Only government schools provide a list of abstract nouns as a school’s values and mostly this is in the group of above average government schools. Table 10 provides the school values according to ICSEA sector.
Table 10 School values by ICSEA
BAGS921 Diversity * Excellence * Success
BAGS935 Respect * Excellence * Diversity
BAGS955 None
BAGS966 None
BAGS979 Respect * Responsibility * Achievement * Enjoyment
BAGS988 None
AAGS1002 Personal Best * Integrity * Respect * Responsibility
AAGS1038 Respect * Responsibility * Personal Best
AAGS1047 Respect * Responsibility * Resilience * Teamwork
AAGS1075 Pursuit of Excellence * Individuality * Creativity
AAGS1082 Excellence * Integrity * Responsibility * Respect * Tolerance
AAGS1092 Community * Choice * Engagement
NEPS1014 None NEPS1082 None EPS1130 None EPS1141 None EPS1160 None EPS1168 None EPS1177 None
In recent decades, as the business model has leaked into education, school
organisations have authorised and provided their staff and clients with mission and vision statements. What is particularly interesting to note here is that none of the non- government schools have chosen to promote their own values or mission statements within their marketing materials. Prime Minister John Howard (1996-2007) referred to the difference between government and private schools as being related to the ‘value free’ (see McLeod & Yates 2006, p.217) and (paradoxically) too politically correct government schools that parents were avoiding for the more value sure private schools. Interestingly, none of the ‘private schools’ in this sample provide school mission statements or a list the school’s values. Some of the Catholic and church schools refer to Christian values or to students acquiring general values by attending the school, but these are never specified in a list. This is solely done by government schools provide and particularly above average ones.
Six of the nine schools that provide such a list of their values include the word
Respect. This shall be discussed in more detail in a later chapter where it will be noted
that the same word can have significantly different connotations depending on the social location of the school (c.f. Bauman 1991).
Excellence is mentioned by three schools, and the Pursuit of Excellence by one – it is
interesting that the school (AAGS1075) that stresses the importance of creativity should stress that excellence is something that needs to be pursued, rather than something that can be possessed. Achievement is mentioned by one school and
Personal Best by two, each of which could perhaps be taken as approximate
synonyms for Excellence. Personal Best is more commonly associated with
achievements in sports and therefore may have been chosen by these schools for these positive associations. The association with sport (and therefore with playing) may be part of the reason Personal Best has been avoided by all of the lower ICSEA schools, another theme that will be discussed in more detail later in this thesis. One school – the lowest ICSEA school in the sample – includes both Excellence and Success as values.
It is interesting that BAGS935 has both Diversity and Respect as values. Both of these have punitive connotations in the context in which they are used within this
prospectus, for instance in the sentence:
A condition of enrolment at BAGS935 is adherence to the school rules and policies, which fosters a culture of respect, excellence and diversity. Here the values are directly enabled by the school’s discipline policy, with the implication that these are only made possible in the context of the school imposing them upon their students, and with there being consequences for non-adherence to these values (in this case, presumably, expulsion). The only schools with Diversity as a value have more than half of their students from Language Backgrounds Other Than English (LBOTE), that is, 57% and 79% of students. These are also the two lowest ICSEA schools.
No above average school mentions Diversity as a value. In fact, when a content analysis of the actual text of the school prospectuses was performed, the only schools found to discuss cultural diversity at all were below average government schools. Of the six below average school prospectuses, four included a discussion of cultural diversity – no other school discussed this.
Higher ICSEA schools sometimes use what might be considered synonyms for
diversity such as Community, Teamwork and Tolerance – each of which are used once in three above average school mottos (see Table 10).
Nevertheless, it is important to note the differences here as well as the similarities. As will be discussed in more detail in chapter 6, none of the below average schools use
teamwork in their values or in their text at all. Instead these schools stress that they
provide an environment where the personal effort of the student as an individual will be rewarded. These schools rarely, if ever, discuss the student body en masse. As will be seen, when the student body is discussed by these schools, it is to discuss the variety of pathways that the school provides to meet the diverse needs of the student
population, rather than in any sense of these students working together toward a common goal. These students are overwhelmingly presented as individuals on individual pathways rather than teams, groups or a community.
Diversity, similarly, can be understood as stressing the individual over the group – in
the sense of the individual being protected given their difference.
Only one school has a school value of Enjoyment and this is a below average
government school. This goes against the trend, as will be discussed later, where it is much more likely that schools with an above average ICSEA will stress education as being about engagement, fun or enjoyment than it is for below average schools. The spectrum of the themes chosen by these schools to represent their values is not random. The stress the values place on the kind of education offered in the various schools differ by social location and therefore the school’s ICSEA score.
