The NSW state government has just announced a major overhaul of its selective school program. This aim is to make it fairer for children from disadvantaged backgrounds to secure a coveted spot.
Some students in higher-ability classes said they felt more confident and motivated, but students in lower streams reported conforming to teachers’ low expectations for achievement.
Selective schools are known for producing some of the highest final-year academic results. But it’s unclear whether students would get the same outcomes anyway, regardless of school.
School zones are a logical way to manage school enrolments, and the policy helps to create schools that are community hubs, ones that reflect the local areas they serve.
New research shows that low-income students who qualify for the federal Pell Grant tend to go to non-selective colleges – and why that hurts their chances of graduation.
Selective schools aim to give all gifted students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, opportunities they may not have had otherwise. But that’s not what’s actually happening.
Caregivers using privilege to buy their children’s way into, and through, education is not a Hollywood anomaly, nor the domain of elites. The middle class have been doing it in Australia for decades.
Selective schools have never operated in isolation from broader historical forces — including Australia’s connected histories of racial exclusion and immigration.
Analysis of MySchool data shows that selective public schools are selecting fewer students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, thus worsening inequality in the school system.
Inequality and its rise across many developed societies poses threats of alienation and marginalisation and has been a feature of numbers of recent publications. Now research led by Simon Burgess at the…
England’s 164 state grammar schools form a distinctive but controversial part of the nation’s education system. These schools are distinctive in terms of their high levels of performance – one consequence…