My School: Parents, Pupils and the Public Interest – Helen Proctor

Dr Helen Proctor is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. She has written extensively on education and schooling and is co-editor (with Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington) most recently of School Choice – How Parents Negotiate the New School Market. On Tuesday 17 May 2011, Helen Proctor joined Maralyn Parker to discuss the new NAPAN tests and the choices for families in schooling in Australia.

 

FAMILIES, SCHOOLS AND THE MODERN EDUCATION MARKET

 

HELEN PROCTOR

 

Early on in the recent best-selling Australian novel, The Slap there is an extended account of a backyard barbeque in which the interactions of an array of characters operates as a commentary on contemporary suburban Australian manners and preoccupations.[1] This is the barbeque at which the eponymous “slap” occurs when one parent hits – hard – another parent’s child. The slapping of the child is the most dramatic of a number of conflicts over parenting that set the groundwork for the ensuing action.

These conflicts range across such recognisable controversies as prolonged breast-feeding, the “spoiling” of children and the provision of computer games. When the talk turns to the question of whether to enrol children at public or private schools the characters’ positions on the issue reflect their social ambitions. For the materialistic Harry the enrolment of his son in a private school is a visible measure of his self-made success, while the defensively working class Gary is on the side of the public school. Incidentally, the novel’s author, a former Victorian public school teacher, is on record telling the journalist Caroline Baum, “It’s probably the single thing that gets me most angry – what successive governments in this country have done to our public education system.”[2]

The reason I mention this fictional episode is because it says something about the current ubiquity of the concept of school choice in public debate. By “school choice” I mean the idea that choosing the right school in which to enrol one’s child is an important intervention in the child’s life and an important parental responsibility.

It is frequently framed in public debate as a parental entitlement (rarely as a child’s entitlement). It can also involve quite a bit of hard work, especially for mothers. The backyard argument in The Slap is immediately recognisable to an early twenty-first century readership and the discussion of the merits and problems of different schools and kinds of schools has become a staple of the Australian parenting conversation. The Slap is set in Melbourne. This evening I am going to draw on some research into the school choice activities of Sydney parents.[3]

Compared with similar nations, Australia has a high proportion of children enrolled in non-government schools. Part of the origin of this is in late nineteenth century sectarianism. In New South Wales, for example we can look to the failure of Henry Parkes and the Catholic Bishops to reach a settlement ahead of the 1880 Public Instruction Act which instigated compulsory elementary schooling. The largest number of students enrolled in non-government schools today remains the students enrolled in the Catholic systemic schools. In the 1960s and 1970s a series of battles over State Aid to Catholic schools resulted in the enshrining of “freedom of choice”, underwritten by Federal and State government subsidisation of non-government schools. In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, freedom of choice has almost evolved into compulsory choice for some families, especially at the secondary school level.

Post Second World War attempts to corral all adolescents into neighbourhood comprehensive high schools were never entirely successful, achieving their high water mark of around 80 per cent of all secondary school enrolments in the 1970s. Since then Australian parents have been steadily deserting government schools in favour of three main non-government alternatives. These are, broadly speaking, a small group of elite high fee schools of older establishment, which are mostly church schools, the large less expensive Catholic sector, currently accounting for about one quarter of secondary students and a growing number of low or moderate fee schools founded during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

In some areas of Sydney now fewer than 50 per cent of young people attend a government secondary school, but the movement has been uneven. Academically selective public schools, for example are full to the gunwales as are many girls’ public high schools.

School choice is not just about individual families. Rather, it is underpinned by a set of market theories of education which have been applied in different ways in many countries including the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Those who support the marketisation of education – to use the rather ungainly neologism – argue that competition leads to institutional improvements resulting from better engagement with consumers. Market sceptics tend to argue that markets are bad for equity.

