This book examines various aspects of school segregation and their complex interrelations with policy, structure, and context in diverse settings. It advances the understanding of the causes, processes and consequences of school segregation around the globe. Topics examined include student sorting between schools in marketized systems; the effects…

Contributing to the understanding of Steiner education as a localised practice, this paper traces the creation of two "second generation" Steiner schools in 1980s Victoria. A period of expansion for Steiner education in Australia, the 1980s saw the number of Steiner schools increase from 5 to 31. These schools were started mainly by…

Purpose: Education is a key institution of modern society, long recognized for its central role in the reproduction of inequities and with the potential to challenge them. Schools behave as their systems are designed. Achieving equity and excellence is not possible through attempts to fix "the school" or educators. Principles of systemic…

This study examines how access to the academic curriculum creates patterns of inequality in Australian schools. Examining students' access to the academic curriculum gives an indication of how schooling is structured to support students in pursuing higher education opportunities. To date, little research attention has been given to the…

Portraying a localised educational system as part of broader global flows of policy ideas and practices emanating from multiple sources -- an eduscape-- the paper focuses on family practices shaped by global policy flows and the return impact of families on the translation of these policies into local school formations. Under scrutiny are the…

In Australia's highly multicultural and multilingual society the number of students studying languages in secondary schools has declined markedly in recent decades, but not for all students. For students from high socio-economic status (SES) families who attend elite private schools and academically selective high schools, studying traditional…

"Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces" examines government funded public schools from a range of perspectives and scholarship in order to examine the historical, political and economic conditions of public schooling within a globalized, post-welfare context. In this book, Rowe argues that post-welfare policy conditions are…

In this article, I chronicle the recent history of efforts to broaden school choice in the Commonwealth of Australia and the opposition to these efforts put forth by Australia's largest teacher union, the Australian Education Union (AEU). Evidence is presented on the positive effects that flow from the public funding of nongovernment schools and…

Australian Education Review (AER) 60 takes the 2011 Gonski "Review of Funding for Schooling" as a vantage point, from which to consider the national funding of schools in Australia, past and future. Section 1 outlines the educational values and perspectives that have underpinned school funding policies and programs and describes major…

This paper reports findings from an empirical study examining the influence of student background and educational experiences on the development of career choice capability. Secondary school students attending years 9-12 (N = 706) in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, were invited to participate in an online survey that sought to examine factors…

It is possible that private schools in Australia may soon become the major providers of education at the senior secondary level. In this paper I describe the context for public and private schooling and report trends that point to the likelihood of such an outcome. The complex arrangements for public and private funding make Australia a rare…

In the growing school choice research literature little, if any, attention has been given to the choices made by the providers of educational services. Yet the workplace preferences shown by teachers and school administrators influences educational practice in important ways and helps illuminate some of the important issues raised in the school…

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

The move to a market model of schooling has seen a radical restructuring of the ways schooling is "done" in recent times in Western countries. Although there has been a great deal of work to examine the effects of a market model on local school management (LSM), teachers' work and university systems, relatively little has been done to…

New evidence is provided about the degree of social segregation in England's secondary schools, employing a cross-national perspective. Analysis is based on data for 27 industrialised countries from the 2000 and 2003 rounds of the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA). We allow for sampling variation in the estimates. England is…