Choice, aspiration and anxiety in the new school markets

• Julie McLeod
• Australian Review of Public Affairs

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Image: KezSLR / Flickr

26 October 2009At school pick-ups, at homes, in cafés and at work, worried parents debate the merits of different schools, share insider knowledge and gossip about school reputations, cultivate strategies for getting into the 'right' school for their child, and endlessly dissect or defend their decision. Choosing child care or primary school pales into insignificance against the intense emotional and ideological investment in making the right choice about secondary schools, and then having the resources and opportunities to activate that choice. Once widely regarded as a default position, even attending the local high school is now constructed as making a choice, one that requires an explanation of why that is the right school for your family and child.

This article discusses School Choice: How Parents Negotiate the New School Market in Australia by Craig Campbell, Helen Proctor and Geoffrey Sherington.

Julie McLeod writes that School Choice casts a valuable historical and sociological eye on these issues, looking mainly at the perspectives of middle-class parents in contemporary Australia. Its core concern is the ‘relationship between the emerging markets in education and the making of the modern middle class’

Image: St Peters School Chapel, Adelaide: KezSLR / Flickr