head and first assistant and two of Lucy’s sisters, Alice and Clara
Weekes, were second assistant and pupil-teacher.19 The most success-
ful of the family fiefdoms was the Rae family at Ironbark outside
Bendigo where John Rae was headmaster, his wife Emily was first
assistant, daughter Barbara was second assistant, son William was sev-
enth assistant, and three other children – John, Alexander and Helen –
were pupil-teachers. Their aggregated family income was over £1000,
more than the sum required to lure the first professors of the
University of Melbourne away from the universities of England and
Ireland. John Rae also had extensive mining interests in the Bendigo
district with his brother William.20
The most common teaching family was the head teacher and
sewing mistress in the rural school, but the category ‘sewing mistress’
often disguised a fully qualified woman teaching with her husband in
a school which did not reach the enrolment required to employ an
assistant. Successive regimes manipulated this possibility when budget
cuts were forced upon them. The practice was challenged in the early
1860s by Mrs Maria Forster who, with her Cambridge-educated hus-
band George was typical of the highly educated middle-class teachers
in the system at that time.21 She protested when her salary and status
were reduced to that of sewing mistress, taking her case (of necessity,
in the name of her husband) to the Supreme Court, where she lost on
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the technicality that the new Board of Education was not responsible
for the debts of its predecessors. A parliamentary select committee
eventually awarded her husband £150 in unpaid salary. As late as the
1880s the Education Department candidly defined the duties of the
sewing mistress as ‘needlework and the rudimentary instruction of the
younger classes’.22
At the other extreme from the teaching couples in the country
schools were the much-envied husband and wife teams who held the
two top positions in the larger urban schools – among them Patrick
and Jane Whyte of the Model School, John and Anne Drake of
Collingwood, and Edward and Harriet Rosenblum of Ballarat. These
families were urban gentry with fine houses, servants, and children
who did not follow their parents into the profession of teaching in the
next generation. The same moral imperatives which favoured the
teaching family in the country led parents to prefer separate depart-
ments for their daughters in urban centres. These separate depart-
ments were encouraged by the dual Boards which allowed their girls’
schools in middle-class areas to become female academies in all but
name. Under the patronage of the Denominational School Board and
the Church of England, Mrs Tabitha Pike ran the St James’ Girls’
School as a de facto ladies’ academy for nearly 20 years, advertising
music, painting and modern languages in her regular press advertise-
ments. One witness before the Higinbotham Commission testified that
Pike had ‘sixty to seventy young ladies who pay highly and provide
their own masters, for accomplishments’, among them the daughter of
the Church of England Dean Macartney.23
Many separate girls’ departments fell far short of Tabitha Pike’s
school. Often the girls were simply taught in a different room, or
divided from the boys by a curtain. The crucial point is that, as was the
case at St Mark’s in Fitzroy, the senior woman in the girls’ department
was accorded the status of head teacher and access to the entrepre-
neurial possibilities of the state-assisted school. Although its own reg-
ulations were silent on the matter, the Board of Education, which
replaced the dual Boards in 1862, began to amalgamate these separate
departments on the grounds of economy and ‘rational’ school organi-
sation. Upon each amalgamation the Board demoted the female head
to first assistant with considerable loss of salary, status and autonomy.
Contestation around the issue of co-education underscores the prob-
lematical nature of gender for the educational state. There is evidence
that where departments were amalgamated, parents removed their
daughters altogether, often accompanied by the teacher who began
her own private school nearby.24
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Acceptance of employment in schools under these conditions

placed the woman teacher in an ambiguous position. The free market
of education before 1872 shaped an elite of teaching matriarchs,
respected by parents and inspectors alike, who were accustomed to
wielding power. But it was power embedded in a melodrama of sexual
danger. Their own accounting of this power, of their efficacy as tech-
nicians in the schoolroom, was implicated in this melodrama of sexual
danger. In the records of the educational state, lady teachers like Mary
Jenvey were often to be found staking a claim to a superior moral
authority by virtue of their sex. They became adept at aggregating into
moral pollution the smallest sexual transactions between boys and
girls, and between male staff and female students, which they imag-
ined they saw around them. They soon learned to hijack the elaborate
technology of moral regulation which underpinned the school as an
institution. Their target was nothing less than the opaque privilege of
male sexuality itself, a form of sexual politics which anticipated the
suffrage campaigns later in the century. Women teachers as willing
agents of moral regulation have proved conceptually uncomfortable
for feminist historians, who have deplored the oppressive structures
which regulated their labour but ignored the professional selves which
were shaped by those structures.
The Education Acts and government intervention

Explanations for the political demise of the Board of Education and its
replacement by the Victorian Education Department have been thor-
oughly canvassed, though these explanations usually focus upon the
constitutional and religious settlement achieved by the 1872 Act. The
Board itself had hoped for a resolution to the constitutional basis of
public education after the Higinbotham Royal Commission, but this
was not to be. Like the dual Boards before it, the Board of Education
had been obliged to struggle on in a constant state of uncertainty until
the knockout blow came in 1872. More important in the present con-
text is the failure of the quasi-free market to provide an adequate sys-
tem of schools for the people or a teaching service equal to the task.
The Victorian Education Act of 1872 and its counterparts in the
other states are acknowledged as the most radical reconfiguration of
government, church and education in Australian history, yet the impli-
cations for the profession of teaching have remained largely unex-
plored.25 The Act reflected a hardening of social attitudes around
state-funded education. On the one hand, it destroyed by default state
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 142
funding of secondary education (there was no provision for state high

schools); on the other hand, the compulsory clause swept into the
schools thousands of children who had hitherto attended spasmodic-
ally or not at all. At the Model School, Patrick Whyte had to assure his
middle-class clientele that they were still entitled to send their chil-
dren.
The Victorian Education Department, which was also created by the
Act of 1872, came into existence burdened with potentially incompat-
ible staffing imperatives. The need for greater control over recruit-
ment, training and dispersal of its teachers had crystallised from the
Common Schools experience of local control. Private and church pro-
vision of schools remained unregulated (though henceforth unfunded),
but the compulsory attendance of children and the abolition of fees
undermined alliances between teachers and parents at the grass-
roots level. The destruction of local control under the 1872 Act also
gave the central authority control over its teachers for the first time.
Yet at the same time the Education Department was most insistent
upon the need to foster a psychology of professionalism among its
teachers. Official discourse abruptly abandoned the entrepreneur
superstar and began to speak of disinterested public service and pro-
fessionalism. In the debates surrounding the Act, teachers, when they
were remembered at all, were promised status as public servants, an
orderly system of promotion, and retiring allowances. The humble
and obedient servant of the state was also to be ‘professional man’.
The contradictions inherent in these regulatory and professionalis-
ing agendas were complicated by two further factors. The first was the
hypocrisy of the legislature through successive Ministries which pro-
claimed the virtues of mass education, yet begrudged every penny to
a Department charged with bringing free education to children in
every corner of the colony. The second factor was the incompatibility
between the masculine project of professionalisation and the gender of
teaching. The Victorian Education Department was the first adminis-
tration to understand, at the level of policy implementation, that in the
buoyant economy of colonial Victoria the generality of men would not
consider school teaching as an attractive career. This was a pivotal
moment in the institution of teaching. The 1872 Act had effectively dis-
mantled the entrepreneurial basis of teaching at precisely the moment
when mandatory attendance fuelled a voracious need for teachers.
John Rae of Ironbark went before a Royal Commission in 1883 to com-
plain that the bottom had dropped out of teaching.26 He was obliged
to take in urchins who could not read and write at ten years of age, a
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 143
fine new state school built in the neighbourhood had stolen his clien-
tele, his income had dropped dramatically, and he had sent his sons
into other occupations. For the last quarter of the 19th Century the
Department’s dealings with its female teachers must be read in mirror
image, for they reflect the struggle to recruit and reproduce a male
teaching elite which was to preside over an underclass of female teach-
ing labour enmeshed in the iron law of supply and demand.
The experiences of teachers in the chaotic 1870s, as the system of
state-assisted denominational schools was finally dismembered, has
been largely overshadowed by the constitutional and religious settle-
ments effected by the Act. Catholic lay teachers faced the difficult deci-
sion to go into the new state system or continue teaching in their own
schools on the pittance which the church could now afford to pay. In
due course those who did remain were replaced by the female reli-
gious who developed a women-controlled and decentralised system
of parochial schools in the decades when the state system was moving
in the other direction on both counts. Proprietors of private schools
were affected in ambiguous ways. Those catering for working-class
families could no longer compete with free state schooling; female
schools catering for middle-class families forged new alliances with
parents who would not countenance their daughters mixing with
working-class children in school. By the end of the century, the move-
ment of teachers between the sectors that had characterised the free
market of the 1850s was minimal.
In 1873, the Department began to implement its professionalising
agenda with a revised system of teacher classification, which was lit-
tle more than a modification of the flat, two-tier system under the
Board of Education. More pressing was the decision that had to be
made about salaries. As the fees abolished by the 1872 Act had been a
major component of salaries since the 1850s, the Department was
obliged to devise a new basis for the remuneration of teachers. In place
of the previous flat base salary with its superstructure of rewards, the
Department stretched the salary scale vertically, with a salary starting
at £80 for heads of the smallest country schools to £380 for heads of
schools with an enrolment of over 1000 children. Similar salary scales
were implemented for assistants, a policy decision which narrowed
the gap between assistants and heads. Thus the principal of payment
by numbers remained, though the ‘farming’ of fees was no longer pos-
sible. Promotion in practice became the scramble for an appointment
in a larger school, exacerbated by the fact that political patronage in
appointments was rife. Teachers had other reasons to be disillusioned
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under the new regime, as the promises held out to them – an orderly
promotion system, retiring allowances and status as public servants –
did not eventuate. The hated policy of payment by results was
retained, yet payment for honours was discontinued.
Women teachers had additional reasons to be disillusioned. They
were to receive four-fifths of the male rate; that is, a salary differential
which had become naturalised since the 1850s was now official policy.
Certificated first female assistants were the only women to be paid
equally with men – unless they were teaching in their husband’s
schools and this was in compensation for the fact that the 1875 regu-
lations delivered the coup de grace to separate female departments. It is
difficult to overestimate the importance of the decision, both in the
professional lives of women teachers, and in pushing middle-class
daughters out of the state system. In New South Wales, by contrast,
separate boys’ and girls’ schools were retained until the 1960s.
However, it was not until the 1880s that the full consequences for
women teachers of this re-alignment between state, education and
gender became fully apparent. The first review of the system ushered
in by the 1872 Act was the Rogers Templeton Royal Commission
appointed in 1881.27 With respect to teachers, its main focus was polit-
ical patronage in appointments and promotions, and the reconstitu-
tion of elementary school teachers as public servants free from
political patronage was a major recommendation of its report. The
minutes of evidence are also a digest of anxieties around gender at a
crucial point in the evolution of the profession. Of the 86 witnesses
called, 37 were male teachers (mostly heads) and nine were female.
Mrs Jenvey was one of the few witnesses to give testimony at both the
Higinbotham and Rogers Templeton Commissions.28 She complained
that under the new regulations she had been demoted as head at
St Mark’s, then transferred as first assistant into the new state system.
She was still defending single-sex schooling. Her testimony, together
with that of Mrs Jane Whyte, now demoted to first assistant at the
Model School, revealed that in selected prestigious schools powerful
teachers and parents had resisted the Departments’ edict that the sexes
should be taught together.
The male witnesses by no means betrayed their female colleagues;
on the contrary, most were generous in their praise and many had
teaching wives. But questioners and witnesses alike positioned the
lady teacher within certain discourses of gender relations and the
female mind and body.29 Women lacked ‘that robust spirit’ to teach the
older boys. They were especially suited to teach the younger children,
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an ideological notion which was to be institutionalised by the develop-

ment of infant departments and specialist qualifications in the next
decades. Women should not be set in authority over men as head
teachers. Their monopoly of first assistantships, achieved as compen-
sation for the loss of headships, was called into question.
There was a dense interweaving of anxieties around the person of
the married female teacher. Ominously, the commissioners called for a
list of married women employed in schools that showed the occupa-
tions of their husbands. Head teacher, John Sergeant, had a particular
objection to female first assistants who were married to heads of large
schools: ‘The lady teacher, his wife, visits the school, that is all it can be
called, and draws a salary of £300, I think it is depriving the State of
money that is not earned.’ Inspector Ross Cox drew attention to ‘objec-
tionable cases where married ladies have to retire at intervals of twelve
or fifteen months constantly’. Their presence in a mixed school was
‘really not nice’, though he did not see why women should be
debarred on that account. Only one witness considered the conse-
quences for the married women themselves of the double load which
they carried (‘They have to get breakfast before they go in the morn-
ing, and when they get home they have to make baby clothes and so
on’), and this was to be used against them by the commissioners. F.A.
Nell of Carlton testified that ‘a married lady in a school has a very ben-
eficial influence’, no doubt out of respect for his first assistant Mary
Jenvey. It was also an oblique reference to the fact that heads were
loath to ask single women to deal with cases of discipline
involving sexual matters. At the other extreme was the head teacher
who believed that ‘when a female teacher married she should leave
the school’.
The Rogers Templeton commissioners made their recommenda-
tions regarding the employment of women teachers in their third
report. For younger children, women were ‘more fitted’ and older girls
should be taught by women in separate classes. The married woman
teacher was officially called into question for the first time, especially
‘wives of men without occupation or of men in various occupations
altogether outside the profession of teaching’. If married women were
to be employed at all, it should be only when their husbands were
teachers in the same school and only when they were not engaged in
the ‘performance of household duties’. These understandings were
absent from the deliberations of the Higinbotham Commission 16
years earlier. With James Service as both Premier and Minister of
Public Instruction, the recommendation of the commissioners to
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reconstitute the school teacher as a public servant under the Public

Service Board was quickly translated into legislation by the Public
Service Act of 1883. Though this was a key strategy in the recruitment
and retention of men in the service, the state had also constituted
2351 women as public servants, where they joined a small number
of postmistresses, telegraphists and female warders in gaols and
reformatories.
The teachers were at first jubilant about their new status, for it was
the intention of the Act to create a structure of classification, promo-
tion and transfer based on seniority, literary qualifications and merit.
A committee of classifiers was created to oversee the creation of five
classes of schools with five corresponding classes of teachers placed in
order of precedence for promotion on a classified roll. Literary qualifi-
cations were once again tied to promotion: the head teacher of a first-
class school must be certificated and classified in first-class honours or
hold a university degree, and so on down to the head of a fifth-class
(country) school who need only be licensed to teach. All appoint-
ments, promotions and transfers were under the control of the Public
Service Board and teachers had the right of appeal. Salaries were to be
modelled on the salary scales and yearly increments in the other
departments of the public service. The four-fifths male:female salary
ratio was preserved.
All teachers, male and female, had cause to be disturbed by the first
classified roll when it appeared in 1885, but women teachers had spe-
cial cause to feel betrayed.30 For the first time they were barred from
the headships of any but the smallest country schools. They were
excluded from the first class of teachers altogether; the most highly
qualified women were now clustered in the second class – 25 women
of whom 15 were married and many of whom had been heads of girls’
departments until 1875. Their exclusion from the first class lasted until
the 1940s. Without explanation there were only six places allotted for
women in the third class (there were 132 for men) and this constituted
an almost insuperable block to promotion for the 82 women in the
fourth class. By far the largest group of women – that is, 780 were clas-
sified in fifth class and their chances of promotion were remote.
Over the next four decades the absence of any statutory ratio
between the five classes allowed the fifth class to expand to the point
were the very notion of orderly promotion was farcical. It quickly
became apparent to the women that the ‘shape’ of their new career
structure created by the roll of 1885 reflected understandings of the
woman teacher as ‘not professional’; she would be transient, moving
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 147
out upon marriage, or content to serve for a lifetime on a salary tail-

ored to a beginner who would rise through the system. There was one
further act of betrayal in the scheme of 1885. A further 240 women,
many of them classified before the 1883 Act, were placed in a newly
created division beneath the fifth class and designated ‘junior assis-
tants’, with no rights at all to promotion or yearly increments. This
crude attempt to force single women out into bush schools where they
could be classified in the fifth class was the subject of a successful legal
challenge by Mary Stark, backed by the Victorian Lady Teachers’
Association in the ensuing years.31
The gendered teaching force created by the legislation of 1872 and
1883 required one further refinement, and this was not long in coming.
Without any public discussion of the matter, clause 14 of the Public
Service Amendment Act of 1889 provided that ‘no married woman
shall be eligible for appointment to any office in the public service …
[and] … every woman employed in the public service who married
after the passing of the Act shall immediately upon her marriage
retire’. The clause safeguarded retiring allowances to which the
women were entitled, and it specifically exempted sewing mistresses,
and women employed in gaols, asylums and reformatory institutions.
In a series of bitterly contested manoeuvres during the economic
recession of the 1890s, even those married women whose rights to con-
tinued employment had been safeguarded by the amendment of 1889
were also dismissed from the service.32 Married women did not regain
full access to the state service until the Teaching Service (Married
Women) Act of 1956.33 In the intervening years the Department’s deal-
ings with married women were duplicitous in the extreme. They were
ruthlessly exploited as temporary teachers where nobody else could
be found to fill the position; indeed the words ‘temporary teacher’
may be read as a code for ‘married woman’. Donna Dwyer’s study of
Mrs Grace Neven and her ‘lonely and itinerant career … through thir-
ty-seven years and forty-eight schools’, captures the human cost to
women desperate for a livelihood but denied the right to tenure.34 For
the majority of young women entering the teaching profession in the
70 years that separate the two Acts that took away and restored the
rights of married women, the Department had installed a revolving
door. Women’s teaching labour rested on a wide base of young and
transient women with a vertical core of single women for whom the
ultimate professional prize was the infant room. These administrative-
ly created certainties shaped the lives and subjectivities of male and
female teachers until the 1960s.
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Conclusion: women’s experiences of teaching

