A governmental research inquiry was conducted into the policy to raise the school leaving age in Western Australia. The study aimed to problematise the policy so as to identify and examine the rationale and intervening practices with young people who were deemed to be at-risk of not meeting the new school leaving age requirements. Drawing on…

Disciplining and pastoral power are central to the strategies and practices of intervening in the lives of young people deemed at risk of disengaging from school, or not completing their compulsory education. As an expression of power concerned with young people's welfare and self-improvement, disciplining and pastoral practices push young people…

From 2004 to 2008, the Western Australian State Government embarked on a period of policy and legislative change to increase the compulsory school-leaving age from 15 to 17. This article adopts a governmental conceptualisation of "ethics" to explore the policy discourses and practices. Drawing on interview and documental data, the…

In this paper I outline an approach towards policy analysis that takes governmentality as its point of theoretical orientation and begin to apply this approach to my research into the recently raised compulsory school-leaving age in Western Australia. I aim to demonstrate the methodological potentials of this approach by giving examples of the…