The extent to which markets are more efficient than bureaucracies is a matter of contentious debate – although the word bureaucracy has become so freighted with negative connotation that it is fairly useless to supporters of this kind of administration of social infrastructure. One interesting term coined by a sociologist writing about the situation in the United Kingdom at the end of the 1980s is the term “parentocracy”. The sociologist Philip Brown argued that the effect of market reforms would be to bind the educational fate of children too closely to the expertise and wealth of their parents.[4]

“Choice” and markets are methods of organisation that have been applied across a range of social services in Australia so it was interesting to interview two fathers for the research project I am speaking about tonight who had experienced privatisation in their own workplaces. The two men – one former and one current public servant – had diametrically opposed views about market efficiency. One put the view that non-government teachers are more conscientious because they have “skin in the game”, the other argued that there’s “predatory behaviour” in a market.

Whatever its effect on schools, the school choice phenomenon has certainly had an effect on families. We know that it is middle class families who have led the historical movement out of public secondary schools since the 1980s. Our study was a study of middle class parents and we were particularly interested in this shift. We also became interested in the ways in which the process of choosing a school had become an important moment, even a defining moment, in the way contemporary middle class parents raise their children. The category, middle class is neither a satisfactory nor a neat one and in our book we tried to capture some of the diversity amongst the people we interviewed. These were parents, however, whose household income, occupation and/or educational background could be seen to place them at some relative advantage in the new schooling markets.

The study[5] was based on an analysis of Australian Census data, a survey and a set of 63 interviews with parents who had recently enrolled a child in year 7 at a Sydney school. It is the interviews I am mainly drawing on for this paper. We recruited our participants through the schools in which their year 7 child was enrolled. These included comprehensive and selective schools, Christian and Islamic schools, high fee and low fee, single sex and coeducational schools, right across the greater Sydney area. The schools had in common that their enrolment was likely to include a large enough component of children of middle class parents. Parents were asked why and how they had chosen to enrol their child in a particular school.

So what did people tell us? First, there was a variety of views and a variety of experiences. Sometimes people had different views of the same school. One Catholic systemic school was considered by one of our interviews as a school more or less of first choice, a good and rather prestigious school. For another parent it was the fall-back option she resorted to when her marriage broke up and she could no longer afford the higher fee schools she had formerly set her heart on. One independent school’s car park was used as evidence of completely opposite views in two different interviews.

One mother cited the car park when explaining how the school enrols people of “all different levels of wealth”. Another mother described the school as exclusive, with a car park dominated by “BMWs and Mercedes Benz”. One thing that surprised me a little was the variety of views we discovered around the evangelical Christian schools in our study. These are low to moderate fee schools founded since the 1970s which one way or another promote themselves somewhat aggressively as placing the Christian Bible at the centre of their teaching. Of the parents we interviewed or who responded to our survey from those schools we found quite a variety of opinion about the religious flavour of the teaching. This included some sharp differences about whether the Christian teaching was on the one hand the school’s main attraction or whether, on the other hand it was an irritant you just had to put up with if you wanted an economical private school education for your children.

Some parents we spoke to felt frustrated by the choice process, others felt energised.

Some felt they had a good range of choices, others felt there was little or inadequate choice. Some investigated a very large number of schools, others only looked at a couple. The kinds of schools that were investigated also varied. The smaller markets in which people operated might be restricted to, for example, Catholic schools or government schools or schools within a certain travelling distance. Strategies included enrolling children in coaching colleges, starting a church-going habit in order to secure the signature of a minister of religion on an enrolment form or moving house to access a well-regarded local government school.

People tended to trust their gut feeling or their own observations or their friends’ anecdotes at least as much as they trusted what they were told by schools. One couple explained that they had crossed one Catholic school off their list when they were “mooned” by a group of naughty students at the open day.

Another parent was horrified when the student leading a tour of a public school wore a studded leather choker with her uniform. Mothers did most of the legwork and it could be a considerable load involving not only the research into schools but also the negotiation of the advice or interference of friends and family. One mother told us that she had no problem choosing a school. Her problem was convincing her ex-husband and his parents that their daughter – who was apparently very unhappy at a high fee primary school – should go against the family tradition and attend a public high school. Another woman described how her friends had accused her of compromising her egalitarian values when she enrolled her sons in an elite boys school. Stay out of it, she apparently told them, “I don’t remember your name on the cheque”.