Politics in the 1990s around the marketplace and educational institu-
tions which are the starting point for this book can mutually inform
our understanding of women’s experiences of teaching in the past. As
the lives of the women in this study testify, there are gains and losses
for teachers in educational institutions underpinned by notions of the
free market and entrepreneurship. There are also winners and losers in
educational institutions underpinned by ideologies of statism, central-
ism and bureaucracy, and controlled by the masculine collectivities of
the education department, teacher unions and the public service.
Though the education ‘market’ in which Mary Jenvey flourished in the
1860s came to an end with the legislation of 1872, after that time the
state assembled its own market for teaching labour, imposing the mar-
riage bar upon women and constituting men as a scarce resource. This
left women vulnerable to exploitation in ways which I have developed
in this chapter. For women then, the market for teaching labour may
operate independently of markets for educational services, regulated
or deregulated. It is also apparent that the institutions of gender have
a life of their own, cutting across the apparent objectivity and ration-
ality of both the market place and more bureaucratic forms of gover-
nance. Women teachers’ experience of marriage, family, child-bearing
and child-raising varies historically with decisions made by men,
whose emotional and material stake in the domestic labour of women
is seldom acknowledged.
Thus women teachers do not encounter the institutions of educa-
tion and gender as stand-alone systems free of context, but as net-
works of relationships (family, community, fellow teachers,
administrators). These relationships are differently configured, indeed
abruptly reconfigured, along the fault lines of legislation and adminis-
trative decisions. This very uncertainty creates the space for teachers
to contest agendas imposed from above, though women seldom do so
from a position of strength. Historically, women have been unde-
terred in their determination to colonise the shifting structures of the
teaching profession. Despite the best efforts of successive administra-
tions to masculinise the profession, women remain numerically dom-
inant today. Their response to the marketisation of education in the
1990s is not yet on the record.
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 149
Notes
1. Details of the Jenvey case are from Victorian Public Record Series (VPRS)
892, No.37 and Jenvey’s record of service (held by the Directorate of
School Education), unless otherwise indicated.
2. The estimation of Jenvey as one of the best teachers in the state is from
her record of service; the quotation from Kane is from VPRS 892, No.37,
1866/13336.
3. Victorian Parliamentary Papers (VPP) 1867, (hereafter Higinbotham
Commission).
4. VPRS 892, No.37, 26 Oct. 1866, Jenvey to Kane, 26 Oct. 1866.
5. VPRS 892, No.37, 67/336, 8 Jan. 1867, Maria Watts to local committee.
6. Higinbotham Commission, Minutes of Evidence, p.287.
7. See, for example, M. Theobald, ‘Agnes Grant’ in R.J.W. Selleck &
M. Sullivan (eds), Not so eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press,
1984.
8. Higinbotham Commission, Minutes of Evidence, p.285.
9. Ibid, p.284.
10. A.G. Austin, Australian education 1788–1900: Church, state and public educa-
tion in colonial Australia, Pitman, Melbourne, 1961.
11. I have developed this argument more fully in M. Theobald, Knowing
women: Origins of women’s education in nineteenth-century Australia,
Cambridge, Melbourne, 1996, ch.5.
12. Higinbotham Commission, Minutes of Evidence, R.H. Budd, pp.110–36.
13. Ibid, Patrick Whyte, pp.254–68.
14. R.J.W. Selleck, ‘A goldfields family’ in M. Theobald & R.J.W. Selleck (eds),
Family, school and state in Australian history, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1990.
15. Victorian Public Record Series (VPRS) 915, Board of Education,
Manuscript Records of Higinbotham Royal Commission, replies to teach-
ers’ questionnaire.
16. Statistics available in VPP, Reports of the Minister of Public Instruction,
published annually.
17. Evidence taken from VPRS 892, special case files of the Victorian
Education Department and its predecessors.
18. VPP 1874, Report of the Minister of Public Instruction, 1873–74, Appendix 1,
pp.1–89.
19. Judith Biddington, ‘The Weekes family’ in R.J.W. Selleck & M. Sullivan
(eds), Not so eminent Victorians, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne,
1984.
20. M. Theobald, Knowing women, p.142.
Xch7E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 150
21. VPP 1867, ‘Report … on Mr G.M. Forster’s Case’; VPRS 892, No.14;
teacher record of Maria Forster, Directorate of School Education (DSE)
Archives.
22. VPP 1886, Report of the Minister of Public Instruction, 1885, p.x.
23. Higinbotham Commission Minutes of Evidence, pp.112 & 212; teacher
record of Tabitha Pike, DSE Archives.
24. This point is developed in M. Theobald, ‘Women’s teaching labour, the
family and the state in nineteenth-century Victoria’ in M. Theobald and
R.J.W. Selleck (eds), Family, school and state.
25. Denis Grundy, ‘Secular, compulsory and free’: the Education Act of 1872,
Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1972.
26. Theobald, Knowing women, p.149.
27. VPP 1882–84, Commission Appointed to Enquire into and Report Upon
the … System of Public Instruction, 1882–84 (Rogers Templeton
Commission).
28. Rogers Templeton Commission, Minutes of Evidence, pp.316–17.
29. For a digest of their views see Ibid, p.xii.
30. Victorian Government Gazette (VGG), No.1, 1 January 1885, pp.1–98.
31. R.J.W. Selleck, ‘Mary Helena Stark: The troubles of a nineteenth-century
state school teacher’, in A. Prentice and M. Theobald (eds), Women who
taught: Perspectives on the history of women and teaching, University of
Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991.
32. Lesley Scholes, ‘Education and the women’s movement in Victoria,
1875–1914’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984.
33. A close reading of this Act reveals that right of re-entry was still qualified.
34. Donna Dwyer, ‘Good and mad women (teachers): The case of Grace
Neven’ in Melbourne Studies in Education, Vol.29, No.1, 1995.
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 151
The social and organisational

renorming of education
LAWRENCE ANGUS AND TERRI SEDDON
Australian education is being reshaped. It could be said to being re-

normed. The institutional ‘rules’ that shape education, its relations,
practices and centres of power, are being restructured and re-articulated
in complex ways. Of particular importance in the process of renorm-
ing has been government intervention in the reshaping of the regula-
tory mechanisms of educational governance and provision. In this
chapter we examine current government policy interventions in two
sectors of education. In our analysis we consider government as a
designer, or more correctly a redesigner, of education as an institution.
We indicate ways in which particular policy interventions represent
purposive strategies of educational change.
Firstly, we briefly locate current policy in the contemporary ruptur-
ing of previous patterns of educational practice. While these had long
been contested, both within and without the educational sphere, they
had been strongly asserted and mainly accepted as legitimate within
mainstream educational thinking, at least until the mid-1980s. By
establishing the comparison, we make problematic some key assump-
tions that underpin current patterns of educational change. Secondly,
we draw upon ethnographic research, conducted mainly in a second-
ary school and an Institute of Technical and Further Education (TAFE)
in Victoria, in order to illustrate ways in which government policy
interventions are experienced and worked through in sites of
151
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 152
educational practice. Seventeen school participants and 27 TAFE par-

ticipants were interviewed, some on several occasions. Our data indi-
cate that processes of renorming, and of living in and through
institutional redesign, are extraordinarily complex. We reveal serious
problems and tensions in the design of education that the policies
imply. Finally, we reflect on the perspectives and experience of educa-
tion participants, as we have been able to interpret and make sense of
them, in order to tease out the implications, for future redesign, of cur-
rent reshaping of education as an institution.
Governments as educational redesigners

Our focus is specifically on State Government intervention in school
education in Victoria through the introduction of the policy of Schools
of the Future in 1993, and on Commonwealth Government interven-
tion in the conceptualisation of education generally, and TAFE in par-
ticular, through promotion of the National Training Reform Agenda
(NTRA) from the late 1980s. Empirically, our emphasis is on the per-
ceptions of organisation participants of the factors that are shaping
their working lives and their struggles over visions of education. Such
struggle is manifest in discourses and strategic actions in such a way
that all institutional participants – not just governments – must to
some extent be regarded as institutional designers.
Education policy typically incorporates particular educational
values and beliefs about the nature and purpose of education, which
policy designers either assume to be normative or intend to become
normative. For example, the expectation that issues of equity and
educational access would be important in the planning of educational
provision and distribution became strongly incorporated into policy
rhetoric (although not always into practice) in the decades after World
War II (Angus, 1986; Bennett, 1982). Although reform of education
in the name of social justice was limited (Connell, 1995), the accept-
ance in principle of such a normative stance was indicative of the
assumed will of government, educators and society generally to pro-
mote and realise the vision of a more equitable society (Bennett, 1982;
Kogan, 1979).
The principle of government extending educational opportunities
was strongly accepted by the 1970s as part of its social and economic
responsibility. Policy convergence on this point between the major
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 153
THE SOCIAL AND ORGANISATIONAL RENORMING OF EDUCATION 153
political parties was such that in Labor Government platforms, feder-

ally in the 1970s and in Victoria most strongly in the early 1980s, the
incorporation of an emphasis on social justice in education policy was
not regarded as exceptional. Apart from their focus on teaching, learn-
ing and curriculum, what such policies had in common was an
emphasis on policy-makers working collaboratively with teachers,
persuading them to change through professional development pro-
grams, and regarding them as essential resources in promoting educa-
tional and social change that was intended to enhance the social
capacities of students. The rhetoric was an educational rhetoric and
the discourse was largely dialogical. Increasingly during the decade of
the 1980s, however, education policy became much more coercive
(Watkins, 1992). A new kind of educational policy convergence, in
which issues of social justice became more problematic and peripher-
al to the main education agenda, emerged between the major political
parties. The new agenda has become increasingly characterised by
economic rationalism and New Right thinking (Pusey, 1991;
Marginson, 1993).
Policy interventions in schools and TAFE

As part of recent reforms, teachers, who relatively successfully asserted
progressive educational values during the 1970s and early 1980s, have
become subject to new demands and controls. The previous policy
emphasis on teacher-oriented issues of teaching, learning and curricu-
lum now seems to have been largely replaced by a more indirect
reform strategy in which the practices of organising educational work
are being manipulated. Funding, outcome measures, policy targets,
industrial relations and management have become the new levers for
change. These do not impinge immediately on the face-to-face work of
teaching and learning, but they shape the institutional context in
which such work proceeds (Seddon, 1994). The effect is that changed
management requirements, funding arrangements and the like, rede-
fine the relationships, and the practical parameters and constraints, of
educators’ work. Such reshaping is played out somewhat differently in
different social and historical contexts. We draw on a school site and
a TAFE site in order to illustrate ways in which different traditions
and institutional inheritances shape the process and politics of educa-
tional reshaping.
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 154
Reshaping schools
Current attempts to redesign education need to be considered in rela-
tion to the design that is being revised, reshaped and renormed.
Grandridge Secondary College is in many respects an exemplar of the
institutionalisation of educational reforms of the 1970s and 1980s. It
can be seen as a case of the seemingly successful assertion of the norms
and practices that were embodied by reformist teachers to challenge
the education bureaucracy. Staff at Grandridge became known as
advocates of social justice and student-centred curricula and peda-
gogy. By all accounts, despite conflicts, teachers worked towards the
realisation by the end of the 1980s of multiple elements of the ‘pro-
gressive’ educational movement that many teachers had been assert-
ing since the 1960s in Victoria and Australia generally.
Jack Regan maintains that when he was appointed principal of
Grandridge in 1987 the greatest asset he had to work with was the
staff, especially a core of innovative teachers who had pushed the
development of progressive curriculum over a considerable period of
time. Teachers at the school had developed a tradition of educational
innovation and a willingness to be at the cutting edge of educational
debates.
In Victoria, a measure of the contribution of educators like those at
Grandridge to the policy process is that, in the early to mid-1980s,
teachers were to a large extent regarded as co-participants with gov-
ernment in the work of educational innovation and change. Such
involvement was not achieved easily but was an outcome of contesta-
tion throughout the 1960s and 1970s in which teachers, teacher unions
and educational organisations asserted their professional status
(Preston, 1994). Their advocacy of educational issues and agendas
encouraged more consultative relationships between teachers and
education departments as departmental officials, many of whom came
from the teaching force, began to respond to the educational agenda
being promoted from the chalkface.
The extent of the education profession’s inclusion in educational
governance is perhaps most starkly demonstrated by a series of six
Victorian Ministerial Papers (Victoria: Minister of Education 1985) pub-
lished in the early 1980s. These statements of policy were intended to
support collaborative practices among managers and teachers, and
also parents and students. There was an explicit emphasis on ‘a
process of participative, collaborative decision-making’ within a
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 155
‘responsive bureaucracy’ (Victoria: Minister of Education 1985, p.5).

Such commitments to democratic and collegial practices began to
erode, however, during the second half of the 1980s as government
educational policy increasingly incorporated the rhetoric and princi-
ples of corporate management (Bessant, 1988; Angus & Rizvi, 1989;
Victoria: Ministry of Education, 1987). By the mid- to late 1990s, the
fluid educational climate of the previous decade had congealed
around particular norms and their proponents.
Against an institutional background in which many teachers were
involved as activists, Schools of the Future policy introduced by the
Kennett Government in 1993 was interpreted and received over-
whelmingly negatively by teachers at Grandridge Secondary College.
For them, the policy signalled a return to antagonistic dialogue
between the main parties concerned with education. The approach to
educational governance in Victoria (and elsewhere) no longer accepts
that inputs from constituent groups are legitimate. The new approach
is decisional – not dialogical or participative. It emphasises manage-
ment decisions. Within the approach, blueprints for education are
largely designed by ‘experts’ according to economic criteria and stan-
dards of economic efficiency and effectiveness. Significantly, the teach-
ers who once contested paternalistic bureaucracy and challenged the
power of technical and political elites in the name of educational
progress and professionalism, are now likely to be excluded from edu-
cational decision-making because they are regarded as vested inter-
ests. This point was made perfectly clear by the former leader of the
Victorian Liberal Party, Alan Brown, when he stated unequivocally
prior to the 1992 Election that:
Left-wing advocates of progressive education have captured the cur-
riculum with the aim of using it to restructure society according to their
socialist ideals ... In contrast, the Coalition acknowledges that education
must promote the common beliefs, values and knowledge on which our
society is based. (Gaff, 1999)
At Grandridge, education policy during the 1990s was experienced

by teachers as the effects of funding cuts, and was seen largely as State
Government imposition. The result among teachers is a general per-
ception that spaces for autonomous institutional organisation have
narrowed as a new institutional design, to which they do not feel they
have contributed, is imposed in a system-changing manner in an
attempt to moderate the older, largely teacher-asserted design. In
other words, beyond the effects of the cuts on their conditions of work,
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 156
the design of education associated with State Government policy has

been largely interpreted by teachers at Grandridge as being of an ideo-
logical kind that is anti the kind of design that many of them had pre-
viously perceived themselves to be advancing.
The progressive educational agenda that had been asserted within
education until the mid-1980s by education workers was represented
in the 1990s as radical. Its proponents, particularly the teacher unions,
from the perspective of the Kennett Government were a blight on edu-
cation not only because they were allegedly responsible for ‘unaccept-
able’ levels of educational expenditure through ‘cosy’ industrial deals,
but also because they and other educationalists were accused of hav-
ing pursued a radical, ideological agenda. It was argued by the incom-
ing Victorian Liberal–National Government in October 1992 that
education was riddled with inefficiencies and would have to be
restructured. The slashing of educational infrastructure, which was
justified by a rhetoric of eliminating bureaucratic waste and inefficiency,
seems symbolically as well as materially important in the education
design that was asserted by successive Kennett Governments during
most of the 1990s. Schools of the Future policy emphasised local school
management within a centrally imposed framework. The language
and terminology of the policy initiatives are quite striking. There is lit-
tle if any reference to educational processes, pedagogy, teaching or
learning styles, or relations between students and teachers. Terms such
as ‘marketing’, ‘accountability’, ‘outcomes’, ‘efficiency’, ‘appraisal’
and ‘competitiveness’, however, which teachers concerned with edu-
cational values often find quite alien, are used freely in the policy doc-
uments and supporting materials.
Jack Regan, principal of Grandridge Secondary College, sees him-
self as a realist who keeps abreast of changes of policy and is willing
to change in response. With the overall aim of improving the school’s
capacity to compete with its neighbours, he is on the lookout for
opportunities that might bring extra students or resources to the
school. But Schools of the Future policy is not just about market com-
petition. It also centralises control and extends accountability over
teachers and managers. Rather than fostering teamwork, according to
our evidence, the policy has extended interpersonal competition with-
in the school and created increased divisions and antagonism.
The policy documents make it very clear that principals are expected
to manage. One of the first duties given to them after the election of
the Kennett Government in 1992 was to nominate their ‘least effective’
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 157
teachers who were then declared ‘in excess’. The workloads of prin-
cipals have increased dramatically (Cooperative Research Project
Steering Committee, 1996). Budget cuts have also meant increased
teacher workloads, which, many fear, directly affect the type of learn-
ing experiences they are able to provide their students. Many teachers
are particularly worried about disadvantaged students, but their
capacities to act on their concerns are influenced by fears that some
staff might still be declared ‘in excess’ if enrolments do not hold
up. Regan has used this general concern as a weapon in controlling
union activists within the school. He reported that he told a union
delegation:
‘Look, I’ve got a contract. If they go on strike and upset the enrolments
and things, who looses? Not me. I might lose emotionally, but you’re
going to cost them their jobs, by talking down the school and all that sort
of stuff’. So really the union’s looking for a weapon and they’re knock-
ing themselves off.
Many teachers said they perceived a change Regan’s style. They said
he had previously established himself as a participative and demo-
cratic manager as he worked with the staff as a whole to establish the
school’s fine reputation. Some staff, including some new to the school,
had in recent years become quite hostile towards him. However, even
the most trenchant critics of Regan’s allegedly managerial and auto-
cratic style since Grandridge joined Schools of the Future tend to
concede that he had been pushed into this position by the current
circumstances. One of his management colleagues put the follow-
ing view:
He’s a very humane person. He’s forgiven for his mistakes [laughs]
whereas some other people aren’t. ... He’s built up lots of credits.
Regardless of much staff sympathy for Jack Regan in his difficult

position, he was increasingly being seen as – reluctantly or otherwise
– accepting a line-management relationship with the Department of
Education, which was seen as having been captured by government.
In a sense, he was seen as the Government’s person on the spot. Under
the policy, Regan and other members of the principal class switched
from tenured positions to individually negotiated contracts that allow
for salary packages. The contracts set out severe limitations on their
freedom to comment on government policy. Such conditions reinforce
the point that the principal class is different. One teacher, a supporter
of Regan, said:
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 158
I don’t think I’ve been more appalled by anything than the idea that
principals can write off tax for private school fees for their kids ... I find
that just totally disgusting.
One member of the principal class at Grandridge, who had previ-

ously been a well-respected teacher unionist, felt keenly the sense of
being on a different side to her former colleagues. She felt she had been
forced to make a difficult choice, and attempted to explain her position
to her former union comrades:
I don’t go on strike any more. I went to the branch meeting and
explained that it was a painful and difficult decision for me to make, and
I felt I owed it to my comrades to tell them why. I mean there’s this feel-
ing that there is a distinction because of the contracts and the differences
in pay and all that sort of stuff.
The comrades were not impressed. The response of one underlines the
extent to which there are now different ‘sides’, and that ‘choosing’ to
change sides can be regarded as a sellout:
She just came out and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to support any union.
I’m not going to go on strike, etcetera, etcetera. This is a new order’... I
got up and said that, you know, your history is quite irrelevant when
you’re a unionist. What is relevant is your present actions and they
should be a reflection of your history, and that you’re only as good as the
last time you supported the industrial action of the union, and that I’d
heard a lot of people say that they’d been a unionist for 20 years and
that is generally a precursor for saying that they don’t go on strike now
and that they can do all sorts of appalling things to undermine people
who do.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of the increasing sense of emer-

gence of different sides at Grandridge, as we have interpreted the data,
is the feeling among teaching staff that what is valued in the work of
teachers has changed. A number of teachers perceive that recent, con-
troversial internal promotions indicate the changed priorities:
It’s the ‘bean counters’ largely who have been the ones who have been
promoted into the middle-management positions. The middle manage-
ment here is typical I think of the attitudes that have been promoted.
That is that they are the most important people around. That they have
almost no interest in curriculum at all ... because your curriculum out-
put is not something that measures you as a success [any more]. It’s your
sort of ability to be able to do administrative tasks, like for example,
working a computer, being able to do rolls or to be able to do a timetable.
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 159
Reshaping TAFE
The National Training Reform Agenda (NTRA) emerged in a series of
steps from about the mid-1980s. These included responses from
Australian politicians and economists to the emerging deregulation of
international markets, and various reports which unfavourably com-
pared the productivity of Australian industry with that of Japan and
several European and Scandinavian countries. The Deputy Secretary
of the Commonwealth Department of Employment Education and
Training during the period 1988–93, Dr Neil Johnston, defines the
NTRA as follows: ‘The Training Reform Agenda is aimed at creating a
more diverse and responsive training system while maintaining suffi-
cient regulation to ensure nationally consistent, quality training and
skills recognition arrangements’ (Smith 1996, p.5). As Smith points
out, ‘industry’ and its ‘needs’ are the key concerns of virtually all
NTRA documents (p.59). There has been a clear sense that the reform
process should be owned and driven by industry.
The effects of the NTRA are felt particularly strongly in TAFE, but
its influence on teachers’ practice is in many respects indirect rather
than direct. For example, its aim of implementing national standards
of competency exposes teachers to external forms of accountability.
Likewise, the development of standard sets of materials for use on a
national basis would seem to impinge on the traditional core of teacher
professionalism: curriculum and pedagogy. It is perhaps for this rea-
son that TAFE teachers have tended to respond to the NTRA largely in
terms of its emphasis on competency-based curriculum and testing.
The ethos of contractualism that we argued was becoming apparent
at Grandridge Secondary College was already well established at
Streeton Institute. Indeed, as the previous policy orientation towards
devolution through ‘responsive bureaucracy’ and ‘inclusive’ govern-
ment practice began to be questioned within the Victorian primary
and secondary education sectors in the late 1980s, TAFE, after about
1987, began a rapid transition to contractual staff arrangements and
fee-for-service course delivery. In a move that strategically advantaged
the TAFE education sector, the growing market emphasis shifted
attention onto vocational outcomes. And because TAFE had always
cultivated close relationships with industry (Rushbrook, 1995), it was
generally more willing and able than the school sector to serve per-
ceived industry needs and implement policies and administrative pro-
cedures that incorporated the kind of contractualist principles that
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 160
were characteristic of industry throughout the 1980s. Managers at

