Objectives
This paper will report on a critical policy study of a federal public policy statement Multicultural Australia: United, Strong, Successful (2017) and its alignment and misalignment with state government education policies. It’s drawn from a larger research study investigating how schools transcend refugee students' past life experiences by creating the social and educational conditions that enhance their resilience. It is focusing on the policies, practices, relationships, and events that shape the schooling experiences of refugee students.
Background and theoretical framing
Internationally, governments are concerned with issues related to refugee resettlement and global displacement. Governments are forming and reforming policies in response to their ongoing and sometimes growing concerns to provide solutions. In this paper, we take Australia as an example to illustrate the policy alignment and misalignment (Savage, & O’Connor 2018) between a key federal multicultural policy and refugee education policies.
Australia, like some European countries, has a federal system of governance. More specifically Australia has three levels of government, and two which are responsible for schooling: federal and state/territory governments. The state/territory governments have constitutional responsibility for education and have direct oversight of the sixty-six percent of schools which form part of the state department schooling systems. These education departments have their ‘own common ownership or ethos’ and ‘administrative arrangements’ (Gonski et al. 2011, p. 4). However, both levels of governments develop policies that influence and/or direct education.
In the past five years, over 75,000 people from refugee backgrounds have been resettled under Australia’s humanitarian entrant program (Department of Social Services (DSS), 2017). Over a third of these were aged under 18 years and entered Australian schools soon after they arrived (DSS, 2017).
Australia prides itself on being ‘the most successful multicultural society in the world, uniting a multitude of cultures, experiences, beliefs, and traditions.’ (Turnbull, cited in DHA 2017). However, Australia’s responses to refugees have fluctuated significantly in the past due to historical and political factors (Marr, 2011). Therefore, there is a need to better understand how federal multicultural policy frames how and why schools and schooling systems have responded to students from refugee backgrounds in the ways they have.
Due to the relationships between the federal and state governments, it was considered likely that the way in which the federal government frames refugees would be reflected in the ways in which education department policies also frame refugees. This study explored the relationships between these levels of policy.
To do this, we undertook a critical policy analysis of relevant policy documents. Codd (1985) suggests that policy documents can be said to constitute the official discourse of the state. He further suggests that:
- policies produced by and for the state are obvious instances in which language serves a political purpose, constructing particular meanings and signs that work to mask social conflict and foster commitment to the notion of universal public interest. In this way, policy documents produce real social effects through the production and maintenance of consent. (Codd 1988 p. 237)
We understand that the ‘meaning of policy is frequently either taken for granted and/or seen as an attempt to “solve a problem”’ (Maguire, Braun and Ball 2015, p. 485). Policies are multidimensional, have many stakeholders, are value laden, intricately tied to other policies and institutions, and never straightforward in implementation or enactment (Taylor, Rizvi, Lingard, & Henry, 1997).
We draw on the notion of ‘assemblage’ as a way of explaining the policy construction processes related to refugee student education ie “bringing together a number of contrasting, and sometimes competing values, embedding this assemblage within a broader set of conditions.” (Rizvi & Lingard, 2011, p 6).
