My PhD

I recently graduated with a PhD from Murdoch University, and some colleagues have suggested I should share its details through social media. This post is the first of a series about my PhD and will probably develop into a broader program about school segregation.

My PhD title was The Validity of Policy Interventions to Address Australian School Segregation and it is accessible through the university research portal. The thesis is a series of seven journal articles that address whether socioeconomic school segregation has an impact in Australia, its policy drivers, and potential accountability mechanisms to influence the school enrolment practices that drive school segregation.

School segregation is the tendency of students to be enrolled in different types of schools based on social characteristics such as ethnicity or Indigenous status. In Australia (and most places), the dominant form of segregation is socioeconomic. That is, Australian schools tend to separate students based on parental occupation and education.

Why does it matter?

Critics of school segregation in Australia have tended to object to its impact on social cohesion. Public education has been seen as a shared socialisation experience that creates future citizens who feel a sense of belonging and obligation to their community and nation. Public schools are part of the common wealth that binds individual families into functional communities by ensuring each child is equally valued and educated. Thus, public education is more than an economic enterprise of creating workers but also a foundation of a sustainable democratic society.

These ideas were espoused by New South Wales premier Sir Henry Parkes as he campaigned for the establishment of the state's public education system during the colonial period. In particular, he argued that religious and class differences were a threat to the emerging democratic nation. He envisaged children from all religious and class backgrounds sharing the same classrooms.

Contemporary debate about social cohesion often locates social division as an issue within individuals, often seen as a matter of personal beliefs and attitudes that can be manipulated by education and media. But this ignores the social dimension to human behaviours. Social division is largely driven by material, institutional and cultural conditions. The categories we judge each other by are embedded in shared social and cultural practices.

Importantly, school segregation research shows that social divisions are entrenched in childhood in the majority of schooling systems. For example, in the Australian context, government funded private schools market themselves through celebrating social differences. Thus, while social cohesion may be a stated aim of democratic governments, the actual developmental experiences of children and young people deeply engrain division and hierarchy. 

Next Article

In my next article I plan to consider other reasons why school segregation matters.