Streeton and many strategically placed staff have generally welcomed
the NTRA’s industry focus. The Director, Barry Klein, emphasises that
Streeton is an industry player and that ‘the business of TAFE is busi-
ness’. He has reportedly told his Divisional Directors: ‘If the bottom
line is working, I’m very happy with your performance.’
Klein is uncomfortable with the label of educationalist and with
educational discourse. He regards all that as ‘too academic’. He is
much happier talking about training, which he clearly regards as a dif-
ferent, more practical and more worldly business than education. He
refers to Streeton as a ‘firm’ which, like any private company, must
first and foremost ‘protect its bottom line’. In departments identified
by Klein as successful there was no shortage of people who spoke with
passion and excitement about commercial activities. For example, the
Director of one of the Institute’s Divisions, who was once a trade
teacher in a technical high school, was revelling in the exciting new
entrepreneurial era:
I’m currently managing two projects [in Southeast Asia] ... One, New
South Wales TAFE couldn’t deliver so we delivered within three days
and had someone on the ground up there and won the contract ... With
the other project that I’m running, it’s a green fields site; there’s no plant
there at the moment, just some training rooms and offices ... We pre-
pared and wrote the resource material from scratch for 320 hours of
training by four, in three weeks ... Then we delivered for a month. It’s
now all been translated and we go up there to deliver for three more
months ... Magic projects! The demands on the College were just incred-
ible and we just [snaps his fingers] did it.
TAFE’s tradition of seeking sectoral legitimacy and identity through

its claimed ‘unique’ relationship with industry may partly explain the
orientation of many TAFE managers and some teachers to both serve
and emulate the private sector. The Director quoted above, for exam-
ple, attributes Streeton’s success to its being ‘ahead in that culture
change’ to embrace entrepreneurialism and commercial competition.
Competency Based Training (CBT), program budgeting and manage-
ment by objectives have generally been accepted by managers at
Streeton, and by education policy-makers, as the embodiment of busi-
ness ‘best practice’. The implementation of such measures serves the
further purpose of reinforcing TAFE’s principal connection with busi-
ness and industry and therefore as a refutation of its ‘school-based’
past. Business and industry are appealed to in a generic sense to give
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 161
legitimacy to the direction of educational reshaping. In this, some

managers have jumped ahead of the requirements of the
Government’s policy intervention in that they see the entrepreneurial
agenda as their own.
There is no doubt, however, that a number of teaching staff regard
the entrepreneurial ethos and what they see as the reduction of com-
plex educational relationships to CBT as anathema to educational
principles and their own cherished educational values. Like many
teachers at Grandridge Secondary College, they tend to perceive the
current business-oriented and outcomes-driven policy environment in
TAFE as anti-educational. Progressive educational thinkers at
Streeton, however, had never experienced the same institutional suc-
cess as their colleagues in schools like Grandridge. A crucial differ-
ence, we believe, is that at Streeton not only has there been general
enthusiasm at management level for changes represented by the
NTRA, but also, despite the presence of scepticism towards CBT, there
has been greater and more enthusiastic take-up of elements of the pol-
icy than at Grandridge by many (but, as we shall emphasise, by no
means all) teaching staff who have perceived exciting possibilities in
the new order.
Actors in the two settings to some extent embody their different
institutional and social histories – and professional identities – that
influence organisational politics. In TAFE generally, the progressive
educational movement, while influential in modifying conceptions of
good teaching, never caught on as a key feature in institutional
debates (Rushbrook, 1997). Indeed, from our first day of field research
at Streeton we heard senior managers and others refer to educational
‘dinosaurs’ – a term that is used derisively in connection with other
terms like ‘educationalist’, ‘intellectual’ or ‘academic’. The unmistak-
able message was that ‘dinosaurs’ were locked into the ‘outdated’ edu-
cational agendas of the 1970s and 1980s and unable to make the jump
to the new commercial climate that was required in TAFE. Dinosaurs
were criticised not just for their antiquated thinking, but also because
they were presumed to be wedded to work practices and conditions
that their union had previously struggled to win for them. The
dinosaurs were therefore painted by their critics as romantic idealists,
at best, and ineffectual time-servers, at worst. They were seen to still
inhabit the old environments in which progressive educational think-
ing and union activism had thrived – humanities, arts and VCE. Many
teachers in these areas had begun their careers in technical high
schools where they were likely to have had exposure to, and possibly
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 162
involvement in, the heady educational politics of recent decades.

Criticism of such teachers, therefore, was another way in which some
TAFE personnel could distance themselves from the culture of TAFE’s
school-based past and, in some respects, celebrate the new era of direct
association with the industry (rather than education) sector.
Less often stated (except by dinosaurs themselves) was the view
that the dinosaurs were defenders of traditions and values which, in
the ongoing process of contested educational reshaping, still retain
some institutional legitimacy. For this reason, some teachers were
pleased to be associated with the dinosaur tag. But even teachers with
backgrounds as educational activists had virtually given up on
defending the vision of education they had long fought for. Once, they
were activist designers of TAFE, and education generally, and were
regarded as progressives. Now they are cast as conservatives. They
might resist policy interventions and refuse to comply in their own
classrooms, but they were often resigned to marginalisation:
People like me are relics of a different era. We’re not market oriented. We
don’t give a fuck about the dollar basically. We’ve got a commitment to
broadening minds, opening inquiry, getting people to think and to
develop themselves through that and, along the way, giving them other
skills that will help them fit into society but with the intellectual appa-
ratus hopefully sharpened a bit. There’s no future for people like us in
TAFE ... It’s a sad thing but we’re an embarrassment to them. They just
want the yes-people who’ll come in and if you give them a copy of Mein
Kampf and told them that’s what you’re going to teach, that’s what they
would teach. No questions. It’s a job.
While we are somewhat sympathetic towards the dinosaurs, the

problem with the above view is that it is extremely limited strategically.
The dinosaur language stereotypically defines the once partially insti-
tutionalised ‘old’ educational culture of TAFE teaching in terms of the
new industry-focused one which is envisaged and willed by its pro-
ponents. Managers, including the Director, repeatedly emphasise that
Streeton is one of the most successful TAFE institutes at raising fee-for-
service revenue. Many staff at various levels see Streeton as a leader in
developing ‘commercial activities’ in much the same way that
Grandridge was once seen as a leader in curriculum reform and in
developing progressive educational practice. There is excitement and
even glamour, as well as institutional recognition and support, for
entrepreneurial individuals and Departments.
People who have taken off in an extension of TAFE’s entrepreneur-
ial and business-oriented traditions do not experience current pres-
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 163
sures for institutional change as impositions in the same way that

teachers at Grandridge Secondary College seem to do. In fact, many
staff believe that the implementation of the NTRA, and its effect of
stimulating entrepreneurial commercial activity, has resulted in the
opening up (not closing off) of opportunities for everyone. People
have started running with the agenda. They seem to have developed a
sense of ownership and personal investment in it. There is talk of
empowerment and new freedom to achieve:
The sad thing I think for a lot of TAFE teachers is they don’t see the
opportunities that are there for them. They don’t open their eyes. They
wear blinkers. I’m a hairdresser for God’s sake! I mean! And I’ve had a
sister who’s an academic who has huge problems with me being a hair-
dresser and doing the things I’m doing now. Now, if a hairdresser
can open their eyes and look above ... there’s opportunities there for
everybody!
This teacher is puzzled that more teachers do not think like she does:
When can we get the academics to understand that it doesn’t mean that
they lose their jobs, and it doesn’t mean that they lose power or control,
or whatever it is, that in fact it gives them more and it’s not a threat, that
it will be one of the best things that’s ever happened to education?
Such puzzlement is interesting. Like many managers, this teacher

attributes the lack of enthusiasm of teachers in general for the contrac-
tualist, managerial and entrepreneurial agenda as being a product of
ingrained ‘public service’ attitudes and a simple inability to see the
benefits of the new order. Critics like the dinosaur mentioned earlier,
however, claim that such a simplistic view of their position entirely
misses the point. The point, as he sees it, is that ‘there’s not even the
slightest educational pretence in this place any more’. Education con-
siderations, in this point of view, have been squeezed out by oppor-
tunistic market considerations. It’s a question of values and normative
orientations. The upshot, it is claimed – and this is the critical issue for
many – is that teachers are required to demonstrate corporate loyalty
to the Institute which cuts across the concept of loyalty ‘to the educa-
tion profession’. This critic claims: ‘Some of those people have no con-
cept of profession. It’s whatever the company wants.’
Despite the variety of educational positionings, all participants
seemed to accept that market competition in education has become a
reality. The emphasis at Streeton on competition, commercialisation
and budgets, and the sense that savvy organisational players are mak-
ing things happen for the Institute, indicates the nature of the changed
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 164
conditions. The Director typifies this sense of localised entrepreneuri-

alism. He refuses to identify with the TAFE ‘system’ and insists
instead that his loyalty and commitment are specifically to Streeton. In
this respect he is very much like Jack Regan at Grandridge who is
equally passionate about his school. Both Regan and Klein expect staff
to share their single-minded loyalty. Klein, like Regan, is a networker,
but his networking is external to TAFE and is used as a way of build-
ing market credibility. He wants to mix directly with the relevant play-
ers in industry – locally, nationally or internationally. He wants people
at various levels of the organisation to act in this way and says he will
back those who take the initiative.
According to the Director, the teachers who are likely to do this
come from trades rather than ‘academic’ backgrounds. Klein regards
such teachers as being ‘more worldly’ than Humanities and Arts
teachers who ‘never left school’. These trade teachers, the backbone of
TAFE, generally took pride in delivering the kind of service which
emphasised the development of relevant skills that they believed
industry and the trades needed. Such teachers were likely to be seen,
and to see themselves, as relatively task-oriented in delivering and
measuring practical training. NTRA priorities are more or less com-
patible with this view of teaching, especially in their endorsement of
competency-based curriculum and evaluation. One thing that was
new about the implementation of the NTRA, however, was the
emphasis on expansion of ‘commercial activity’. In order to meet the
challenges of both the competency emphasis and the emphasis on
commercial activity, much work has been done in various
Departments on the development of curriculum materials that lend
themselves to flexible modification and individual pacing, and to com-
puter testing. Some Departments in particular have become externally-
oriented and entrepreneurial in this respect. These are the
Departments that the Director sees as successful – the ones that have
‘taken off’ in the new era.
The easy distinction made by Barry Klein and others between ‘aca-
demics’ and ‘tradies’ has the effect of reinforcing existing stereotypes.
We need to be careful, however, as the apparent dichotomy between
enthusiastic, practical, entrepreneurial advocates and despondent,
academic, high-minded critics of educational redesign may be some-
what misleading. In fact, in some ‘practical’ curriculum areas that
were involved in direct training of industry-employed students, and
in which CBT and an emphasis on commercial activities had generally
been embraced, we found some of the most profound thinking
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 165
about issues of pedagogy, curriculum and evaluation. These data are

especially important, not just because they give some indication of the
complexity of educational practice at Streeton as a whole, and of the
complexity of responses to the current educational redesign, but also
because they indicate that the professional educational discourses of
the 1970s and 1980s, so readily dismissed now by some organisational
players, may have penetrated quite deeply into general educational
thinking in TAFE. For example, a teacher in the Applied Health
Science Department maintains that:
[TAFE] has become a business. I mean, I think to survive you have to see
yourself as a business that is providing education to the client who, from
a policy point of view, is industry, but, from the educator’s point of view,
is the people that come in here on a daily basis. I think it’s wrestling with
that – trying to keep industry happy but making sure that we treat our
customers not as customers or as clients, but ... in a broader sort of edu-
cational perspective. I mean, we really do see them as people and, sure,
we have to justify our existence under policy, but they are still people
with problems, people with issues, and from an educational perspective
that’s just as important as meeting the demands of industry.
The point being made here is that education cannot simply be com-
modified as a product to be delivered but must be negotiated as part
of the teacher–student relationship which is a joint process that calls
forth forms of engagement and interaction. A similar consideration led
this teacher and his colleagues to modify the assessment regime that
was specified under CBT and which teachers felt was ‘pushing them
from teaching to assessing’ to the point where they were ‘bogged
under with assessment’. But their strategic adaptation of the assess-
ment regime has as much to do with pragmatic imperatives as educa-
tional ones:
We do use computer managed learning assessment [but] we see it as a
superficial form of assessment that simply looks at whether a student
has read the material ... We’ve tended to go to a more holistic form of
assessment in terms of a project or an assignment or case study or that
sort of thing. Not arduous, but nevertheless can be justified and figured
back to the learning outcomes. And partly it’s survival. Not all of this is
driven by good educational principles. You know, we’re saying, ‘Shit,
we just can’t cope.’
The pressure on Departments to develop and use computer-based

instructional materials in order to allow for individual student pro-
gression (as well as the marketing of courses and materials to other
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 166
providers) has been resisted by many teachers as foreign to their pro-

fessional culture. The core group of teachers in the Applied Health
Science Department, however, seems to have applied here also a com-
bination of pragmatic adaptation and protection of educational princi-
ples. Moreover, they have found that their pragmatic critique of CBT
has resulted, to some extent at least, in critique of formerly accepted
practice. As the teacher quoted above explains:
The big change of that technology is not so much technology [as such],
but all of a sudden the teaching that was going on was no longer a pri-
vate affair in the classroom between the teacher and the student. It then
became a very public affair because the documentation was public. And
so all of a sudden the students knew exactly what was in the subject
from start to finish. It was available to the employers. To other
Departments. That was quite threatening for a while for all of us I think.
All of a sudden, if we were documenting stuff it had to be right and that
required some review of the material ... and also it made our assessment
methods and so on very public. That actually, for us, had a fairly posi-
tive effect because it demystified the process if you like. All of a sudden
these were documents that people could comment on and processes that
people could comment on, and that could be changed.
The move to computer-based teaching materials and the public pro-

duction and ownership of curriculum documents, for this informant,
signals the evaporation of the teacher’s paternalistic mystique. While
he says this has ‘created a sense of disempowerment for some people’,
it has also necessitated more collaborative working relations and the
development of good curriculum. Most importantly, teachers were
able to ensure group ownership of the materials and that ‘there’s still
that relationship with the students and between teachers’ that is the
essence of educational practice.
We have spent some time on this teacher’s account because it seems
to us to offer a good illustration of organisational actors struggling to
deal with imposed institutional design. Although many TAFE teachers
we encountered were struggling to balance commercial viability
against their commitment to educational and social values, few
seemed prepared to critique formerly entrenched educational ideals.
That this is going on in one quarter at least, where teachers are also try-
ing to protect the flame of professional educational practice as they
bring revamped educational values to bear in reshaping the design
that is reshaping their institution. This suggests multiple possibilities
for the ongoing politics of educational reshaping.
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 167
Implications for future design

