Images of parents in school marketing materials (either video or prospectus) are exceedingly rare. If parents are seen at all it is often as part of an undifferentiated mass in an audience (generally only showing the backs of their heads) or standing outside the school gates dropping their children off to school. In NEPS1037’s video – what is presumably a parent says to camera,
There’s nothing sweeter than having your child come home to you to say, ‘Mum, guess what I learnt today!’ Learning should be fun and a natural progression.
In a school where 59% of the student population are from a language background other than English, and 35% of the students are in the bottom half of the ICSEA range, the parent chosen is an Anglo-Australian blonde woman in a business-like jacket, refer Image 1. The only other parent shown in the video, glimpsed briefly, is dropping off her children at school, and she is also blonde.
Image 1 Parent from Non-Elite school marketing video
AAGS1038, which, as mentioned above, has dedicated an entire page to the parent- school partnership does not have a single image of a parent in its school prospectus,
other than the silhouetted backs of heads of parents seated in a hall watching a student performance. The image that accompanies the text that discusses parental
involvement in the school is of a school building.
Costs of Education
Only two schools in the sample mention the cost of education; both are below average government schools: BAGS921 and BAGS966. The schools where, presumably, this information would be of especial interest to parents, that is, the non-government schools which charge significant school fees (often as high as the disposable income of someone earning the average wage), require expensive uniforms and extra-
curricular activities are invariably silent on cost. This is interesting, as presumably the cost of education would be of interest to parents considering sending their children to these schools.
The same pattern is repeated when schools discuss scholarships. Of the six below average government schools, three discuss the scholarships that are available,
frequently making it clear that these scholarships are to assist parents with the costs of education. In some cases these scholarships are awarded to ‘outstanding students’, as in school BAGS966. Other research has shown (Ball 2003, 2006b; Hayes 2012; Reay 1998; Reay et al 2011) that scholarships are often awarded to students from middle class backgrounds, and therefore to families who are relatively better off. Schools are prepared to pay a premium to gain access to students with the middle-class habitus that will facilitate academic success both for the student and for the school (Bonnor & Caro 2012).
There is only one above average government school that discusses the scholarships the school offers, AAGS1002, and this is virtually the average Australian school in terms of its ICSEA score. The only other school in the sample that mentions scholarships at all is the Elite EPS1177, but this school provides no detail on these scholarships other than stating they exist,
A range of scholarships and bursaries is available each year for eligible students commencing Years 7, 9 and 11.
Teachers
This thesis returns to the role of teachers in school marketing materials in the later chapter. Here we note that teachers are almost invisible in these materials. Not only are they largely absent from the images presented, they are also rarely discussed in the texts as well. Table 16 shows the proportion of images in all materials analysed that contain either students, teachers or the school principal. As can be seen, students appear in the overwhelming majority of all images, at or over nine-in-every-ten images.
Teachers are shown in only one-in-every-twelve images in the highest ICSEA
schools, principals in only one-in-every-fifty images. Non-elite schools are something of an outlier in above average schools, with many more images of teachers than the
other two school groups. But below average schools are an outlier in the opposite direction.
Table 16 People in images (all materials)
Student Teacher Principal
Elite 91% 8% 2%
Above Average 90% 8% 2%
Non-elite 95% 14% 8%
Below Average 92% 2% 2%
*note: percentages do not add to 100% as students, teachers and principals can appear in the same image and some images do not contain people.
The most significant result here is the remarkable absence of teachers in the
photographs that accompany the marketing materials of below average government schools. While teachers appear in one-in-twelve above average government school images, they appear in only one-in-fifty below average government school images. Since teachers are the most direct instrument for imposing school discipline, this finding may initially appear to contradict the overall contention of this thesis,
however, the implications of this finding will be discussed in more detail in chapter 8.
Teacher Qualifications
Hooper (2011) found that marketing materials from the nineteenth century often listed the qualifications of all teachers at the school, often going so far as to name the
teachers. This is rarely done today in elite marketing materials. Only one school in the sample, non-elite NEPS1082, supplied a table showing the highest qualifications attained by the teachers. As Hooper says,
Yet contemporary advertisements, by contrast, only rarely identify individual teachers, and if mentioned at all, it is only in a generic sense: they are ‘highly experienced’ at PLC, ‘caring and professional’ at Xavier College, ‘dedicated and experienced’ at Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar School, ‘passionate’ at Loretto, and ‘dedicated and nurturing’ at MLC (p. 13).
This finding of a generalised description of teacher qualifications has been confirmed here too. Any reference to teacher qualifications rarely constitutes anything like a major part of the text of these prospectuses. Table 17 shows that across the various school ICSEA groups the schools present similar proportions of text discussing teacher qualifications and skills, although, again below average government schools dedicate proportionately less text to this than do other schools.
Table 17 Sentences discussing teacher qualifications
Elite 3%
Above Average 3%
Non-elite 4%
Below Average 2%
However, what is said about teachers and their role in teaching students is highly dependent on the ICSEA group the school belongs to.