Policy sociologists flag a global trend in which policies from governance loci external to schools increasingly drive new effects within schools, via standardisation, accountability, testing and marketisation (Apple 2014; Ball & Youdell 2008; Comber et al. 2006; Lundahl 2005, Rizvi & Lingard 2009). Alexander (2008:97) observes: ‘[S]anctions that everywhere attend the unequal distribution of power are no longer limited by the rules and customs of the classroom or school but transmit to students their teachers’ consciousness of the national apparatus of targets, levels, league tables and inspections’. Alexander addresses England but the phenomenon is international. Taking cues from Alexander, our conceptual framework gives close analytic attention to how exertions from the meso-level of policy-making reach into the micro-level of classroom practices, relations and (sub)conscious formations, spurring new strategic devices within schools (e.g. intensified differentiations and streaming of students). Our research, situated in ‘disadvantaged’ schools that struggle to achieve performance targets and compete in ‘quasi-markets’ (Whitty 1997), puts further focus on how new policy effects at the school level feed into macro-level reproduction of social-structural power inequalities. Within a multi-nation ECER symposium, this paper’s case study (from a wider research project) locates in an inner-suburban school, west of Melbourne, Australia, populated by refugee/immigrant and working-class students. Our methodology entailed a semester-long curriculum intervention supporting Year 10 students, in small groups, to investigate emerging changes in their communities that they saw as mattering for their futures (Zipin, Sellar, Brennan & Gale 2015). The paper focuses on Ethiopian refugee students who raised future-oriented questions regarding local processes of urbanisation and gentrification: e.g. whether race/culture relations will become more tense; whether Ethiopians will be able to sustain ethnic-based shop rents or will be forced further to the urban fringe; and more. Our data shows how, within small groups—after trust was built between students and researchers through pedagogic dialogue—these students showed capacities, as social geographers, to analyse and articulate how racism operates diversely in different suburbs and in different social spaces (restaurants, shops, and—significantly—the school). However, our data also shows how, in plenary classroom processes beyond the small groups, their capacities to participate, learn, and educate others went ignored, indeed silenced (Delpit 1995), by various systemic school devices. Our analysis traces these micro-level devices—differently affecting Ethiopians in relation to other demographic groups—to effects of meso-level policy upon the school, reinforcing reproduction of macro-structural inequalities.

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