In our account of the current playing out of particular policy interven-
tions in education, we have presented something of a contemporary
social history of specific sites of the social and organisational renorm-
ing of education. The different social contexts embody distinctive tra-
ditions and educational norms and networks that influence
educational reshaping in particular ways.
Schools of the Future policy and the National Training Reform
Agenda have been major State and Commonwealth policy interven-
tions in education. Their effects have been felt in educational organi-
sations not just as imperatives that are mandated, but also as
normative orientations which shape the agenda of possibilities for
ongoing institutional design and change. For example, many man-
agers and some teachers, especially at Streeton, but also at Grandridge,
saw themselves as running ahead of the reform agendas, and even
independently of them. The Divisional Director at Streeton quoted ear-
lier is a good example of this, as is the Institute Director who feels that
in the new era of TAFE he has been liberated from restrictions of the
past to the point where he can now regard himself as ‘not actually
working within the TAFE system’ but as an independent entrepre-
neurial operator within the training market. He is normatively located
beyond the policy interventions but within the broad design agenda
that he finds so empowering. His counterpart at Grandridge, although
clearly being pulled in the same direction and endeavouring to run
‘his’ school like a private enterprise outfit, does not exude the same
cultural and normative identification with business and industry – or
at least not to the same extent. Moreover, at Grandridge, much more
so than at Streeton, teacher input at various school forums is still a
force to be reckoned with and must be carefully negotiated. Relatively
long-standing educational norms still largely inform teachers’ dis-
course about their work and their understandings of good practice. So
despite his nominal authority, Jack Regan rarely insists on making uni-
lateral decisions.
The institutional design that is manifest in government policy inter-
ventions, however, legitimates particular kinds of change and frames
direction for continuing change. In the embodiment of design in prac-
tices of management, teaching and learning, we can detect trends
which suggest that, for example, while income generation is enhanced
at Grandridge and Streeton, there is also a renorming of teaching and
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 168
learning processes going on. As researchers and educators, we, like

many of our informants, can see complex costs and benefits of the
asserted education design and alternative designs that are being dis-
placed or that might be worked towards within the limits of change
agendas. Perhaps most significantly, the current design reduces the
agency of teachers by asserting alternative ways of transmitting cur-
riculum content and minimising the teacher’s role in contextualising
and shaping the learning encounter. This point was picked up by the
teacher from the Applied Health Science Department at Streeton quot-
ed above, who, with colleagues, was working both within and against
the design agenda in a way that suggests possibilities for embracing
affirmative practical politics of shaping educational possibilities and
purposes. We would argue that the assertion and defence of normative
possibilities is the essence of organisational politics, in which feasible
designs need to be evaluated to ensure that ongoing processes of insti-
tutional shaping do not lead in dysfunctional directions.
At the most practical level, the implication of the above is that ‘what
might be’ in education must grow in some ways out of ‘what is’. And
although we have not attempted to present a definitive account of
what is at Grandridge and Streeton, our data do enable us to say that
it is clearly not the same as what the policy agenda and policy docu-
ments say it should be. There are many examples of active and passive
resistance, adaptation and accommodation to policy. On at least one
point, however, all participants we spoke to seemed to be in agree-
ment: that education does particular work on behalf of society. It con-
tributes to the social polity, the economy and social fabric of society in
ways that most educational designers – be they educators, govern-
ments or industry players – would presumably hope would enhance
both individual and social capacities for institutional visioning and for
realising willed visions through their embodiment in institutional
practices. It is such capacity that Connell (1995) refers to as ‘the capac-
ity for social practice’. Because such capacity is interactive and reflec-
tive, Connell argues, the extent to which it can be enhanced ‘depends
to a considerable degree on teachers’ capacities for reflection and
strategic thinking about their work’ (1995, p.110).
From this point of view, considerations of desirable educational
futures amount to considerations about social and individual invest-
ment in individual and collective capacities for reconstructive practice
that might realise socially optimistic visions. Education workers, as
institutional players and designers, would need to accept responsibil-
ity for contributing to new ways of social organising and living, and
Xch8E2 15/4/04 12:37 PM Page 169
for developing creative capacities linked to traditional educational

touchstones of democracy and equity. If this is the case, then the aping
in education of the economically rational fixation of modern business
practice, with its links to positivism and fundamentally modernist,
behaviourist and mono-motivational assumptions, will need to be
problematised in order to accommodate the complexity and multipli-
city of ways in which meaning and understanding are constructed.
For example, the aspect of organisational reality that presses most
heavily on Jack Regan, and especially on Barry Klein, is ‘the bottom
line’. Accountability tends to be reduced to economic viability more
than to educational responsibility. Klein is out in the market place
doing deals in this respect, as also is Regan to a lesser extent. They are
networking and setting up ‘strategic alliances’ that will advantage
their organisations. But in terms of building a sense of institution, such
networking promotes the individualistic advantage of individual
players and individual, competitive educational units rather than sus-
taining integrated grids of mutual professional cooperation and soli-
darity. Such an individualistic orientation, as well as marginalising
general education thinking, challenges the ‘historic consensus’
(Anderson, 1997) that education should serve the public good and pro-
mote long-term social, economic and cultural development of the
society.
In other words, forms of rationality, and what counts as rational, are
social constructions that are capable of being deconstructed and recon-
structed from various perspectives including critical policy analysis
(Bowe et al., 1992; Lingard et al., 1992) and postmodernism (Yeatman,
1998), strands of both of which embrace affirmative practical politics
of contributing to the shaping of preferred educational and social pos-
sibilities. Such a view of institutional design assumes that the assertion
and defence of normative possibilities in institutional spheres is the
essence of practical politics which may largely be conducted in organ-
isations but which have broader institutional and social implications.
A politics of possibility, in these perspectives, is not seen as the work
of solitary, autonomous, calculating and objective individuals, but of
collections of diverse, interconnected social beings who engage in
intersubjective striving to shape their practice within social and insti-
tutional spaces and discourses.
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 170
The politics of
postpatrimonial governance
ANNA YEATMAN
One could suppose that before a certain era, say a thousand years ago,
only a very few people lived creatively ... To explain this, one would
have to say that before a certain date it is possible that there was only
very exceptionally a man or woman who achieved unit status in per-
sonal development. Before a certain date the vast millions of the world
of human beings quite possibly never found or certainly soon lost at the
end of infancy or childhood their sense of being individuals. (Winnicott,
1971, p.70)
The argument of this chapter centres on the proposition that ours is an

era of postpatrimonial governance. By postpatrimonial governance, I
mean that government can no longer ethically model its policy, admin-
istrative and regulative work along the lines of a patrimonial house-
hold owing care and protection to those who are viewed as both the
subjects and dependents of this household. Instead, government has
to structure its policy, administrative and regulative work in relation
to what I will call individualised personhood. Individualised person-
hood is a type of political and social personhood which requires rela-
tionships of governance and social connectedness to be mediated by
individual consent. This means that these relationships have to
respond to individuality. Or, to put it differently, that the individuality
of persons has to be addressed and harnessed in how these relation-
ships function. For the individuality of all persons to be taken up and
170
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 171
THE POLITICS OF POSTPATRIMONIAL GOVERNANCE 171
responded to in relationships of governance and social connection, a

profound transformation of the structures of what we can call patri-
monial individualism has to have occurred. Instead of only heads of
households being accorded the status of individuality, all who are
counted into human communicative interaction, including types of
interaction which are non-verbal and tied to the embodied co-presence
of individuals, are counted as ‘individuals’. This is a non-discriminatory
and universalistic ethos of individuality which fundamentally
challenges the paternalism and maternalism of patrimonial types of
governance. People who a patrimionial liberal-democratic discourse
took for granted as unable to participate as citizens in democratic gov-
ernment because they were not capable of governing themselves let
alone others – children, lunatics, idiots and prisoners – are admitted to
the status of individuality. This extension of the status of individuality
requires a fundamental recasting of the patrimonial conception of
citizenship (see Yeatman, forthcoming).
Governance has to be refigured on behalf of an individualised social
life. Relationships of authority or legitimate domination have to be
reshaped so that they are responsive to individuality and deploy it.
These are new challenges to what it is we think we mean by demo-
cratic governance. Instead of authority working in terms of the hierar-
chical relationships of a patrimonial household, authority has to be
reconceived in ways which make it possible for those with unequal
power and capacity to respect, respond to and interact with each other
as individuals whose agency must be taken up within the conduct of
this authority.
This is the ethical direction of individualised democratic gover-
nance. It is difficult to find any contemporary political position which
in some fundamental way does not affirm this direction. It is arguable
that the ethical reassertion of a libertarian neo-classical economics as
interpreted by Hayek is precisely such an affirmation. This is a neo-
classical economics that elaborates a radical possessive individualism
which appears to be ethically free of its old patrimonial encumbrances.
This is a universalised possessive individualism that deals in the non-
discriminatory and individualised metaphors of choice, rational
action, firms and markets.
Since the 1960s, New Left and other participatory social movements
have been developing a political culture of individualised personhood
and they have been experimenting with organisational forms, models
of governance and political process which can respond to individu-
alised personhood. These are two different kinds of political affirma-
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 172
tion of individualised democratic governance. Where a postpatrimo-

nial neo-classical economics reasserts a universalistic individualism –
the sovereign individuality of individuals as private property owners
in the marketplace–postpatrimonial forms of social democracy are
exploring how continuing relationships of governance and social con-
nection can be individualised in ways which make social life respon-
sive to individuality, and individuality responsive to the claims of
social life. Where the former tends to be anti-government, the latter
affirms the centrality of government to the conditions of democratic
participation. Where the former uses metaphors that are centred
on market-based forms of individualised action, the latter uses
metaphors that are tied to political and social participation by means
of government-supported structures of citizenship.
When we examine these two different political affirmations of post-
patrimonial democratic governance more closely, it becomes clear that
neo-liberal individualism turns into a reassertion of hierarchical com-
mand relationships that may respond to a particular version of indi-
vidualised action, consumer choice, but which do not and cannot
respond to individualised political action (what I will call citizen
choice and citizen voice). Neo-liberal individualism authorises the
expansion of market-oriented action at the expense of democratic gov-
ernment, and to the extent that this expansion occurs, the force and
scope of democratic governance is diminished. Postpatrimonial liber-
alism accepts individuality but this is the severely non-egalitarian
albeit non-discriminatory individuality of a competitive ‘survival of
the fittest’. This is not an individuality capable of respecting, respond-
ing to and interacting with the individuality of others except in a
highly instrumentalised, utilitarian and privately oriented fashion.
Postpatrimonial liberalism is an elaborated conception of
governance and techniques of rule which deploys market-based
individualism in order to correct what it takes to be inevitable
paternalistic-bureaucratic features of government. In this way it
evades the task of working on what it may mean to develop an indi-
vidualised form of democratic governance. There is however consid-
erable effort in the direction of meeting this task which can be used to
think about what it may mean.
The politics of postpatrimonial governance, then, is currently struc-
tured in terms of contestation between a neo-liberal and postpatrimo-
nial reassertion of utilitarian individualism, on the one hand, and
positive efforts in the direction of individualised democratic gover-
nance, on the other. While the former term of this contest deploys the
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 173
market at the expense of government, the latter term relies on an affir-

mation of government and things public.
Postpatrimonial challenges to patrimonial

models of democratic governance
This is a protracted and complex crisis which, broadly speaking, is
associated with the post-Second World War era for established and
aspirant liberal democracies. Up until this point the classical concep-
tion of democratic government had prevailed. It is this conception that
I am calling a patrimonial one because democratic government on this
account is tied to its foundations in private patrimonial household
governance.
On this conception which goes back to the Aristotelian account of
politics, and to use Lockeian rather than Aristotelian language, gov-
ernment as a public authority is constituted by the association of free
householders. They are free because they are independent household-
ers, or, differently, they are heads of households that are economically
independent. These male heads of households are the governors of
what is a private household economy (the oikos). Until industrialisa-
tion brought about the separation of households and productive eco-
nomic activity, economic production was embedded in the kin-based
and master–servant relationships which defined the structure of
household as a unit of governance. With the disembedding of the
economy to become an autonomous sphere of capitalist market-
based production and exchange, households lost their economic char-
acter and function. However, their ethos was imported into the func-
tioning of capitalist firms where the relationships between employers
and employees continued to be structured in terms of the originally
household-based master–servant relationship.
The distinctively patrimonial element in this conception is associated
with the idea of independence as the essential condition of citizenship
or participation in democratic governance. Independence refers to a
capacity to govern oneself – a capacity, incidentally, which cannot be
present without its corollary; namely, the capacity to govern others.
Independence, then, is tied to a hierarchical relationship between
those who are so constituted that they can govern themselves and
those who either temporarily or permanently lack this capacity. Thus,
until this century when the accession of especially wives to the
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 174
suffrage began to fundamentally complicate this picture, the headship

or private governorship of a household was not only associated with
the basis of the democratic suffrage but was also understood to be the
basis of private property, in both senses of the term property/propri-
ety: property as the ownership of land, things and people, and as the
capacity to be one’s own man.
The patrimonial bases of democratic government are also extended
to how the state apparatus which follows upon the establishment of a
public authority is understood. While the free association of inde-
pendent householders maintains an association of the public authority
with contractarian principles of freedom and consent, when this pub-
lic authority assumes the aspect of state administration of domestic
welfare it takes on patrimonial features. Such state administration was
associated with political economy; that is, policy which is oriented to
the increase of national wealth on behalf of the welfare of the national
populace. There were two models of political economy available:
either the historically novel principle of universalistic capitalist market
exchange, or the management of the household economy or oikos.
When state administration was oriented to the welfare of those who
could not otherwise meet their needs, it was conceived as a patri-
monial administration of the needs of those who were positioned as
dependents of the state. It is for this reason that a political theorist like
Hannah Arendt fundamentally objected to the obtrusion of the rise of
the social or welfare state into the domain of the political. For Arendt
(in The Human Condition) the political is the sphere of freedom, of
‘action’, as distinct from the principle which rules the oikos, the prin-
ciple of necessity.
Patrimonialism, then, I am arguing characterised the formation of
modern democratic governance and state administration in three fun-
damental and interlinked respects. Firstly, the capacity to be a citizen
was associated with the capacity to be one’s own man, and this in turn
was contingent on status as a free and independent householder or
head of a household. Thus the capacity to be self-governing was con-
tingent upon and associated with one’s responsibility for the govern-
ment of others within one’s household. Secondly, patrimonial
assumptions coloured all conceptions of economic management: these
ranged from the slave plantations of the southern United States in the
19th Century to the structuring of the modern employer–employee
relationship internal to the firm. Thirdly, patrimonial assumptions
informed the conception of state administration of needs, where needs
were associated with the status of economic dependency and as thus
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 175
requiring patrimonial protection and support. The welfare state, as

well as the colonial state, were both structured by this conception of
state administration as the protection of the weak and needy by a state
conceived as though it is a large and independent household. The
independence of the state is expressed in interstate relationships
where international law is modelled on the contractarian assumptions
of natural law; namely, the right of independent private property own-
ers to defend their own property and their obligation to respect that
of others.
Modern patrimonial democratic governance and state administra-
tion, then, produce a set of asymmetric relationships between those
who are constituted as capable of self-governing and those who, being
not so capable, are to be governed by those who are: men and women;
parents and children; colonial administrations and the colonised; wel-
fare administrations and the needy; employers and employees; those
who are counted as normal self-governing adults, and those who by
some reason of moral, physical or mental impairment are deemed
unable to be self-governing.
The first line of challenge to modern democratic patrimonialism is
on behalf of those who are so positioned that they can claim the capa-
city of self-government: wives, employees, colonials and the colonised.
They use the tradition of natural right which identifies the capacity for
self-government with an educated and mature capacity to reason. In
the case of labouring men, they also use patrimonial masculinism: as
heads of their own families they should have the right of citizenship.
Masculinism of this kind also informs anti-colonial struggles on behalf
of national independence. In many ways this line of challenge to mod-
ern democratic patrimonialism sustains it by making it more inclusive.
An individuality which is identified with the independence and self-
sufficiency of a self-governing unit is the model for individualised cit-
izenship on this account.
The second line of challenge to patrimonial democratic government
is made on behalf of those for whom metaphors of self-government
will always be inappropriate because they lack the capacities to be self-
governing: children and infants, many people with relatively severe
intellectual and/or psychiatric disability, older people with dementia,
for instance. While the first line of challenge was nourished as it were
within the terms of patrimonial liberal democracy, this line of chal-
lenge was without previous harbingers and represented a genuine
challenge to the patrimonial model itself. It involved a very new idea:
just because an individual cannot be independent in the sense of self-
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 176
governing does not mean that they cannot be respected and responded
to as an individual in how others connect with and relate to them.
Here individuality or the integrity of an individual does not pre-
clude dependency on others. Rather, the issue turns on how this
dependency operates. Does the person whose assistance, education,
nurturing, care and so on, is needed give these in ways which respect
or which deny respect to the individuality of the person who has this
need? As I have argued elsewhere (Yeatman, forthcoming), and will
further detail below, this is a profoundly postpatrimonial turn of
events. There are asymmetries of capacity and power between the par-
ties to this relationship of dependency of the one on the other, of this
there can be no doubt. However, these asymmetries are to be struc-
tured by what Seyla Benhabib (1992, p.31) terms an ethic of universal
moral respect and egalitarian reciprocity. Among other things, this
ethic cannot be practised except as this practice is oriented to respect
for the unique individuality of those who participate in the relation-
ships concerned. What this means, for example, is that a parent or
teacher cannot discipline a child without orienting the nature and
mode of discipline to respect for and responsiveness to the individu-
ality of this child.
It is this line of argument which in a profoundly novel way recasts
the whole problem of democratic governance. If ‘participation’ in gov-
ernment does not have to be tied to a capacity for self-government in
the sense of an independent individuality, then we are in a position to
think about ‘participation’ in ways which admit different kinds of sub-
ject positioning and the different kinds of inequality, capacity and
power they may entail regardless of whichever politico-redistributive
regime is in place. For example, it is impossible for a client to compete
with the expertise of a professional, but does this mean that the pro-
fessional has to exercise this expertise as a paternalistic ‘speaking for’
the client? It must mean this if all we have is a model of participation
tied to independent self-governing selfhood. On this model, those who
participate have to be equal in their capacities for independent self-
government, a metaphor impossible to sustain in situations of tutelage
or dependency where those who lack knowledge are dependent on the
judgement, knowledge and expertise of others. However, if this model
is no longer the only one going, and it is possible to think of respond-
ing to those who are less able, knowledgeable or expert as individuals
who can participate with their own distinct and unique wisdom or
sense of self in the relationship, the distinctive inequality of the pro-
fessional–client relationship can be reconciled with individualised
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 177
democratic governance. It is not that professional and client become

equal in terms of expertise, or even that they are equal in their respec-
tive capacities to be individuals, but that the relationship can be gov-
erned in such a way as to invite reciprocal respect from each for their
own unique individuality and that of the other.
With hindsight, the New Left movement’s formulation of the value
of ‘participation’ as the right to participate in the decisions which gov-
ern one’s life can be seen as a conception of individualised voice. This
is a conception of democratic governance that requires the work of
government to be mediated by the voice, or as I have put it elsewhere
(Yeatman, 1995), individualised consent of those subject to govern-
ment.1 This conception is possible only to the extent that government
is accepted as a normal feature of social life. New Leftists had a gener-
alised conception of the decisions which govern one’s life. The logical
thrust of this formulation was to demand individualised participation
in all forms of government, domestic and public, private and public,
thus, for example, in the government of the family or domestic rela-
tionships, in the government of classrooms and of whole schools, as
well as in the government of the locality, province and nation. New
Leftists surely did not realise that they were generalising government
as a feature of social life in this way, but that was the logical force of
how they formulated democracy.
The significance of this conception is that it makes individualised voice
central to the workings of governmental relationships, and, in this way, goes
beyond the liberal democratic tradition’s tendency to reserve voice for the
establishment, and disestablishment of relationships. On the more orthodox
liberal democratic model, voice tends to be assimilated to choice, to the
rights of voting in and voting out a government, or, on the older social
contract model, to the choice of contracting into a political association
or of contracting out. The New Left conception, on the other hand, is
oriented to the individualisation not of moments of establishment and
dis-establishment of governmental and other relationships, but to the
individualisation of ongoing relationships. On this conception, choice
tends to be in service of voice, or, of individualised participation;
whereas, in the liberal-democratic conception, voice tends to be in
service of choice. As we shall see in a moment, this difference under-
writes very different conceptions of government.
When participation or voice is identified with the individualisation
of ongoing relationships, the two lines of challenge to patrimonial
democratic governance, instead of working in different directions can
come together to work in the same direction. When hitherto excluded
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 178
groups such as women claim access to democratic self-government,