The lowest ICSEA schools have values that imply a flow of discipline from the school to the students. The students acquire these values from the school and these values are followed by the students (diversity, respect and, as will be discussed in more detail later, responsibility). At the other end of the ICSEA spectrum school values contain words that stress student attributes of manifest internalised discipline (integrity, resilience, responsibility) and the manifestations of these internalised virtues that can only exist once such dispositions have been internalised (creativity,
community, teamwork).
Again, this distinction is a recurring theme in this thesis.
Curriculum
In the narrowest sense, curriculum within Australia is common to all schools as it is mandated by state and federal governments. That is, individual schools have little leeway when it comes to curriculum. As such, on a surface level at least, it would not appear to be something that could lead to market differentiation. In Victoria, the mandated curriculum is the Victorian Curriculum
(http://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au). Prior to the incremental introduction of the Australian Curriculum, which began in 2012, Victoria had its own state
curriculum, the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS). However, Victoria has agreed to replace subjects in its own curriculum (VELS) with those from the
Australian Curriculum as those subjects are introduced and agreed upon. The only
alternative available to the Victorian Curriculum is the International Baccalaureate, which is most frequently used by Elite schools.
The Australian curriculum is overseen by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and
Reporting Authority (ACARA) which also conducts annual tests of literacy and
numeracy in all schools in years three, five, seven and nine. These assessments are called the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). They have been designed with the intention of providing parents with reliable, authoritative and objective information on school performance to facilitate parental choice
stakes testing regime (NAPLAN) to judge school performance against this standardised measures. This would imply that ‘curriculum’ itself should not be a theme used to differentiate schools, but rather that their results in implementing the common curriculum should be the factor discussed. Such is the explicitly stated reason for ACARA developing its My School website (ACARA 2016).
Mainly, school students, other than those enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program or Vocational education options, are required to take part in high stakes academic examinations at the end of high school, which in Victoria is the Victorian
Certificate of Education. These examinations provide students with an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) score, and as the name implies, this ATAR score is
used as the basis for students gaining admission to further study. The average of these individual student scores is often used to rank schools, particularly in the press. The curriculum options available to students that are not structured around the highly academic VCE examination are the equally academic International Baccalaureate or the vocationally oriented Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL) and
Vocational Education and Training (VET) programs.
NAPLAN and VCE Results
It would therefore not be unreasonable to expect schools to refer to how they have performed against these various national and state measures of their effectiveness in educating students in their marketing – given that, in the case of the NAPLAN in particular, this was the stated purpose for this highly expensive and complex exercise (ACARA 2016). In fact, the results of the test (taken in March, a few months into the new school year) have been criticised for the limited pedagogical value they provide (see, for instance Wu 2011), and so their value is mostly related to their ability to rank schools (Lingard 2010).
It is interesting, then, that only one school in the sample mentions its NAPLAN results at all. Schools, perhaps predictably, mention their VCE results depending on how well their students perform. The ability to do well on this examination can be directly related to the social class of the schools, as has been shown in previous work considering the social reproduction of school success and failure (Teese 2000, 2011, 2016).
Table 11 shows whether ICSEA grouped schools mention their VCE course in general or focus on the results their students obtain in VCE. Elite schools and Below Average schools are more likely to mention VCE in general, than to discuss the results that their students achieve. In the case of Elite schools, excellent results in these high stakes tests are taken for granted and are unlikely to be the reason that parents might select one Elite school over another. As Teese and Polesel (2003) make clear, these schools have colonised success, being able to export failure beyond the school gates.
The below average schools are unlikely to have VCE results that would positively impact on their marketing effort. As such they are likely to stress the wide range of subject choices on offer at VCE level, rather than detail the results students obtain following pursuing these options.
Table 11 Schools identifying VCE
Mention VCE in general Mention VCE results obtained
Elite 60% 40%
Above Average 67% 67%
Non-Elite 50% 50%
Below Average 100% 33%
The top above average school, AAGS1092 uses its VCE results extensively in its prospectus, although much less so in its promotional video. However, while it does not discuss the contents of its VCE program at all in its prospectus, thirty per cent of all sentences of the prospectus relate to how its students had performed in their VCE exams or discussed the universities and TAFE colleges they gained entry to.
When below average schools discuss their VCE results they do so in less precise terms. For instance, BAGS966 says,
Our senior students consistently achieve excellent results in VCE, VET and VCAL and our completion rates are very high. On average, over 90% of students who apply to University or TAFE, receive a first round offer. Our high achievers consistently attain Tertiary Ranking scores over 90.
Needless to say, this does not tell us the proportion of students from the school that applied to University or TAFE, nor the proportion of all students who are ‘high achievers’. That is, the self-eliminated (Bourdieu & Passeron 1990; Teese & Polesel 2003) have been eliminated from these figures.