Youth crime and the faulty commodity in education: Students with disabilities invisible in the neoliberalism of Australian education

Abstract

Australian society is teetering on the brink of anarchy under the threat of rapidly rising youth crime. Statistics showing offences committed by children aged 10 to 17 has risen by 18.2% since 2022. Research indicates that these figures are directly affected by educational outcomes impacted by disability and disengagement at school. Australian education in the 21st century continues to operate as an institutionalised industrial mechanism of neoliberalism losing the ability to perceive the individual in its process. Leaving students with disability on the fringes of education results in disengagement, and exclusion and what is now beginning to be seen as a common pattern emerging in youth crime. Since 2010, the My School neoliberalism of education has transformed Australian students into commodities to produce a prosperous government economy. Students reduced to Human Capital. Schools are now placed as if on the stock market of My School league tables. They are regulated in the market and commodified through the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), standardised testing. The study used a mixed methodology to explore the faulty commodity in the state education system in Australia – the ‘invisible’ students with disabilities. How this may have impacted the increasing youth crime figures and future outcomes re also examined. In addition to the social contract of legislation, the Queensland Education Act (2006), pledges that all students receive ‘a high-quality education to maximise educational potential’ ( Queensland Parliamentary Council, 2015 : 24) is failing disadvantaged students and society. How schools educate students within a veiled system that continues to hide and remove the unwanted product, the students with disabilities from the marketplace of My School is also investigated. The action of Capitalism sustained in education through the hidden curriculum of NAPLAN is also examined.