both at the level of the individual and at the level of the polity, their
claims work to re-instate the difference between those capable of gov-
erning themselves and those who lack this capacity. Moreover, in mak-
ing the claim for self-government, women buy into a conception of
individuality which is associated with a self-sufficient and private
propertied individualism. On this account, one is an individual only to
the extent that one has an integrity or singularity which not only
marks off who one is with regard to other individuals, but establishes
individuality as separation from other individuals. For this to occur,
one has not only to own one’s will but also to own all that is required
for this to be possible: thus, to own one’s body and all those things that
enable a private individual propriety of this kind. This individual can
interact with others only in one of two ways: either, by reciprocal
choice or contract; or, by the former commanding the latter on the
model of patrimonial household governance.
This is an individuality in fact which is modelled after the individ-
ualisation of dominium or lordship. It is not an individuality capable
of coming into an ongoing relationship with other individuals where
the dynamics of their reciprocal recognition as individuals is taken up
into how this relationship is conducted. Patrimonial individuality can
recognise the presence of other individuals only as separate lords of
their own dominium. Thus, reciprocal recognition here is structured in
terms of recognition of such separateness: a recognition of each as lord
of his own castle, his own private property. Patrimonial individuality
can enter into positively acknowledged relationships of interdepend-
ency with others only as these others are positioned as the dependents
of the patrimonial lord or master.
When the patrimonial individual recognises other patrimonial indi-
viduals not as partners in a common venture (for this would inappro-
priately place them inside his private household economy), but as
separate lords of their own dominium, this establishes a particular
dynamic between patrimonial individuals. Their relationship of mutual
recognition is a defensive relationship: ‘I will recognise you as the
best prudential defence of my own property, but I have to recognise
that if you manage to increase your property, you will have more
power than me, and, potentially, more leverage in terms of what it is
you may wish to get me to do. Therefore, I will work hard to increase
my own property so to deny, or at least to minimise, this leverage you
may gain.’ A defensive relationship, then, which becomes a competi-
tive relationship oriented to the accumulation of private property, or,
in its modern sense, capital.
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This is a solipsistic type of individuality, one that requires individ-

uality to be expressed as a privately oriented individualism. As many
have remarked before now, it is a curious feature of modern demo-
cratic dynamics that women have to claim access to this privately ori-
ented individualism in order to be counted as individuals. For women,
of course, are located in social life as relational creatures – as mothers
who are bound in an intimate relationship of dependent co-existence
with infants and young children. For this reason, women never make
entirely convincing patrimonial types of individual.
The contradiction in women’s claims to be individuals too is not
reconcilable until a different and genuinely postpatrimonial concep-
tion of individuality is in view. This opens up when the idea of indi-
vidualising ongoing relationships makes it possible to think of
reconciling individuality with relationships of interdependency with
others. Somehow these relationships have to be structured not only to
invite individualised participation, but also to afford the private space
or property which enables an individual to enjoy integrity as an indi-
vidual. Self-government is not so much the issue here as opportunities
to grow and develop as an individual and to be an individual – in
ongoing relationships of reciprocal recognition with other individuals.
Such growth and development includes the care, teaching and nurtur-
ing which many individuals give those individuals who need such
care, teaching and nurture.
The postpatrimonial conception of individuality, then, does not
work in terms of a heavily marked difference between those who get
to be individuals because they can govern themselves and those who
do not get to be individuals because they lack this capacity. It requires
private property in all senses of the term; namely, recognition of a dis-
tinctly embodied individual as a unit of agency; recognition of the acts
of this individual as his or her ‘own’, if they are indeed so – that is,
both uncoerced and facilitated to be his or her own in this way; free-
dom to pursue choices and opportunities which enable an individual
to explore their individuality or to become more of their own individ-
ual.2 However, this right of private property is limited by its function-
ing on behalf of a postpatrimonial individuality; namely, an
individuality which does not need to assert itself as an individualised
form of lordship engaged in a competitive relationship of reciprocal
recognition with other individualised lords. A postpatrimonial indi-
vidual needs only so much private property as enables him or her to
function as an individual in different kinds of relationship with other
individuals – that is, to be able to achieve, as Winnicott puts it, unit sta-
tus in these relationships. If reversion to patrimonial individuality
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 180
where others inside an ongoing relationship of interdependence are

accommodated only as the lord’s or master’s dependents is not to
occur, unit status of this kind has to be able to accommodate the posi-
tive existence of other individuals; that is, to welcome and work with
others as individuals.
The politics of postpatrimonial democratic

government
Postpatrimonial conceptions of individuality and democratic gover-
nance represent a much more serious threat to patrimonial democratic
individuality than communism, socialism or other kinds of communi-
tarianism have ever represented. The socialistic or communistic tradi-
tions of resistance to patrimonial possessive and competitive
individualism were made in the name of equality but they could not
show how they could accommodate individuality in a politico-ethical
sense. Historically, indeed, the structures of social democratic wel-
farism or of the communist state form were bound into patrimonial
household models of governance which were antagonistic to a univer-
salistic and inclusive conception of individuality.
From the mid-1950s onwards a number of social movements com-
bined to present a postpatrimonial set of challenges to the established
liberal-democratic welfare state form. These included the civil rights
movement on behalf of Afro-Americans within the United States and
its affiliations with the pan-African postcolonial movement; the sec-
ond wave of feminism and its later offshoots such as the women’s
health movement; the participatory democratic student movements
and their ripple-out effect into various kinds of bottom-up movements
to reform the delivery of health, public housing and legal assistance;
the Vietnam Vets movement seeking rights on behalf of returning
American soldiers with disabilities, and the wider disability rights
movement which was spurred by this; indigenous people’s move-
ments for self-determination; and the new public administration and
public administrative law which combined to develop a more publicly
accountable and participative conception of state administration.
This was in fact an epoch of postpatrimonial developments in
democracy. Looking back, it is possible to see the various movements
of the latter half of the 1950s and 1960s as laying the groundwork for
what became a sustained set of policy, procedural and institutional
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 181
reforms over the two decades of the 1970s and 1980s. In Australia
where reforming Labor Governments began this process in 1972 and
were able to sustain it until about 1989, there was an accumulation of
policy reform initiative and learning which constitutes a rich repository
of experimental practice. It is not too much to see this epoch as a quiet
participatory revolution which worked in the direction of extending
the Keynesian welfare state into a participatory state form. It was a
revolution which elaborated the idea of ‘voice’ as central to a democ-
ratised state administration. Governments and administrators became
increasingly practised in various kinds of consultative relationships to
citizen users of state administrative services. Much of this consultative
work involved highly innovative experimental practice, and much
functioned on behalf of a real input to the governmental policy
process, until roughly the end of the 1980s. By this time a counter-
revolution was in play and it had led to the rationing of public
resources to such an extent that citizen claims on state administration
and public services had to be both curtailed and pushed off the
policy agenda.
The Keynesian welfare state did not just evolve into a participatory
form. For the participatory revolution to be possible, a sustained cri-
tique had to come in the name of participatory democracy from those
who rejected the patrimonial features of the welfare state. These
included feminists who rejected how the welfare state positioned
women on public income support as ‘dependents’ under state protec-
tion, as they included multicultural activists who rejected the assimi-
lationist assumptions of the welfare state, and indigenous activists
who rejected the racism built into state protection of an inferior race.
This critique is still ongoing as the recent report on the ‘stolen genera-
tions’ Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997)
exemplifies. Transmutation of the Keynesian welfare state into a more
participatory form occurred by fits and starts and in uneven ways
depending on the effectiveness, vision, consistency and organisation
of change agents on behalf of the participatory revolution in the
period of the 1970s until the present. However, by and large it suc-
ceeded in establishing the new terms of legitimacy for governmental
practice and state administration.
The critical point, however, is that the Keynesian welfare state could
be extended in a participatory direction because it represented gov-
ernment of the economy on behalf of a citizen community. In short,
it represented the fundamental principle of democratic political
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 182
economy: the economy should be in service to the needs of society, and

part of government’s role is to ensure that the market works in this
way. The other part of government’s role is to specify and respond to
common or public goods (for this conception of democratic political
economy, see Levine, 1996).
Keynesian thus represents the primacy of democratic government
with regard to capitalism. Resistance to this regime on the part of
champions of the freedom of the market in relation to government has
been growing since the 1960s. This resistance has taken two forms:
firstly, the increasing organisation of transnational corporations from
the 1970s onwards to change public policy agendas in the direction of
freeing the market from governmental intervention and Keynesian
types of regulation; secondly, the reassertion of a libertarian neo-
classical economics which champions market-oriented freedom as the
only principle congruent with individuality and views the inequalities
which follow upon unrestrained market-oriented competitive individ-
ualism as natural rather than as artifacts of social arrangements. The
combined practical and ideational force of these two agencies has suc-
ceeded in bringing about a counter-revolution: the disestablishment of
the legitimacy of the Keynesian welfare state and of its extended par-
ticipatory form.
The public policy agenda has been reshaped to become one of
restructuring state administrative action so that it works on behalf of
market-oriented capital, the proposition being that the welfare of indi-
viduals will be best served by wealth generation than by a citizen-
responsive state. This is a counter-revolution on behalf of the
reassertion of a non-relational individualism, an individualism for
whom freedom resides in individualised dominium and separation
from other individuals. This is an individuality for whom choice of
contracting in and out of relationships is critical but for whom voice is
redundant except as it is expressed in contractual agreement.
Conclusion: new contractualism and relational

individualism
The non-relational kind of individuality that I described above cannot
participate in relationships of interdependency without losing its free-
dom, unless it can become the directive voice of command in these
relationships. Are we back then to a patrimonial individualism? Not
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 183
quite. This is a postpatrimonial market-oriented individualism to the

degree that, firstly, a non-discriminatory conception of individual free-
dom to participate in market-oriented action is operative, and, sec-
ondly, command relationships are themselves contractualised. This is
the point of the principal-agency model, borrowed from the new insti-
tutional economics, and which is driving the new contractualist mod-
els of entrepreneurial management in the public sector. As Jonathan
Boston (1995, p.78) puts it: ‘control by administrative hierarchy is
being replaced by control by contract.’
To briefly explain, a non-discriminatory economic or market-oriented
individualism generalises the principle that each individual is bent
on maximising his or her own private happiness, or utility. It is this
principle which is used to call all conceptions of public values and
service into question, for, on this reasoning, all actors regardless of
where they are placed are in the pursuit of private, not public, goods.
Since it is conceded that there needs to be some kind of state apparatus
in attendance of residual welfare needs, law and order, and the
facilitative regulation of the free market, those who staff this state
apparatus have to be controlled in ways which minimise both their
tendency to convert state power and resources to their own benefit
and the possibility of them being captured by ‘interest groups’ seeking
to gain special advantage from the state. The favoured instrument of
control is the performance contract; namely, a contractual agreement
between those who work on behalf of the state and whoever is com-
missioning/funding the work to produce against specified outputs
and standards. Boston’s (1995, p.79) representation of the new con-
tractualist model of public management for New Zealand is now gen-
eralisable to Australian public sector management:
... the new model of public management has placed a heavy emphasis
on the separation of funders/purchasers and providers, and the separa-
tion of policy advice from policy implementation. It has also led to an
extensive use of ‘contracts’ of various kinds to govern relationships, not
merely between public- and private-sector organizations, but also
between (and within) public-sector organizations ... some government
departments now employ a significant proportion of their ‘permanent’
staff on fixed-term contracts and regularly draw on the services of con-
sultants to undertake short-term assignments.
This is a contractualism which is driven by a universalistic non-

relational individualism, an individualism which is extended to all
adults so as to draw them into a market-based performativity, regard-
less of whether these adults are engaged in non–market-oriented
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 184
kinds of social contribution such as the care and parenting of young

children. Its general direction is one of substituting the market for gov-
ernment, choice for voice, and economic standing for citizen standing.
Elsewhere (Yeatman, 1997), I have argued for a new contractualism
that fits and contributes to the development of a post-Keynesian par-
ticipatory state form which works on behalf of democratic governance.
This is a contractualism which privileges voice by developing differ-
ent kinds of protocol and procedure which facilitate the individualisa-
tion of ongoing relationships. Contractualism here is used on behalf of
participation and a relational individualism. For this kind of citizen-
oriented contractualism to develop, it will need to be joined with a
participative conception of the policy process where citizens are
drawn into public learning and social problem-solving in ways which
make them more responsible as policy claimants.
In short, the politics of our time is structured by a contest between
two kinds of contractualism. One kind re-asserts the sovereign indi-
viduality of individualised dominium and extends market freedom as
the most appropriate expression of sovereign individuality at the
expense of government. While this contractualism is not patrimonial,
it has neo-patrimonial features because it enables power to be
expressed as contractualised command relationships. However, the
universalisation of contractual individualism ensures that there are no
longer any ethical obligations of patrimonial authority: those who are
powerful enough to structure contract relationships in their favour
have no obligation to those with whom they contract beyond what the
contact specifies. The older patrimonial economy where the household
head owes protection to his dependents has gone.
The other kind of contractualism is specified in terms of the indi-
vidualisation of ongoing relationships of all kinds of governance. In
particular, it is tied to the specification of the rights of individuals to
participate in administrative state decisions that govern their lives. It
is a contractualism which is defined in terms of a relational individu-
alism where to get to be an individual, a person does not have to be
self-governing or independent but, simply, to be effectively invited to
participate as he or she can in the relationships that govern his or her
life. On this model, power differences exist but they have to be worked
in ways which facilitate the participation of the less powerful in the
relationship, whether it be a professional–client, employer–employee,
or parent–child relationship. This kind of contractualism depends on
primacy being given to democratic government as the guarantor of cit-
izen standing and rights in relation to the economy or market.
Xch9E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 185
Notes
1. The Port Huron Statement, written by Tom Hayden as a manifesto for
Students for a Democratic Society founded in June 1960, and for the 1962
SDS Convention at Port Huron, Michigan, mixes older masculinist patri-
monial metaphors of ‘independence’ with a newer participatory language:
‘As a social system we seek the establishment of a democracy of individual
participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in
those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that
society be organised to encourage independence in men and provide the
media for their common participation.’
2. From the Port Huron Statement again: ‘This kind of independence does not
mean egotistic individualism – the object is not to have one’s way so much
as it is to have a way that is one’s own.’
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10
Beyond nostalgia:
institutional design and
alternative futures
TERRI SEDDON AND LAWRENCE ANGUS
This collection began with a vignette: a 1993 seminar in Melbourne

during the early days of the implementation of the Liberal–National
Coalition Government’s school reform agenda. At this seminar a
woman – a parent involved in her child’s schools council – and a man
– an economist, exchanged views about the direction of the then recent-
ly elected Kennett Government education reform. For the woman
what was at issue was care; how she and other parents worked with
teachers and the school principal to ensure the best schooling for their
kids. For the man what was at issue was cost; education is like any
other area of government expenditure and must be constrained with-
in the fiscal limits required to ensure a balanced state budget.
Looking back from 2000, this vignette, with its polarisation of care
and cost, can be seen in some respects as having been a motif for the
1990s. While policies and practices of the past decade have varied in
their emphases, there has been a tendency for care and cost to be seen
as irreconcilable in education. In the main, governments and some
community interests have emphasised the need to manage the costs of
education. The problems of spreading scarce resources across prolifer-
ating demands for educational support and development, and of
ensuring that these resources are used efficiently and effectively,
186
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 187
BEYOND NOSTALGIA: INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES 187
became the priorities. Many educators and other community members

countered by asserting the priority of care in education: the view that
productive learning depends upon an interpersonal chemistry
between teacher and student. From this perspective, cost is only sig-
nificant in so far as this chemistry is enabled or disabled by resource
allocations.
The upshot of these trends, as stated in the introduction to this col-
lection, led to a situation in which stakeholders in education polarised.
They tended to speak past each other, neither hearing the other party’s
concerns or criticisms. Market rhetoric became de rigeur. Affirmation of
the social purposes of education, public interest and public provision
was marginalised, seen as old-fashioned criticism, an appeal to the
past, or an expression of self-interest.
But such disengagement between stakeholders in education is
unproductive. It implies that some interests have a monopoly on wis-
dom. It undercuts consultation about the intentions and impacts of
policy and this limits public and professional acceptance of reform.
Such reluctance to engage in the issues of reform undermines fidelity
in implementation and, in some cases, fuels stoic resistance or overt
conflict. Ultimately, disengagement reduces the capacity of govern-
ments, education systems and institutions to respond to rapid social
change in ways which both return benefits to the Australian commu-
nity and ensure innovation and feedback mechanisms that generate
feasible education reform into the next millennium.
The reform trajectory: 1994–99

In the years since 1994, there have been complex trends in education
reform. Worldwide, neo-liberal corporate politics and governance
have been strongly allied to globalising tendencies, and have
mobilised these tendencies selectively so as to achieve various domes-
tic agendas such as cut backs in the welfare state. The weakening of the
welfare state, income redistribution and tax reform, means that the
tendency of global market forces (like all markets) to increase dispari-
ties of wealth and power is not offset by contrary trends that are either
national or supra-national in character. There is a growing disparity
between rich and poor countries, and between the rich and poor within
each country.
These trends are evident in Australia as a result of a policy agenda
pursued during the 1990s, in somewhat different ways, by Labor and
Liberal–National Coalition Governments both within States and the
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 188
Commonwealth. The agenda has been further diffracted by the local

political dynamics within states and in the traditional state–federal
politics that are a long established feature of Australian federalism.
These complex political trajectories have given rise to different pat-
terns of neo-liberal reform. The Commonwealth has moved from
residual social democratic principles that were maintained under the
Hawke–Keating Labor Government (1983–96) to more deregulatory
neo-liberalism under the current Howard Government (since 1996).
Among the states, Victoria provided the most extreme example of neo-
liberal reform in the 1990s. Under Jeff Kennett’s Liberal–National
Coalition Government that was in power from late 1992 until late 1999,
there was far-reaching marketisation, privatisation and public sector
reform – not least in education (Costar & Economou, 1999; Spaull,
1999).
In education, the neo-liberal politics of globalisation are very appar-
ent. Education has been both a means of adjusting culturally to the
growth of globalised relations and the focus of neo-liberal reforms in
public administration. Education has been expected to pioneer global-
era Australian innovations and augment national economic competi-
tiveness and adopt the neo-liberal institutional blueprint of corporate
institutions and quasi-market forms of production and exchange,
while making do with lower public subsidies.
The upshot of these neo-liberal policy trajectories has been the ero-
sion of the old statist arrangements in which education was for the
nation, of the citizen, by the professional teacher and through norma-
tive content and controls. In place of these previously established
arrangements there is now a three-way crisis of public educational
provision: (Marginson, 1998, p.3)
• a resource crisis brought on by declines in government funding,
linked to a declining commitment to the nation-building role of
public education and training;
• an identity crisis brought on by the corporatisation of internal edu-
cation and training systems and cultures; and
• a crisis of global strategy: how do the Australian education and
training institutions make their way in a globalising learning envi-
ronment?
In this changing context, education and training are being re-
engineered as quasi-markets oriented to national competitive advan-
tage and to serving the consumer/client. The principles governing
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 189
access and success in education and training are increasingly individ-

