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.
Students who rely heavily on financial aid tend to be concentrated in non-selective colleges, new research shows.
Ariel Skelly/Getty Images
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.
Actress Felicity Huffman was one of the celebrities involved in the recent US college admissions scandal.
Etienne Laurent/AAP
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.
In the 1960s and 70s selective schools were seen to be old fashioned and elitist.
from www.shutterstock.com
Selective schools have never operated in isolation from broader historical forces — including Australia’s connected histories of racial exclusion and immigration.
How accessible really are selective schools?
from www.shutterstock.com
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.
Syrian refugees at a UNICEF school in Jordan.
Muhammad Hamed/Reuters
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…
Punching a hole through privilege.
Ben Birchall/PA Archive
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…