CUÁNTAS SENTENCIAS CONDENATORIAS Y

Only Elite schools talk in their marketing videos of community or of developing students to take their role in the world beyond school as leaders.

The principal of EPS1160 says,

The fact that the community’s here, together, with the staff, resident in one place just gives such a feel of community that’s a really powerful

combination.

The principal of EPS1165 ends his video by saying,

We believe that what we are doing here is creating an environment where all of our young people get a sense of the way in which they can have a positive influence on this community, and by building a sense of confidence in them increasingly show how they could bring that sense of influence to their local community, national community and also the international community. We see very realistically that already students in a school setting are showing great leadership not just locally but abroad as well.

Elite schools are keen to promote their ability to develop cosmopolitan skills in their students (Rizvi & Lingard 2010) – lower ICSEA schools never mention this.

While chapters 4 and 5 focused on those attributes the sampled schools share and yet are shown to treat differently according to their ICSEA score, chapters 6 and 7 focus on word choice and use (via a corpus analysis – chapter 6) and word use in context (chapter 7) to again investigate if these are impacted by the schools’ ICSEA scores.

Chapter Summary

If parents are the main audience for these materials then the fact that these materials have a reading age that implies the reader will require 12 years of education to read them comfortably supports the contention in the research (see, for instance, Gewirtz et al 1995) that these materials are primarily directed at middle class parents. It is also surprising how rarely the role parents might play in their child’s education is discussed in these materials.

The roles parents might play in the schools – either in actively helping their children with school work or by engaging with the school community by participating in the governance of the schools – is mentioned by one school above average government school in the sample of thirty-one schools. Below average government schools often mentioned that parents can be involved in the process of streaming in the middle years of high school that tracks students for academic or vocational pathways. For most schools, if they mentioned parents at all, it is in terms of the role parents play as cheerleaders for the school, with parents quoted in marketing explaining the

The costs of education, particularly in the elite non-government schools, are significant. In the final years of schooling fees can equate to the annual disposable income of the average Australian employee per child. And yet these costs are rarely mentioned in the school’s prospectuses or marketing videos. In fact, the only schools to mention the costs of schooling were the below average government schools – ironically enough, the schools most people might assume provide a ‘free’ education. Teachers are almost entirely missing from school marketing materials, both in voice and in the images accompanying these materials, but again this is particularly true of the below average government schools. Since these schools are expected to provide the strictest forms of discipline and since teachers are the main way in which discipline is dispensed in schools, this might seem an unexpected finding. Although teachers are rarely seen in these schools’ marketing, and certainly never shown as disciplinarians in any school sector, the lowest ICSEA schools overwhelmingly show images of the effects of strict discipline in the images they display. These images display the most traditional pedagogies being enacted on the bodies of students who are shown gazing in rapt attention at a teacher almost invariably out of frame and yeet unquestioningly in control of the classroom.

Below average government schools stress that their teachers have the professional qualifications necessary to make a difference to the education of their students. No below average government school mentioned their teachers being on a life-long learning journey, something that many of the above average and non-elite non- government schools stressed. Below average government schools say nothing that might undermine the assumed professionalism of their staff. Higher ICSEA schools mention life-long learning since their teachers having skills to continue learning is seen as the best means of inculcating such an attitude in their students – something, presumably, middle class parents are more aware is a necessity today (See Brown et al 2011; Sennett 2006). The most elite schools emphasise their teachers’ skills in developing a student’s all-round abilities, particularly in nurturing innate talents and passions.

The use of the word ‘teacher’ rather than ‘staff’ or ‘employee’ also depends on a school’s ICSEA score, with higher ICSEA schools much more likely to refer to teachers as employees or staff. Lower ICSEA schools refer to teachers by their professional name. This reflects other research (see Reay 1998) that suggests that middle class parents are likely to see teachers as having similar, if not lesser,

qualifications than themselves and for these parents to see themselves standing in an employer/employee relationship with teachers.

6. Language – Corpus Analysis

The words schools use to describe the education they provide their students and how these choices differ from other schools presents a powerful tool to illuminate the preoccupations, concerns and preferences of different schools and groups of schools. This chapter presents the data collected from a corpus analysis of text of the 19 prospectuses once these had been arranged by the four ICSEA groups. Comparisons have then been made between these groups of schools showing patterns in which schools overuse certain words while underusing others when compared to other groups of schools.

These patterns according to word use by ICSEA group are shown to move from the most explicit discipline and a preoccupation with facilities for the lowest ICSEA schools, through to stressing people skills, collaboration and the attainment of credentials for schools between the average school and one standard deviation above average, to the most elite schools focused on students innate natures, assuming internalised self-discipline and using the most abstract terms for the educational experience they offer.