ualised through consumer choice policies, privatised user-pays
arrangements and learners’ acceptance of individual responsibility for
learning. The acceptance of consumer choice is paralleled by the
acceptance of market failure. The work of teaching has become more
technical in orientation, partly as a consequence of information tech-
nology applications and work intensification, and more constrained
within corporate rather than professional frames. Governance has
tended towards an executive style. It has become more transparent
to clients but more controlling in relation to employees as decision-
makers assert managerial prerogative in the organisation and control
of teaching.
These policy agendas and implementation processes have been
shaped by economic rationalist discourses which broadly represent
social processes as the outcome of individual choices within changing
contexts. Individuals are assumed to be rational actors, disembedded
economic units, divorced from social attachments and contexts, and
motivated by self-interest to maximise utility and benefits. It is there-
fore presumed possible to model aggregate individual behaviour in
the light of both prevailing and changing incentives and disincentives.
And if the incentive structure is changed it becomes possible to re-
engineer individual behaviour and ‘collective action’, the aggregate of
rational individual actions, towards preferred ends. The promise of
economic rationalism is the capacity to redesign and re-invent social
institutions. Governments have been quick to grasp this promise, pur-
suing varied policy processes that have reworked patterns of institu-
tional rules, regulatory frameworks and incentive structures that
shape education and training.
Economic rationalist discourses, however, downplay the fact that
education is a peopled social landscape rather than a neutral site in
which self-interested rational actors interact independently of society,
culture and governance. While the broad neo-liberal policy trajectory
has had an impact on educational provision and practice in Australia,
institutional re-engineering is never as straightforward as the policy-
makers, neo-classical economists and management gurus suggest.
There are unintended as well as intended outcomes. Individuals and
groups contest as well as comply with change imperatives. And,
despite all the reforms, the old problems of education and training
must still be dealt with: how to prepare students for adult life and
responsibilities; what to teach them; how to ensure reasonably equi-
table access and articulations between family, school and work; how to
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 190
prepare and regulate teachers; how to pay for a learning society in a

knowledge economy. That this point is well recognised among the
general public, as well as by critics of neo-liberal marketised education,
is illustrated by the outcome of the 1999 State Election. Victoria was
the state at the forefront of redesign of the public sector and, although
the Kennett Government seemed invincible, polling consistently indi-
cated massive public unease about the state of education, particularly
the erosion of the caring and supporting role that citizens still appar-
ently expect schools to play on behalf of young people.
Impacts and effects of neo-liberal institutional

redesign
In 1997, when the chapters that made up this collection were first pre-
sented at a two-day conference at the Australian National University,
there was relatively little research documenting the impact and
effects of neo-liberal institutional redesign in Australian education.
Authors were asked to draw on their own research and turn their var-
ious conceptual frameworks to analysing the impact and effects of
neo-liberal reform. In early 1997, many of the chapter authors who
were located in Victoria had already lived through four years of
Kennett Government reform. They had first-hand personal and
professional experience of the impact of neo-liberal decentralisation
and re-centralisation in education, as well as insights arising from their
academic research. Drawing on this diverse knowledge base, they pre-
pared chapters that presented preliminary evidence and analysis of
the complex and contradictory effects of current education reform
agendas. A variety of themes began to emerge in the papers and in
subsequent conference discussion that have been developed and
reworked for this volume as further research has been conducted.
The impact of institutional redesign processes are seen by the con-
tributors to this volume to have been far more equivocal than the rhet-
oric of government suggested. As Burke explains in Chapter 2,
funding patterns were complex and did not lead to clear-cut educa-
tional benefits. Meredyth and Hunter suggested that contemporary
education reform was simply an ongoing task of pragmatically adjust-
ing processes of governance and educational provision in order to
attend to the prevailing problems of the time. In their view, pragmatic
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 191
problem-solving by governments seeking to manage society, rather

than experiments in ideological educational redesign, can be seen as
the reason for changes being made in education and training. But, they
stress, problem-solving depends upon a continuing role for govern-
ment in both collecting and monitoring data about educational provi-
sion and performance, and also responding to it in ways which make
clear to citizens that governments are managing to deal with emerging
problems. The scenario they describe of continuing government tin-
kering with the institutionalisation of education and training was con-
firmed by Angus and Seddon in Chapter 8. Drawing on ethnographic
data from schools and technical and further education in Victoria, they
indicate that top-down institutional design has been countered and
contested as staff within education and training attempt to impose
bottom-up institutional designs as they pursue preferred educational
futures. These educational developments in advance of policy and
management, arising from the pressure to innovate in order to survive
in marketised contexts, ultimately outrun intended institutional
designs. These processes create continuing debates and politics over
change which are costly to manage and also pose constant problems of
control within education.
The effects of marketisation in the past decade or more have been far-
reaching. Simon Marginson, in Chapter 3, analysed the effects of com-
petition within education, drawing attention to the way market
competition during the 1990s was overlain on existing educational com-
petition for positional goods. He stressed that market competition
would play out differently according to the stratification of positional
goods on offer in different schools and universities. The effect would
be to increase the segmentation of education markets and, as Mark
Western confirms in Chapter 5, encourage social closure at both the
top and bottom of education-jobs markets. Jane Kenway and Lindsay
Fitzclarence reported on interview data with school students, showing
that in a marketised context, students became discerning consumers.
They know which are good and bad schools and where they are posi-
tioned in the market. There was disturbing evidence in Chapter 6 that
some students were resigned to their place in the low end of the
schooling market and understood this as their place in society. The
implications for teachers of stratification among education providers
was foreshadowed by Marjorie Theobald. Her historical study of
teachers in a marketised context in the 19th Century shows that there
was stratification then of star and sink teachers according to the mar-
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 192
ket position of the school they were associated with. Again, the histor-
ical analysis indicates that the effect of marketised education is to con-
firm social closure on class lines.
Marketising institutional redesign intensifies social inequality and
promotes social closure into rigid stratified class groupings. This
recent trend contrasts with the long-standing Australian commitments
to a fair go. As Gronn indicates in Chapter 4, education has long been
a means of elite formation and its corollary, non-elite formation. The
clear distinction between public and elite private schooling has histor-
ically been an important means of reproducing social inequality and
for creating relatively secure pathways for students of elite schools to
elite occupations. As Western emphasises, such reproduction is less a
function of the schools than of their clientele and the way schools have
been shaped in response to client demands. But in the context of mar-
ketisation and labour market reform, protected pathways to elite for-
mation are taken up by middle-class families wishing to secure
cultural advantage for their children. Middle-class flight from public
schools further compounds the problem of inequality in education
which has already been exacerbated by market segmentation as a
result of competition. As Kenway suggests, middle-class flight is an
indicator that families are taking up the identity of consumer rather
than citizen, and expressing concern for their own children’s educa-
tional advantage rather than for all Australian children’s benefits
through educational provision. Such trends suggest an increase in trib-
alism in Australian society rather than traditional commitments to the
commonweal.
Neo-liberal reform entails complex shifts in patterns of governance
and control. As Anna Yeatman argues in Chapter 9, the character of
neo-liberalism, particularly its assumptions about individuals as eco-
nomic units who are disconnected from communities and cultures, has
driven governance towards an executive, decisional model. This
model presumes that the decision-maker, like the old-styled ‘head of
the household’, exercises sovereign power within his dominium and
that this executive figure or agency – a premier, government, chief
executive, TAFE director or school principal – makes decisions which
are binding on those within that dominium – the citizens, workers or
teachers. Yeatman argues that, in the context of 1990s neo-liberalism,
this patrimonial model of governance has been stripped of traditional
ethical responsibilities of leaders to protect those within the dominium.
It represents a backlash against an emergent postpatrimonial model of
governance that had been developing particularly since the 1960s.
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 193
Such postpatrimonial governance had begun to extend decisional

authority and individual status beyond traditional heads of house-
holds, and to recognise difference and develop new practices of dem-
ocratic citizenship based on active participation.
Other authors provide further evidence of a long and continuing
struggle over modes of governance. Theobald shows that marketised
education in the 19th Century confirmed decisional and independent
status of school principals in star schools while locking teachers in
those schools into poor pay and working conditions. Marketisation
benefited the executive figure rather than those within the dominium.
As Selleck (1990, p.62) has noted, teachers welcomed bureaucratic
rules in education which systematised decision-making processes:
… teachers did not have to be dragged under the control of a centralised
authority – they went willingly, glad to be rid of the turbulent priests
and local communities which bedevilled their existence. To them the
1872 Education Act, which abolished local boards and installed a power-
ful state bureaucracy, was not a contested act of state formation. At the
time it seemed a liberation.
Angus and Seddon’s chapter suggests that the struggle between

patrimonial and postpatrimonial governance is playing out within
schools and TAFE institutes as managers attempt to assert and extend
executive authority, while teachers (and some managers) work around
and beyond executive decision-making in collegial and participative
ways.
These emergent trends – increased social stratification in education,
middle-class flight, exacerbated social inequality and division, strug-
gles over modes of governance and decisional status, and ongoing
cycles of institutional tinkering to try to fix up the limits of previous
reforms – foreshadow a future of ongoing destabilisation in education.
But they also raise questions about the limits of neo-liberal reform in
Australia. How far can education and training be marketised? What
are the costs of neo-liberal reform? And what might be necessary to
bring about some kind of re-assessment of neo-liberal institutional
redesign?
Evidence of impact and effects

By the end of the 1990s considerable evidence about the effects of a
decade or more of neo-liberal reforms was becoming available, and
increasing debate about the social implications and costs of the
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 194
reforms was occurring. The evidence that is available is an eclectic mix

of independent research, theses, surveys, government-sponsored
research and evaluation, reviews and reports of committees of inquiry.
A comprehensive review of these evaluations and debates is impor-
tant, but is well beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is possi-
ble to give a flavour of this growing body of material.
A landmark study of post-World War II education in England
(Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, 1981) used four themes to
structure its analysis: context (that is, the institutional and funding
arrangements of education and training), access, content, and control.
We have used these themes to organise a brief overview of this emerg-
ing body of research and evaluation literature.
Context
There is a substantial critique developing of the institutional context
created as a consequence of neo-liberal reform (for example,.
Anderson, 1997; Marginson, 1997; Fooks, Schofield & Ryan, 1997).
While the general policy trend has been to marketise education and
training, there is widespread recognition that what has developed is
not a ‘true market’ as modelled by economists but a quasi-market. For
example, a recent review of TAFE in Queensland (Bannikof, 1998),
conducted for the Queensland Government, stresses that, despite
reforms since 1990 that were intended to create a national training
market, the formal vocational education and training sector (including
public – mainly TAFE – and private training providers delivering
nationally recognised training programs and services) does not oper-
ate like a true market. The report asserts:
You can distinguish products, buyers and providers. But there is limited
choice of products and providers in the formal sector, demand signals to
providers are diluted through complex processes and information for
consumers is scarce. Government is the dominant buyer and the domi-
nant provider in the sector of the market that it regulates. (Bannikoff,
1998, p.7)
Given this prevalence of government in both the demand and supply

sides, Bannikoff (1998, p.9) asserts:
Government has a clear role to play in funding vocational education and
training because the operation of the training market does not lead to
optimal levels of skills in the community. Nor does it lead to appropri-
ate standards, efficiency or fairness. It is a clear case of market failure
the market does not, of itself, invest in socially or economically optimal
levels of funding.
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 195
Bannikof argues that contestable funding is a blunt instrument for

reform and that, used by itself, it ‘leaves a trail of instability and cre-
ates a reservoir of resistance to a wider range of changes’ (Bannikoff,
1998, p.11).
As Gerald Burke makes clear in Chapter 2, the Commonwealth
Government’s own figures indicate that contestability of funding has
accompanied reduced budget allocations to support education.
Indeed, the National Commission of Audit, established after the
Howard Government came to office, indicated that funding for school
education declined from 3.6 per cent of GDP in 1983–84 to 2.8 per cent
in 1993–94. Reduced funding has been accompanied by an explicit
agenda oriented to increasing the privatisation of education and train-
ing. In vocational education and training this is evident in the devel-
opment of the training market which permits private as well as public
providers to compete for government funds. In school education the
strategy has been more direct. The Howard Commonwealth
Government legislated to permit the establishment of private schools
on the basis of very small enrolments. They also legislated for an
Enrolment Benchmark Adjustment such that every enrolment in a pri-
vate school will draw $1712 from the following year’s Commonwealth
outlay to government schools. Senator Lyn Allison of the Australian
Democrats has estimated that these adjustments will consume the
whole Commonwealth allocation to government schools if private
school enrolment approaches 50 per cent (Anglican Diocese of
Melbourne, 1998, p.29).
Despite the trend to reduce government involvement and funding
responsibilities in education and training, there is increasing evidence
that a substantial role for government in education and training is
being reaffirmed. In Victoria, for instance, there have been growing
protests about the increasing dependence of public schools on ‘volun-
tary’ levies on parents as a financial base for providing core education
services. This protest led, finally, to a statement by the Department of
Education concerning the items for which government was responsi-
ble. This statement clearly commits government to specific funding
responsibilities while leaving open questions about how much fund-
ing will be available and how the broad resource base for education
will be regulated so as to adequately service citizens in the emerging
knowledge economy. There has also been a growing emphasis on gov-
ernment responsibility for orchestrating relations between market,
state and community that can sustain effective lifelong learning. The
expansion of work-for-the-dole schemes and affirmation of ‘mutual
obligation’ are expressions of this emerging commitment by govern-
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 196
ment to organising learning relations beyond the traditional para-

meters of institutionalised schooling.
Access
Ultimately, the viability of the redesign of education and training has
to be assessed against students’ opportunities for learning, that is to
say their access to education and their learning outcomes. Trend stud-
ies indicate that there has been a long-term growth in participation in
education and training. A recent report on the Longitudinal Survey of
Australian Youth, based on cohorts of 19-year-olds in the early 1980s,
mid-1980s, late 1980s and mid-1990s, found that:
• year 12 completion more than doubled – up from 35% in 1980 to
78% in 1994;
• young entrants to further education and training became more
likely to have completed year 12 – up from 43% in 1980 to 75% in
1994, but the post-school participation of early school leavers has
also improved;
• participation in higher education almost doubled – up from 20%
in 1980 to 38% in 1994;
• participation in non-apprenticeship TAFE courses showed a con-
sistent increase – up from 13% in 1980 to 20% in 1994;
• participation in apprenticeships declined substantially in the
early 1990s – down from 18% in each of 1980 and 1984, to 16% in
1989, and then to 12% in 1994, but this decline has been offset
somewhat by an increase in traineeships – up from 2% in 1989 to
3% in 1994. (Long et al., 1999, p.vi)
Although these data predate the most recent neo-liberal reforms in
education, they indicate that, despite all the neo-liberal criticism of
Australian education, bureaucratically organised education and train-
ing do enable access and learning outcomes. However, since the early
1990s, school retention rates have fallen. Lamb (1998) maps the dimen-
sions of this trend by gender and school type in the light of various
social trends. The analysis shows that retention rates have fallen most
for boys, government school students, rural youth and children who
are not from professional and managerial backgrounds. Lamb can-
vasses a number of possible explanations for these trends but, noting
an association between school failure and decline in school completion
(Teese, 1996), suggests that:
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 197
… it is important to consider the impact on the quality of school experi-

ences of changes in the levels of school funding. It may be no coinci-
dence that the decline in school completion, which has largely involved
government schools, has occurred during a period in which various
State governments have reduced funds to these schools. Larger class
sizes, general staff cuts, fewer resources, reduction in support services,
and the loss of specialist teachers may well have had an impact on the
range and quality of school programs and, ultimately, on the quality of
teaching and learning experiences of students. (Lamb, 1998, p.28)
Long et al. (1999) confirm the re-emergence of family factors as

significant determinants of educational access and success. Among
the student cohort which was 19 in the mid-1990s, parental occupat-
ion and family wealth had re-emerged as factors influencing entry to
higher education from year 12, irrespective of other family back-
ground characteristics. As Spierings (1999, p.8) notes, other OECD
countries are overtaking Australian school retention rates and
‘Australia seems to be the only OECD country in which school partici-
pation has actually fallen during the 1990s’.
More recent data and more detailed analyses indicate that within
these aggregate trends there are increasingly complex movements in
access and outcomes (for example, Lamb, 1998; Golding & Volkoff,
1998; Teese, 1996). The Dussledorp Skills Forum (1998; 1999) has
drawn much of this work together in two significant collections, one
on 15–19-year-olds and the other on 20–24-year-olds. The general con-
clusion that emerges from this detailed work is that young people,
teenagers and young adults, have been seriously disadvantaged by
changes in the labour market over the past two decades. They are
more exposed to casual work, to employment that is part-time or tem-
porary in nature, and, in general, they are increasingly being offered
work that is low skilled and provides static or declining earnings
(Speirings, 1999, p.5). These labour market trends make education and
training increasingly important in the competition for jobs and adult
status. Yet, the reports indicate that almost 15 per cent of 15–19-year-
olds are marginalised in that they are unemployed or working part-
time and are not involved in education and training, or they have
dropped out of the labour market (McLelland & Macdonald, 1998).
Twenty-six per cent of 20–24-year-olds are similarly marginalised
(McLelland & Macdonald, 1999). Young women (32 per cent) are more
affected than young men (20 per cent).
There is some evidence that young people’s patterns of participa-
tion in education and training are shifting towards a combination of
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 198
work and study, and that they are developing a range of capacities
rather than focusing on specialist programs (for example, Dwyer, 1998;
Golding & Volkoff, 1998). These trends suggest that there may be
sharp generational differences between students and their teachers.
However, there is also evidence that young people’s values and aspi-
rations have not changed significantly from those of their parents and
that they continue to seek an effective transition to independent adult-
hood, autonomy to consume and establish a lifelong career, and to
form life and parenting relationships of their own (Spierings, 1999,
p.5). But among the growing percentage of marginalised young peo-
ple, these aspirations will be difficult to realise. The implications for
social education in terms of social learning, care and support, and gen-
eral skills development are obvious.
Content
The impact of neo-liberal reform on the content of education and
training is difficult to pin down because the effects of different reforms
associated with different sources of content in education and train-
ing are complex and interactive. Reforms have shaped formal curricu-
lum and assessment, the hidden curriculum related to the implicit
norms and values structured into organisational arrangements and
practices, and the embodied expertise that teachers bring to their
pedagogy.
Curriculum and assessment have become more centrally regulated
and, in many respects, the reforms have reaffirmed the traditional
dualistic patterns of academic and vocational learning. For example,
during the 1990s the Victorian Certificate of Education gradually
became more like the traditional Higher School Certificate, which
it replaced in 1989, than its innovators would have predicted (Collins,
1992). In vocational education and training, curriculum reform
has encouraged a behaviourist skills-based competency-based
model which confirms older patterns of vocational education
(Stevenson, 1994).
The ‘hidden curriculum’ – the organisation of education provision
and the norms, values and priorities that are evident as institution-
alised practices of teaching, assessing and administering education
and training – has also shifted. Marketisation, commercialisation, the
growth of regulatory practices that encourage preoccupation with
visible performativity, and consequent normative conflicts around
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 199
teachers’ and managers’ work, all create learning contexts. The upshot
of this learning is not just evident in student’s ability to perform in
assessment tasks or to demonstrate particular behaviours. More
importantly, such learning results in the formation of particular kinds
of people. Students not only learn knowledge, skills and attitudes, but
also how to be one kind of person rather than another kind. As
Kenway and Fitzclarence show in Chapter 6, students and parents are
being shaped as consumers who look out for their own advantage
rather than maintaining older commitments as citizens with interests
in the public good.
The capacities of teachers to make their embodied expertise avail-
able to students in their care have also been redefined as a result of
neo-liberal reforms which have changed teachers’ employment condi-
tions, intensified teaching work, and increased teacher regulation
through performance appraisal and professional recognition schemes.
With increased class sizes and increased work demands, teachers now
have less time and emotional resources for building productive learn-
ing relations with pupils (Blackmore, 1998). Technology has been pro-
moted as a means of facilitating more efficient learning, although there
is evidence that resource demands in developing and maintaining
powerful educational computer applications are very substantial
(Cashion, 1998). Increased independent learning has also been encour-
aged, although whether this leads to increased learning or simply
more ‘hunting and gathering’ of information is hard to say (Bates,
1998). Moreover, independent learning also serves to further prob-
lematise the role and responsibilities of teachers. With curriculum
and assessment decisions shifted to central agencies, and learning
decisions shifted to students, there is a vacuum around the teacher,
who is reduced to a deliverer of knowledge and expertise objectified
in modules and materials, and a facilitator who can manage learn-
ing processes.
This erosion of the teacher as a significant source of curriculum
content is intensified by reductions in professional development for
teachers (although not managers) and, in the VET sector, the removal
of requirements for teachers to possess teaching qualifications. In
Victoria, for example, teachers need only have undertaken workplace
trainer and assessor qualifications in order to teach in TAFE institutes.
Victoria also commits a low proportion of gross wages and salaries to
professional development (0.7 per cent) compared with other TAFE
systems and industry more generally, and casual teachers, who make
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 200
up 20 per cent of the workforce, received only 3 per cent of staff

