Why is it, after decades of social democratic imagination and investment in education, that the outcomes of schooling continue to be so clearly related to wealth, or to the lack of it?  Notwithstanding the increasing sophistication of the technologies of so-called effective schooling and teaching, the least advantaged students continue to encounter barriers in gaining access to the highest status knowledge as defined by the official curriculum.   Reflexively and depressingly the technologies of effective education produce evidence (eg see Teese and Polesel 2003) which concurs with the insights of social theory: education and its outcomes are socially divided and socially dividing.

In reporting the findings of the Standpoint Project, funded by the Victorian Department of Education and Early Childhood Education, this paper will discuss the possibility that learning and learning outcomes might be defined as social practices accessible to all students.   When defined as a social practice, learning can be conceived as a bridge between the lived experiences of students and teachers in the classroom and the hierarchically organised, developmental and mostly cognitive progression of learning outcomes contained in conventional curriculum statements, and which come to be enshrined in formal tests of student achievement.

That the outcomes of education continue to be the product of social division has been the dominant question for education systems, schools and teachers for nearly 40 years in Australia.  The problem is one for the whole education enterprise; not just for a small fraction dealing with the poorest minority.  Finding a means of enhancing the educational participation and success of the least advantaged will require system-wide change and will affect the learning and achievement of all students. While the direct attention of the Standpoint Project has been on the ways in which teachers have sought to take the standpoint of the least advantaged students in their curriculum and pedagogical practices, the Project’s outcomes have general significance because they point to changes in the ways schools and school systems need to change their relationships with students, families and the wide range of social agencies with which schools work.

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