Broadly speaking the people who felt best about the process were those with an academically clever and/ or compliant child who, they reasoned, was either going to be considered a desirable asset by a school or was going to be able survive all right in any school.

Also undeniably considered helpful were money, connections, a residential address in the catchment area of a good public school or a demonstrable religious affiliation. The school choice process frequently required families to undertake a kind of audit of their resources as well as an examination of their beliefs and values. One same-sex couple, for example was worried by the prospect of what their children might be taught about their relationship at a religiously-affiliated school. Another person in our study explained that one reason for choosing a Christian school was that unlike the local public school it would not employ homosexual teachers (whether or not this was in fact the case was not part of our study). The people in our study who reported the most difficulty in the process of choosing a school were probably those who had children with degrees of learning difficulty or disability.

An aspect of schooling that many people would apparently like to influence is the make-up of the peer group. Concerns about this aspect of schooling varied to an extent with the section of the market the family was looking at. People might be concerned about materialism or snobbery in a high fee school or about rough behaviour in a local high school. Parents who looked at enrolling their children in the highly competitive selective schools were divided. Some were concerned that their child might feel inadequate as a little fish in a big pond. Others felt that the high-powered atmosphere would keep their children on-task. Some liked the idea that a private school had the power to screen.

One woman who enrolled her children in an evangelical Christian school explained,

If a student is too much a problem he is going to be expelled from the school and if he is my son’s friend he won’t be his friend anymore and my son has to choose someone who is good.

So is there a perfect school? Well of course there’s not. Schools are large, dynamic, complicated places and it is of course unrealistic to expect any school to a) have everything you want and b) operate to everyone’s satisfaction every living minute. One of our interviewees spoke for a number of people when she concluded:

I think it’s good that we think about the school [but] I don’t know if I can articulate it but I just think sometimes we over-analyse things. …  People analyse and analyse schools, and pick [a school] because they think this is going to create this outcome, and they forget all the variables in between – about the child’s actual desire, and ability, and the school having the right Principal at the time they’re there, the whole lot of dynamics that have to be in alignment to maybe get the outcome that you want.

This view came from the perspective of a family with a number of options. The question remains about whether our current system of school choice can be good for everybody. Can the market work for the collective good? And are people choosing amongst a number of viable options or using every weapon in their armoury to avoid schools that are genuinely bad?

It was rather distressing to hear more than one interviewee tell us that sending a child to a local public school was tantamount to telling them they are second rate. At the same time another parent apparently chose a comprehensive public school for her son over both a selective high school and a scholarship to a prestigious public school. She felt that the experience of a socially-diverse neighbourhood school was preferable to all that.

As I was thinking about this talk I was reading a book written in the 1980s by Michael Hogan about the funding of private and public schools. Hogan was most certainly in favour of what he described as “freedom of choice” and he expected to send his own children to Catholic schools but he expressed little patience with the sometimes vicious politics of the pitting of schools against each other to compete for resources. I quite liked one of his final sentences in which he looked forward to a time “when the worst Australian schools are good schools”.[6]

ENDNOTES

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[1] Christos Tsiolkas (2008). The slap. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 14-48.

[2] Caroline Baum (2008). ‘The passion of the Christos’. Sydney Morning Herald Good Weekend, 13 December.

[3] Craig Campbell, Helen Proctor and Geoffrey Sherington (2009). School choice: how parents negotiate the new school market in Australia. Allen & Unwin: Sydney.

[4] Philip Brown (1990). ‘The “Third Wave”: education and the ideology of parentocracy’. British Journal of Sociology of Education, vol. 11 no.

[5] The study was funded by the Australian Research Council and conducted by members of the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney.

[6] Michael Hogan (1984). Public vs. Private schools: funding and directions in Australia. Melbourne: Penguin Books.