development expenditure (Villiers et al., 1997). Yet, increasingly
sophisticated knowledge and skills are required to support effective
learning in vocational education and training (Seddon & Malley, 1998).
School-teacher education provision has also been reduced as a con-
sequence of neo-liberal reform in higher education. A number of facul-
ties of education, particularly in Victoria, have been subject to
reductions in student load in initial teacher education programs. This
has coincided with an ageing of the teaching workforce and increased
alternative labour market opportunities that have led some commen-
tators to predict a shortfall in teacher supply. The Australian Council
of Deans of Education (Preston, 1998), for instance, has projected a
shortage of primary and secondary teachers by 2004.
It is in relation to content that some of the most active contestation
of neo-liberal reforms has occurred. There are active debates around,
for example, literacy and civics curriculum (Yates, 1995). Narrow
behaviourist competency-based training has been contested through
policy processes (Lilly 1998), curriculum and assessment (Sefton et al.,
1993) and in day-to-day teaching in classrooms (Rushbrook, 1997;
Billett et al., 1999). The growth of VET in Schools has problematised
the nature of vocational education and reopened the question of how
general and vocational education can come together in ways that ben-
efit learners. A recent set of case studies of school-industry programs
(Malley et al., 1999) indicates that many schools, teachers and com-
munities are developing innovative programs that extend beyond the
frameworks established by central education and training agencies. In
some cases, central agencies have changed their guidelines as a result
of this work. What is emerging is a model of general education that
encompasses workplace learning and which also provides more ‘client
service’ than is usually available in TAFE institutes or other training
organisations. In many cases, this support is attributed to teachers’ tra-
ditional professional responsibility and their duty of care to students.
As Malley et al. (1999, p.24) indicate:
This level of servicing is probably the major factor contributing to ongo-
ing concerns about the adequacy of many traditional school-based
resource allocation models to structured workplace learning programs.
It might be too simplistic to suggest that this resourcing issue occurs
because schools are over-servicing, as the feedback from students, par-
ents and employers identifies these services as a major reason for their
participation.
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 201
Control
Neo-liberal education reform has refigured relations of control in edu-
cation in two ways: by privileging the voice of industry and undercut-
ting the voice of educators and other community stakeholders; and by
reducing citizen voice to consumer voice and undercutting opportuni-
ties for broad participation in educational decision-making. The
upshot of these two trends has been the decentralisation of provision
of education between provider and consumer, while also centralising
control by government as a consequence of government being the key
funder, provider and regulator of education and training. This re-
regulation of control in education has been particularly evident in
intergovernmental alignments and conflicts (Lingard, 1993) and also
in the development of decision-making processes which exclude key
stakeholders (Seddon, 1996).
What has emerged in education and training is a quasi-market and
an evaluative state (Whitty, Power & Halpin, 1998) which has become
increasingly hollowed-out by the strong emphasis on performativity
and performance measures under Liberal–National Coalition
Governments. Residual equity programs that had been supported by
predecessor Labor Governments have been weakened (Lingard, 1999).
In a sense, the textual reality produced as a result of proliferating
assessment, reporting and accountability measures has become more
important in educational decision-making than the social reality of
educational provision and practice (Jackson, 1993). School enrolment
figures, for example, have been used to determine school provision. In
Victoria, primary schools with less than 150 students and secondary
schools with less than 200 were targeted for closure in 1993 in the cyn-
ically named ‘Quality Provision’ process. Yet the Commonwealth has
encouraged the formation of private schools by legislating that non-
government schools can open and receive Commonwealth funding
with far fewer enrolments (primary = 20; secondary = 60).
The centralised evaluative state asserts executive authority over its
dominium, encourages consumer exit rather than citizen voice, and is
increasingly secretive in its practices of governance. In Victoria, for
instance, the Kennett Government was criticised by the state auditor-
general for failing to make its budget allocations in education trans-
parent. During this Government’s term of office there was a wealth of
promotional material available but little statistical and financial data
to provide a clear picture of developments in Victorian education. The
Government refused to release some research findings, such as a
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 202
report by Professor Caldwell of the University of Melbourne on the

effect of class sizes on literacy development. This report was later
released under Freedom of Information. Teachers were subject to
increased restrictions in relation to speaking in public on education
issues. Teaching Service Order 140, for example, limited Department
of Education employees from speaking freely to school councils or
gatherings of parents on policy matters. The Kennett Government sim-
ply broke off consultative relations with unions on coming to office
(Spaull, 1999; Humphries, 1999) and, as well as regulating informa-
tion, seemed impervious to public criticism. Yet, reports by concerned
citizens apparently has a cumulative effect on public opinion, if not on
the Government. For example, the Anglican Diocese of Melbourne
(1998) established a Synod Schools Task Group to argue its concern
about the direction and trajectory of school reform. The report pre-
sented a carefully documented case outlining the impact of neo-liberal
reform on funding (based on official Commonwealth and State docu-
mentation), school management, teachers, students and equity, and
the public interest. In establishing this investigation, a preamble was
approved which captured the Synod’s disquiet:
This Synod views with dismay the increasing polarisation between rich
and poor in the facilities and infrastructure provided within the State
education system, which expose the more vulnerable sections of the
community to serious disadvantage. (p.1)
The Victorian Coalition Government (Department of Education,

1998) responded to the Report by indicating that the Synod got its facts
wrong and by countering specific claims in the Report. The response
noted that all the information (except some current budget data) it was
using was publicly available although, apart from one reference to
Education Victoria’s Corporate and Business Plan, 1998, none of this
documentation was sourced in the response. It concluded by empha-
sising the Department of Education’s ‘willingness to debate the merits
of its policies and operations, so long as the debate is based on fact not
misrepresentation’ (p.15). Yet what counts as a ‘fact’ is clearly con-
tentious. Statements about the purposes of education outlined in the
Synod Report, and the Government’s response to this outline (see
Figure 10.1), illustrate the point. The response claimed that the Synod
and Government statements were similar in their ‘essential aims’ and
that only the wording differed. Yet the rest of the response picked up
endless ‘inaccuracies’ in terminology in the Synod’s Report.
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 203
Figure 10.1 Statements of the purposes of education in the Synod

Report and the Victorian Department of Education’s response.
The of purposes of education The vision of education

(Synod Report) (Government response)
… the vision of a quality education The Department of Education’s vision is for

system which is open to all irrespective a world-class education and training,
of social, economic, ethnic or religious founded on consumer choice and
background, which offers equal access accountability, and achieved in partnership
to that knowledge and those values with business and the community, which
which are widely shared in our society, provides literate and numerate citizens with
which enables society to draw on the enhanced__NOTE: COPY MISSING
widest possible range of abilities in the HERE???
population, which prepares people for
effective participation in a democratic
society and which helps unify that
society. (p. 3)
Despite recent emphasis on a performance-focused evaluative and

increasingly secretive state, there are plenty of indications that parents
and other stakeholders do not prefer contractualised accountability
but seek to participate in a kind of local decision-making that values
cooperation and collegiality (Macpherson, 1998). There are also signs
of increasing pressure for less secretive and less unresponsive govern-
ment. In the 1999 Victorian Election, for example, the level of secrecy
in government was a major issue and considerable emphasis was
given to the danger of secrecy breeding corruption. State–federal rela-
tions provide another set of forums in which patrimonial and unre-
sponsive government is being contested. In vocational education and
training, for example, national policy has demanded the use of
ungraded competency-based assessment, but this is widely criticised
by teachers who condemn the practice because they say it reduces stu-
dent motivation (Kavanagh, 1999). Parents, students, universities and
many employers criticise such assessment because it reduces opportu-
nities for access to further education and because it reduces the infor-
mation available to employers on which they can make job selections
(Rumsey, 1997). States began to take the matter into their own hands
and, despite national training policy, initiate graded competency
assessment.
Alongside these assessments of the impacts of neo-liberal reforms
in relation to the four specified dimensions of education and training,
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 204
global assessments are also beginning to emerge. These evaluations

begin to address the way the redesign of education has affected edu-
cation as a social institution. For example, a recent five-country com-
parative evaluation (Whitty, Power & Halpin, 1998) concluded as
follows:
The dismantling of bureaucratic control of education provision currently
taking place to varying degrees in our five countries represents a signif-
icant and far-reaching strategy to reformulate the relationship between
government, schools and parents. … The evidence we have put forward
suggests that recent education policies are doing little to alleviate
inequalities in access and participation and, in many cases, may be exac-
erbating them. (p.126)
The evaluators added that

… there was insufficient evidence to claim that self-managing schools
enhance student attainment. So, while it is clear that self-management
results in changes to certain school processes, there is considerable
ambiguity about how or whether these have positive consequences for
student outcomes. (p.111)
While acknowledging that school reform has engendered organisa-

tional changes, the evaluators also noted evidence of continuity in
education. They note that there has been little change in the balance of
power between lay and professional stakeholders, and that there is lit-
tle evidence of enhanced teacher autonomy and professionalism. Yet
there have been significant changes in the role of principals and a
widening gap between managers and the managed. Performance indi-
cators emphasise product over process of learning, and narrow the
scope of education and its purposes. Whitty Power and Halpin and the
other evaluators add:
Perhaps most worrying of all is the welter of evidence on the system-
wide effects of articulating self-management with choice-driven fund-
ing mechanisms and the marketisation of education generally. There
seems to be little doubt that such a combination of policies is enhancing
the advantages of the already advantaged at the expense of the least
well off. (p.126)
Conclusion: beyond nostalgia

This collection claims to move ‘beyond nostalgia’ in the consideration
of contemporary education and training. It has tackled this task
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 205
through critique and also by beginning to flag issues and themes that
help us think about preferred educational futures rather than simply
reiterating the probable futures that neo-liberalism has laid out for us.
There are key lessons to be drawn from these analyses.
Firstly, it is clear that rational actor theories of institutional redesign
can provide only a very schematic picture of possible institutional
redesigns. Individuals are not only rational actors but are embedded
in relationships and social landscapes. These landscapes are not thin
contexts in which individual decisions are the only significant factor.
Rather they are thick environments which have histories and cultures,
patterns of affiliation and difference, and relations of advantage–
disadvantage and possession-dispossession. It is the thickness of
social environments, and the embeddedness in them of social actors
that people them, that render rational actor institutional redesigns a
caricature of social life. It is the thickness of social life that is real and
which must be dealt with in promoting either change or continuity in
education.
The analyses collected here begin to provide a basis for grasping
and understanding what we are calling here the ‘thickness of social
life’. Each chapter is informed by knowledge traditions within the
social sciences and humanities that have accumulated and tested
resources and ways of understanding social institutions that offer par-
tial insights into the complexities of social life. These insights shed
light on the social processes that constitute history in the making, the
obdurate social relationships and structures that persist irrespective of
voluntarist institutional redesigns, the continuing patterns of inequal-
ity which demand government attention, and the way long-standing
relations of class, gender, race and culture inflect institutional processes.
While institutional design can begin with rational models which
identify potentially effective strategies for change, things cannot end
there. It is these complexities that must be taken into account in any
institutional redesign process because they will overrule change
strategies and overwhelm those individuals who seek to enact change.
Effective policy and practice depend upon this kind of broad know-
ledge base, oriented to understanding the thickness of social life, as
much as the data collection and opinionaires that are currently
favoured and sponsored by government.
Global and local historical, social and cultural processes disrupt and
undercut the design intentions of governments and managers despite
their authority in decisional processes. As a result, it seems likely that
neo-liberal reform will bring ongoing instability in education because
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 206
embedded cultures, traditions and routines have been destabilised

through the 1990s. These social and historical dynamics appear to be
bringing increased inequality and social closure which are taking us
towards a social order in which there is more social division and dis-
possession. These developments are not simple effects but are accom-
panied by both attendant consequences and increased costs. The
privileging of consumer voice in public affairs seems to encourage a
consumption-oriented ‘me society’ that puts individual advantage
before the commonweal and to undercut the individual’s role and
faith in democratic politics. As Don Aitken (1999) comments, the com-
bination of a loss of a national project, a lack of confidence about the
future, pronounced individualism, preoccupations with the ‘economy’
and lack of interest in ‘society’, a sluggish economy with high unem-
ployment, and increased welfare demands on a declining tax base, cre-
ates ‘an unusual philosophical and political context’ in Australia. He
suggests that this context seems unlikely to sustain present quality of
life or a high level of civil law and order in the longer term. He calls
for active efforts to rebuild social and economic infrastructure within
the national domain.
Finally, as this collection, together with a range of more recent
research, has suggested, there are indications that the tide of neo-
liberal reform is turning. The 1999 Election outcome in Victoria is
probably the most obvious indicator of such change in Australia. The
social and economic costs of marketisation are becoming increasingly
apparent and public opinion is beginning to mobilise against the
evaluative and secret state, and against the subordination of quality of
life issues to privatised profitability. There is growing concern that the
gulf between rich and poor is ultimately destructive of society and
there is a sense that, despite the rhetoric of globalisation, neo-liberal
reform does not position Australia well in the New World order.
The emergence of arguments about social capacity, the responsibilities
of government to Australian citizens, and the importance of national
culture and identity in a globalising world, point towards a much
needed reworking of the relations between state, market and
community in the provision of social infrastructure such as education
and training.
These developments foreshadow a renewed process of nation- and
institution-building but, this time, oriented to global as well as local
frames, processes of community development and problem-solving.
As these chapters have indicated there is already a live academic
debate about new modes of governance and patterns of democratic
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 207
citizenship (Davis, Sullivan & Yeatman, 1997; Yeatman, 1998). There is

advocacy of the importance of civil society (Cox, 1995) and the contri-
bution of social capital to social and economic life (Fukuyama, 1994;
Sen, 1992). These themes are being taken up in public debate and being
used to challenge political parties to revise policy agendas (Latham,
1998; Tanner, 1999). There is also an extensive re-assessment of the
impact of reform and the need to attend to the documentation of ugly
increases in inequality, social marginalisation and alienation.
But perhaps more importantly, there is also evidence of bottom-up
innovation and community-building that is problematising the tradi-
tional processes of administrative problem management and running
ahead of governments. Some of our chapters flagged such develop-
ments. They are also evident in the development of community banks,
community employment schemes, small-business developments and
the proliferation of community activism on single-issue campaigns,
such as urban and regional development, environment, school clos-
ures, and the protection of legitimate community interests in work and
collective action. The drive for more civic responsibility is already
becoming evident. What is now required is a process of institutional
redesign oriented to facilitating these developments, not stymieing
them through work intensification, mis-allocation of public resources
and the lack of institutional frameworks and agencies for effective col-
lective action.
The challenge in education is to move beyond both neo-liberal nos-
talgia for the unfettered free-market capitalism of the 19th Century
and social democratic nostalgia for a nationally oriented education
provision and governance focused on characteristics of the post-
Second World War period. It also means moving beyond the policy
framework of the 1990s that has set cost and care as opposites and then
privileged the former over the latter. The care-less effects of neo-
liberal reform reveals the unsustainability of this policy regime and
its implementation in the practical world of education and training.
In reshaping Australian education for the 21st Century, it will be
necessary to address Australia and its diverse communities within a
global context and tackle this policy agenda by building on synergies
between cost and care that contribute to productive community build-
ing. Already, alternatives to neo-liberal policy and practice are emerg-
ing which are beginning to rework the polarisation of cost and care.
These alternatives discern that while cost is important, care is what
sustains societies. They recognise that economic development and
profitability is not an end in itself, but only a means to a good life for
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 208
all. They also see that critical decisions relate to the way costs are
incurred and the way they are met in institutional designs that benefit
communities in equitable ways.
These policy and practice alternatives allow us to begin to shape a
schematic outline of a broad reform agenda that pursues community
development and the reworking of state, market and community rela-
tions with a view to nation-building for the global era. It recognises
that nation-building consolidates the social and cultural resources that
make Australia distinctive in world affairs and global markets, and
creates a basis for reaching out into the globalising world. It seeks
institutional frameworks that accommodate difference, and the
rebuilding and re-legitimation of participative forms of governance.
Government has a necessary role and responsibilities in these processes,
not least in defining and guaranteeing a financial basis for social
development. But these tasks will need to be addressed in the context
of shared governance, with authority exercised in partnership with cit-
izens and their communities.
In all this, education and training will be crucial because through
education and training learners become knowledgeable, develop rele-
vant capacities for social practice and take on the responsibilities of cit-
izenship in a shared national community. These kinds of outcomes
mean that educational effectiveness beyond the neo-liberal 1990s will
need to address three core challenges:
Firstly, there is a need for educational redesign that promotes person-
formation oriented to citizenship and responsible adulthood as well as
skill formation within and beyond the frames of formal schooling. As
Yeatman suggests in Chapter 9, such processes of person-formation
within education and training which support responsible citizenship
will need to be joined ‘with a participative conception of policy process
where citizens are drawn into public learning and social problem-
solving in ways which responsibilise them as policy claimants’. The
trajectory is towards lifelong learning in which community develop-
ment in a variety of contexts goes hand in hand with person-formation
to advance the learner, both as an individual and as a member
of diverse communities (for example, global, national, local, occupa-
tional, political).
Secondly, there will need to be a far greater recognition than there
has been through the 1990s that the peopled landscape of education is
not only a learning place but also a workplace. Between the system of
education and training provision and individual learners, there are
educational workers who realise the educational enterprise. These
Xch10E2 15/4/04 12:38 PM Page 209
workers are a crucial element in both the systematic provision of

education and training, and in effective learning, because they orches-
trate and give content and purpose to learning. The conditions of
learning/work will determine the effectiveness of the educational
enterprise.
Finally, the central role of educational workers in realising educa-
tional outcomes demands that careful attention be given to both their
formation and organisation. Traditionally, these educational workers
have been termed ‘teachers’, although through the 1990s it has been
managers that have been privileged. The critical question for the
future is how practitioners’ teacherly capacities that sustain effective
learning (that is, caring, competence, inquiry, social learning and com-
munity building) might be integrated with the organisational capaci-
ties of managers and the emerging agendas around lifelong learning
and community development. The challenge is to remake processes of
teacher formation and to reconsider the current division of educational
labour so that Australia can develop an effective teaching workforce
for the learning society.
XreferencesE2. 15/4/04 12:41 PM Page 210
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Index
Notes
1. Entries in bold indicate major entry.
2. Abbreviations used in this index: ACE (Adult and Continuing Education);
ALP (Australian Labor Party); ANU (Australian National University);
CAEs (colleges of advanced education); CofE (Church of England);
CEGGS (Church of England Girls Grammar School); HECS (Higher
Education Contribution Scheme); NTRA (National Training Reform
Agenda); RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology); TAFE
(technical and further education); UTS (University of Technology,
Sydney); VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education); VET (vocational
education and training)
Aborigines xii, 42, 180, 181 Australian Catholic University 61, 63

access see recruitment Ballarat, University of 61, 63
ACE ix, 43–4 Benhabib, Seyla 176
Adelaide, University of 60–2 Board, Peter 17, 18, 19, 85
Aitken, Don 206 Brown, Alan 155
Alberta, University of 86 Bruce–Page government 85
Allison, Lyn 195 Budd, R.H. 135
ALP viii, x, 1, 2, 20, 55, 56, 57, 60, business
100, 153, 181, 187, 188, 201 competition in education and 49,
Anglican Diocese of Melbourne 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 106, 159–69,
202–3 202, 203, 207
apprenticeships 26, 39, 40–1, 46, 196 elites and 75, 78, 79, 80, 82, 84–8,
ANU xv, 57, 60–2, 63, 64, 190 94
Arendt, Hannah 174 universities and 64, 65
assessment see attainment VET and 37, 61, 64, 65, 159–69
attainment 19, 23, 38, 40, 74, 93, 115, bureaucracy and public service
198, 200, 203, 204 economic rationalism and viii, 16,
see also examinations 91, 156
227
education control x, 2, 6, 7, 11, 12, Davitt, Arthur & Ellen 135

