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School autonomy reform and social justice: a policy overview of Australian public education (1970s to present)

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Abstract

This paper provides an overview of the policies of school autonomy in Australian public education from the Karmel report in 1973 to the present day. The key focus is on the social justice implications of this reform. It tracks the tensions between policy moves to both grant schools greater autonomy and rein in this autonomy with the increasing instatement of external forms of regulation. Utilising Nancy Fraser’s concepts of dis-embedding and re-embedding markets, we track key policy moments in three Australian states (Victoria, Western Australia and New South Wales) along with federal interventions. We draw attention to the redistributive and representative justice implications arising from these policy moments as occurring within a consistent trajectory towards a market agenda and argue that future policy needs to consider the effect of past policy.

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Notes

  1. The vagueness of the numbers in the official Victorian Auditor General’s report on Schools of the Future is worth noting. The numbers vary across sources. For example, staff losses range between 8000 and 11,000 and school closures range between 300 and 350. The inaccuracies relate to the conflation of school closures and the rebadging of tech schools in the previous Cain/Kirner government era, the conflation of school closures with school mergers and whether staff losses include teachers only (Spaull, 1999). Additionally, numbers differ according to source of reporting (e.g. union compared with government publications).

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This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP190100190].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

    Katrina MacDonald, Amanda Keddie, Jill Blackmore & Caroline Mahoney

  2. Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

    Jane Wilkinson

  3. School of Education, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

    Brad Gobby

  4. School of Education, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Richard Niesche & Scott Eacott

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  1. Katrina MacDonald
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MacDonald, K., Keddie, A., Blackmore, J. et al. School autonomy reform and social justice: a policy overview of Australian public education (1970s to present). Aust. Educ. Res. 50, 307–327 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-021-00482-4

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