Governing Schooling, People and Practices: Australian Policies on Transitions

Abstract

This chapter analysed Australian State and Territory policies on the transition from school to post-school life. The chapter used two lenses to give multiple understandings of transition. The first lens, a content analysis of the policies using Leximancer software, identified five themes that were significant across all State policies. These themes were students, school, young people, assessment and skills. This analysis showed that the school was depicted in these documents as a bridge between students and young people, and between school and work. The second lens, a fine-grained critical discourse analysis of selected extracts from the documents, traced discourses on transition in the policies and related these discourses to the wider social context. The analysis showed that the policy discourses defined transitions in terms of the problem of economic productivity, which in turn was defined by school retention and completion rates. Increased economic prosperity was to be gained through policies that mandated participation in, and engagement with, schooling, indicating a view of young people as a problem requiring government intervention. The policies sought to regulate young people and schooling through policy discourses that steered changes in the practices of senior secondary schooling. That is, the policy discourses realised spaces for the governance of schooling and young people as they constructed frameworks for actions aimed at increasing school retention and completion rates in order to build a skilled workforce to ensure economic prosperity. The analysis found that this heavy emphasis on economic productivity was mitigated by a focus on social inclusion resulting from the governing rationality of social investment. This rationality constrained the practices available to young people, placing a heavy emphasis on linear progressions from school to post-school life. However, the presence of alternative discourses, such as those that discussed social inclusion in human terms, attested to the inherently unstable nature of the policy process and to possibilities for challenges to, and contestation of, policy discourses as they are enacted in local sites.