15–23, 154–6, 159, 172, 193, 196, Dawkins, John 2, 55, 56, 59
204 Deakin University viii, 60–1, 63, 67
elites and 77–84, 94, 101 deregulation 1, 2, 4, 20, 22, 106, 148,
expertise 6, 16, 19, 77, 78 159, 188
teaching service and 15–23, 101, disabilities 42, 175, 180
146–8, 154–6, 159, 193, 196, 204 Drake, John & Anne 140
Public Service Act (Vic. 1883) 133,
146–8 economics
competition see competition
CAEs 56, 60, 61, 66 economic rationalism 2–6, 20, 72,
Calder, William 85 91–2, 148, 153, 169, 171, 189
Caldwell (Professor) 202 economics of VET 24–47
Canberra Australian University 61, 63 economists ix, 6, 77, 159, 186, 189,
capital costs 45–6, 47 194
Central Queensland, University of elites and 18, 71–2, 75, 76, 91–2,
61, 63 101–3, 192
Charles Sturt University 61, 63 globalisation see globalisation
civics education 1–23, 200 Keynesian 72, 77, 85, 181–2, 184
Coalition governments see Liberal markets see markets
Party; National Party planning & statistics 7, 8, 11, 13,
co-education 133, 140 19, 20, 22
competition postpatrimonial governance and
class formation and xix, 91–104 xxii, 170–85
economics and 1, 2, 16, 20, 22, 25, Edith Cowan University 61, 63
49, 50–2, 76, 172, 178, 179, 180, elites 70–90, 92–104, 192
182, 188, 191, 192, 197 employers 1, 24, 26, 29, 36, 37, 39, 41,
education and xix, 24–47, 48–69, 45, 46, 49, 85, 92, 97, 166, 173, 174,
71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 83, 87, 90, 175, 184, 200, 203
91–104, 105–29, 154–69, 191 ethnicity xix, 2, 21, 42, 43, 94, 203
elites and 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 83, 87, examinations 10, 16, 132
90 see also attainment
higher education and 26, 48–69,
159–69 families
schools and 2, 5, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, Aboriginal 181
83, 87, 90, 91–104, 105–29, consumers 1, 65–6, 90, 107, 109,
154–8, 167–9 119, 123, 143, 192, 197
Copland, Douglas Berry 85, 86 domestic arrangements 118, 119,
councils see schools – councils 148, 175, 177
Cox, Ross 145 elites 54, 70, 78–9, 81, 82, 83, 84,
curriculum 5, 16, 21, 36, 38, 45, 82, 89, 90, 96, 97
83, 87, 136, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, equity 41, 96, 97, 99, 189–90, 192,
162, 164, 165, 166, 168, 198–200 197
Curtin University of Technology funding 26, 54, 65–6, 90, 96, 97, 99
60–1, 63 history of education 18, 19, 20,
Darling, James 82, 83, 94 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143
INDEX 229
moral influence 16 Haig, Robert 120

see also parents Hawke, Bob 76, 188
Flinders University 60–2, 66 Hawthorn Grammar School 136
Forster, Maria & George 139–40 HECS 35, 36, 56, 57, 65, 69, 98–9
Fort Street Boys High School 80 higher education see tertiary educa-
funding tion
fundraising 2, 106, 115 Higinbotham Royal Commission
government ix, xiii, 1, 24–47, 49, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137,
50–1, 55–7, 65, 66, 67, 133, 136, 140, 141, 144, 145
141, 195, 197, 201, 202 Horne, Donald 74–6, 84, 86, 89
private 24, 25, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, Howard, John 38, 188, 195
38, 48, 56, 57, 65, 66, 115, 162
student fees 24, 27, 35, 36, 50, 56, independent schools see private
57, 65, 66, 98–9 schools
see also Victorian Education Act inequality 91–104
1872 Irving, Martin Howy 136
Geelong College 137 James Cook University 60–1, 63, 67

Geelong Grammar School 78, 79, 80, Jenvey, Mary 129–33, 136, 137, 144,
81–3, 94, 125 145
Geelong National Grammar School Johnston, Neil 159
136, 137
gender xix, 42, 94, 107, 118, 119, Kane, Benjamin 129, 130, 135, 136
129–50, 170–85, 196, 205 Keating, Paul 2, 188
globalisation 1, 2–3, 16, 25, 49, 58–9, Kennett Jeffrey viii, ix, 155, 156, 186,
70, 76, 90, 188, 206, 207 188, 190, 201, 202
Goold (Archbishop) 136 Keynes, John Maynard 72, 77, 85,
government role 181–2, 184
competition in higher education King’s School 82
48–69 Klein, Barry 160, 164, 167, 169
development of schools 1–23
economics of VET 24–47 La Trobe University 60–2, 67
education–government nexus xx, Labor Party see ALP
170–209 Liberal Party viii, x, 1, 20, 64, 98–9,
elites and 72, 89–90, 192 155, 156, 186, 187, 188, 201
funding ix, xiii, 1, 24–47, 49, 50–1, literacy 25, 43, 44, 54, 200, 202
55–7, 65, 66, 67, 133, 136, 141,
195, 197, 201, 202–3 Macartney (Dean) 140
reinventing government xviii–xx, Macquarie University 57, 60–2, 66
1–47 Manly Boys High School 81
Schools of the Future viii, 152, markets
155–8, 167–9 education market viii–xi, xiv, xv,
Grandridge Secondary College xix–xxi
154–8, 159, 161–4, 167–9 elites and 72, 76, 91–104, 192
Griffith University 60–2, 66, 67 globalisation 1, 2–3, 25
higher education and 36, 48–69
labour 43 parents viii, x, xx, 2, 4, 15, 21, 22,

political philosophy 20, 22, 23, 24, 106, 107, 112, 113, 117–20, 187, 197
25 see also families
postpatrimonial governance and pastoral care 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14,
xxiii, 170–85 15, 16, 18, 19, 23, 85
quasi-markets xix, 48, 51, 55, 56, Pike, Tabitha 140
58, 64, 69, 133, 134, 141, 188, postpatrimonial governance xxiii,
194, 201 170–85, 192–3
schools and 2–7, 16, 36, 105–28, Presbyterian Geelong College 137
155–8, 187–93, 198 Presbyterian Ladies College 81
TAFE (NTRA) ix, 36–8, 159–66, privatisation ix, 2, 4, 7, 22, 30, 188,
167–9 189, 195, 206
see also competition; economic private schools
rationalism elites and 55, 67, 70–1, 77–84, 90,
media xi, 78, 108, 109–12, 113, 119, 93, 94, 95
126 funding and government policy
Melbourne Boys High School 80 2, 4, 7, 24, 32, 33, 36, 38, 46, 55,
Melbourne Grammar School 78, 79, 195, 201
80, 81 history 13
Melbourne Technical College 85 recruitment 2, 7
Melbourne, University of 60–2, 64, see also named schools
66, 85, 86, 136, 139, 202 progressive education 154–6, 161–2
Menzies, Robert 74 public (state) schools
meritocracy xix–xx, 67, 70–90, 93–5, elites and x, 78–81, 90, 93
103 expenditure on 30–4
Monash, John 85 history of schools 9–20, 23
Monash University 60–2 management ix, 24
Morrison, George 136 Schools of the Future viii, 152,
multiculturalism x, 109, 181 155–8, 167–9
Murdoch University 60–2, 67 social theory and x, 1–23
see also schools
National Party viii, 1, 20, 64, 98–9, see also named schools
156, 186, 187, 188, 201 public service see bureaucracy
Nell, F.A. 145 Pusey, Michael 2, 91, 94, 153
Neven, Grace 147
New England, University of 60–2, 86 qualifications
New South Wales 17, 70, 77, 79–80, elites and 84, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97,
81, 144, 160 100, 103
New South Wales, University of lack of 25
60–2, 64, 66 teachers 130, 134, 135, 136, 139,
Newcastle University 60–2 145, 146, 199
North Sydney Boys High School 78, VET 26, 36, 39, 40, 44, 199
80 quality and attainment 19, 23, 38, 45,
Northern Territory, University of 61, 49, 53, 54
63 see also attainment; examinations
NTRA 152, 159–66, 167–9 Queensland 17, 39, 194
INDEX 231
Queensland, University of 60–2, 64 principals viii, ix, 81, 106, 115,

Queensland University of 125, 129–33, 136, 137, 143, 145,
Technology 60–1, 63 154, 156–8, 164, 167, 169, 204
private see private schools
Rae, John 142 public see public schools
Rae, John & Emily, and family 139 retention 40, 44–5, 96, 146, 196,
Rae, William 139 197
recruitment 2, 7, 94–104, 196–8 Schools of the Future viii, 152,
Regan, Jack 154, 156–8, 164, 167, 169 155–8, 167–9
religion/religious schools teachers see teachers
Anglican/CofE 14, 15, 195, 202–3 see also named schools
general 2, 8, 9–18, 21, 22, 77, 78, Scotch College 78, 79, 80, 81
80, 81, 94, 136, 140, 143, 193, Sergeant, John 145
202 Service, James 145
Protestant 13, 14, 77, 78, 80, Shore (school) 78, 80
Roman Catholic 13, 14, 15, 34, 61, Smith, Adam 55
63, 77, 80, 81, 136, 143 Smyth, John viii
see also named church schools sociologists 6
research South Australia 35
educational and social xi, xvii, 46, South Australia, University of 60–1,
53, 68, 71, 81, 86, 88, 95, 96, 101, 63
103, 105–28, 151–69, 190, 194, Southern Cross University 61, 63
201, 206 Southern Queensland, University of
funding 45, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 64 61, 63
universities 38, 45, 50, 55, 56, 57, St James’ Girls School 140
58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, St Mark’s CofE Girls School 129–33,
92, 93 140, 144
retention 40, 44–5, 96, 146, 196, 197 St Peter’s College 79, 80
retrenchment viii Stark, Mary 147
Ricketson, Staniforth 85 state education see public (state)
RMIT University 60–1, 63, 66 schools
Rogers Templeton Royal Stow, David 135
Commission 144, 145 Streeton Institute 159–69
Rosenblum, Edward & Harriet 140 Stretton, Hugh 75, 76, 82
rural issues 38, 42, 43, 137, 139, 156 students
attainment & assessment 165,
schools 166, 189, 199, 203, 204
advertising 109–12, 113, 117, 118, competition between 52, 53
123 consumers 1, 2, 4, 7, 105–128, 191
closures viii, 133, 201, 207 disadvantaged 157, 191, 192,
councils ix, x, 115, 119–20, 129–33, 196–7, 202
135–6, 202 fees 24, 27, 35, 36, 50, 56, 57, 65,
discipline 114–15, 116, 119–20, 66, 98–9
121, 145 gender 132–3, 136, 138, 141
history of 9–20, 23 numbers & resources 2, 26, 27–9,
markets and ix, 105–28 32, 33, 34, 53, 67, 156, 157, 164
student:teacher ratios 34, 200 199–200

teacher–student relationship 5, 8, teacher–student relationship x, 5,
10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 114–15, 116, 8, 10, 13, 14, 18, 23, 114–15, 116,
145, 153, 154, 156, 165, 166, 187, 119, 121, 122, 123, 145, 153, 154,
189, 198, 199, 200 156, 165, 166, 187, 189, 198, 199,
Sunshine Coast University College 61 200
Swinburne University of Techology training 47, 61
61, 63 university 65
Sydney Boys High School 78, 80 VET 45, 47
Sydney CEGGS 81 technical and further education see
Sydney Grammar School 80 TAFE
Sydney, University of 60–2, 64 tertiary education x, 48–69
see also TAFE, universities, VET
TAFE testing see attainment; examinations
apprenticeships 41 Tisdall, Henry & Lucy 139
funding 33, 38, 45, 67 Tufnell, E.C. 135
NTRA 151–3, 159–66, 167–9
participation 27, 41, 42, 43, 100, unemployment xii, 20, 23, 25, 30,
196 109, 112, 197, 206
Queensland 194 unions x, xii, 37, 78, 148, 154, 156,
teachers 159–66, 167–9, 199–200 157, 158, 161, 202
see also VET universities
Tasmania, University of 60–2, 85 competition xix, 48–69, 91–104
Tate, Frank 17, 85 funding ix, 26, 27, 29, 33, 38, 44,
Taylor F.W. 85 45, 48, 50–1, 64–7, 98
teachers hierarchy 48–9, 51, 53–68, 92–3,
activism and 20–21, 23 98, 100
bureaucracy and 5, 6, 23 recruitment 95–104
casual 45 research 38, 45, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58,
discipline 5, 114–15, 116, 145 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 92,
see also (below) teacher–student 93
relationship retention and completion 45
gender xix, xxi, 129–50 see also named universities
history of profession xxi, 129, UTS 60–2, 66
134–47, 191–2, 193, 209
marketing and 113–23, 159–66 VCE 111, 161, 198
principals viii, ix, 81, 106, 115, VET 19, 20, 23–47, 194–5, 198, 203
125, 129–33, 136, 137, 143, 145, Victoria viii–x, xxi, 2, 17, 35, 70, 77,
154, 156–8, 164, 167, 169, 193, 79, 80, 81, 86, 134–7
204 Education Department 136, 139,
retrenchment viii 140, 141, 142, 148, 154, 157, 195,
salaries and conditions 32, 33, 65, 202, 203
132, 143–5, 157–8, 199–200, funding 195
208–9 Schools of the Future viii, 152,
student:teacher ratios 34 155–8, 167–9
TAFE (NTRA) 159–66, 167–9, Victorian Education Act (1872)
INDEX 233
141–4
Victorian Public Service Act (1883)
146–7
Victoria University 61, 63
Watts, Maria 130–1

Weekes, Alice & Clara 139
Wesley College 79, 80, 136
Western Australia, University of
60–2
Western Sydney, University of 61, 63
Whyte, Jane 140, 144
Whyte, Patrick 136, 140, 142
Wollongong University 60–1, 63, 66
Xavier College 81
AER Beyond Nostalgia 15/4/04 12:02 PM Page 1
beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education

beyond
nostalgia:
"The polarised and exclusionary debate about education
(has created) unproductive walls of silence…
reconstructing a sensible debate about educational reshaping australian
reform is imperative for the long-term future of
Australian education and the people, young and old, who
pass through it."
education
Lawrence Angus & Terri Seddon
Enormous change to Australian education over the past decade
has created a maelstrom of debate among politicians, teachers
terri seddon and lawrence angus (eds)

and academics about the direction of education.
Beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education distils this
ongoing debate into a concise account of developments in
education, and provides a positive framework for finding a way
forward.
It examines the:
• shifting relationship between government and education;
• implications of commercialising education;
• broader social factors, such as globalisation, which impact on
education; and
t. seddon and l. angus (eds)

• prospects, challenges and opportunities for Australian education
in the new millennium.
With contributions from 12 highly-regarded education
professionals, this insightful and accessible book is important for
policy makers, undergraduate students, academics and educators,
as well as anyone concerned with education reform.
Australian
Education
Review No 44
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beyond nostalgia: reshaping australian education

terri seddon and lawrence angus (eds)

t. seddon and l. angus (eds)

THIS FOLD REMAINS CONSTANT.

The Australian Education Review is a series of books on subjects of

Terri Seddon and Lawrence Angus (Eds)

First published 2000

Copyright © 2000 Terri Seddon & Lawrence Angus

All rights reserved. Except under the conditions described in

Edited by Ronel Redman

National Library of Australia

Beyond nostalgia : reshaping Australian education.

1. Education - Australia. I. Seddon, Terri. II. Lawrence, Angus.

Section I: Reinventing government

Section II: Education design and class formation

Section III: Redesigning education

Section IV: Rethinking the education government nexus

Figures and Tables

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION ix

argued, destabilises existing educational provision and creates a con-

x BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

been critics of stifling bureaucracy, it seems that every feature of

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xi

education and those who work day-to-day in the provision of educa-

xii BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

rests on the personal experience of expanding social and cultural hori-

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xiii

society by educating the next generation and by reforming society and

xiv BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xv

About this book

xvi BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

norm), resulting in a whole structure of relations rather than just a sin-

This definition highlights the context in which practice occurs.

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xvii

This corporatised social organisation privileges particular groups and

xviii BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

means of inducting new generations into the ways and wisdom of an

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xix

governmental and educational reform has had significant resource

xx BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

traditional and emerging processes of elite formation that operate

BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION xxi

A particular historical experience of teachers in marketised contexts

xxii BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

Australian education is said to be in crisis. The crisis is said to have

2 BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

a common emphasis on the need to use education to build a ‘national

COMPETENT CITIZENS AND LIMITED TRUTHS 3

4 BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

Liberal government: less is more

COMPETENT CITIZENS AND LIMITED TRUTHS 5

causally on the other social institutions, including education. The

6 BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

themselves as ‘civil’ societies without the continuous administration

COMPETENT CITIZENS AND LIMITED TRUTHS 7

sable part of any large-scale education system, whether administered

8 BEYOND NOSTALGIA: RESHAPING AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION

Identifying its limits is instead a means of contextualising and plural-

COMPETENT CITIZENS AND LIMITED TRUTHS 9

the ‘theory-program’ for organising a local functional milieu. Further,

The historical ends of education