This paper contributes to debates that shaped a special issue of "Discourse" in 2017 by taking the debate about "responsibilisation" in education into the realm of Foundations Skills in Australia. The difficulties that many Australian adults experience with low levels of language, literacy and numeracy skills (Foundation…

International higher education in many developed countries and more particularly in the United States and Australia has become a great source of revenue for their economies from students of the developing and underdeveloped countries (Least Development Countries). Money together with the mobility of international students from Least Development…

Within the broad landscape of early childhood education and care politics and policies, calling quality reform into question is a political act. As numerous scholars have pointed out, policy structures that measure and identify what constitutes quality (and what does not) are not value-free and reflect neoliberal human capital economic agenda…

Management educators have developed a wide variety of approaches to ensure students develop job-ready skills, resilience, and other forms of career capital to gain and retain employment in an ever-changing, competitive job market. Yet, concerns about the employability agenda's consequences for students' self-concept and wellbeing have gained…

This article is a commentary on the seven articles in this special issue of EJTE on teacher quality from international perspectives. In the article, Marilyn Cochran-Smith points to differences as well as common themes and details across the articles in the issue. The article discusses the emergence of teacher quality as a global concern, including…

There is a standardised neoliberal inspired notion of what professionalism entails for early childhood educators. These standards tend to infiltrate much of the literature, reporting and pre-service educator training, creating a notion that educators are never quite good enough at what they do. Although constant reflection and aiming for…

In Australia, boarding schools and residential facilities for remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (First Nations) students have long been part of the educational landscape. Policy settings are paying considerable attention to boarding schools and residential colleges as secondary schooling options for First Nations students, particularly…

Purpose: This paper explores the economic and social effects of human capital investment in the 20th century. As well as drawing on census data and statistical yearbooks in Australia and Aoteoroa/New Zealand, the paper develops its argument by an intersection of scholarly work in sociology, economics and the history of education to consider the…

In many Western nations (an area of the world identified by Connell as the Global North), the early childhood sector has positioned itself within the education discourse. This positioning brings along with it the neo-liberal agenda in relation to education -- i.e. that education's key aim is the preparation of employable future employees (children…

This paper offers a conceptual framework that combines Sen's concept of capability and Bourdieu's forms of capital to understand the generative mechanisms of educational advantage or disadvantage. The paper illustrates some ways that the Sen-Bourdieu framework can be applied to understand the Programme for International Student Assessment 2015…

Study at a foreign university can be an important way of developing international human capital. We investigate factors affecting international student flows for higher education and their consequences for bilateral market integration in Australia. Estimation results demonstrate that income, cost competitiveness, migration network effects and…

The OECD Career Readiness project makes use of quantitative evidence to identify how teenage career-related activities and attitudes are linked with better adult employment outcomes. Review of multiple national longitudinal datasets confirms that teenage experiences of the workplace through part-time working and volunteering are routinely…

Australia attracts international nursing students from China to maintain its economic advantage and to alleviate the projected nursing shortage; conversely, China needs its best and brightest citizens who have trained abroad in nursing to return to cope with current challenges within its healthcare system and nursing education. This paper explores…

In Australia, like many western countries, there has been a convergence of education policy around a set of utilitarian and economistic approaches to vocational education and training in schools. Such approaches are based on the assumption that there is a direct relationship between national economic growth, productivity and human capital…

This paper explores the proposition that modern universities have been changed radically by globalization not least of which has been the erosion of "public scholarship". The paper argues that whatever the kind or scale of changes which have occurred in the past few decades, "globalization" does not provide an explanation of…