Federalising Australian Curriculum in Response to Globalising Pressures: A Shift in Political Governance

Author(s):

Marie Brennan(presenting / submitting)Lew Zipin(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2012

Network:

23. Policy Studies and Politics of Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

23 SES 05 D, Local Education Policy

Parallel Paper Session

Time:

2012-09-19

11:00-12:30

Room:

FFL - Aula 35

Chair:

Nafsika Alexiadou

Contribution

The governance of school education in Australia has remained, until recently, the province of the six state and two territory governments, which each have state-wide schooling systems employing teachers, and providing policy and infrastructure. This paper examines the emerging and potential implications for the governance of school education by the greater governance involvement of the political arena in educational domains, particularly the increasing policy interventions emerging from the federal level of governance. This federally-driven nationalisation of curriculum appears to presents a new governance ‘settlement’ for education (Taylor et al 1997) – but a highly unsettled settlement, we argue –whilst unsettling and redirecting control of educators’ work. We ask if this is represents new forms of centralisation in marketisation of the schooling sector, with the federal government acquiring both a policy and an accountability function. We address this question through a focus on standardisation, control and accountability through the invention a national curriculum (c.f. Grumet & Yates 2011).

Australia is the only federal governance system in the OECD to have introduced a national curriculum (Brennan 2011). The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that brings together federal and State governments, along with the Ministerial Council that brings together Ministers of Education, have been systematically building agreements that involve federal funding, policy and accountability regimes for a range of domains in the sector, without having to resort to formal referral of powers from the States to the federal government, as specified in the Australian constitution. National Curriculum provides an instructive case for examining the strategies by which governments at both federal and state levels make policy interventions that accentuate control the work of both teachers and students in schools. Examination of different iterations of the curriculum, and their treatments of pedagogy and assessment, enables an analysis of the effects of governance ‘at a distance’ (Kickert 1991) through both cooption and coercion across levels of government, and how this links to the trends and exertions of international, northern hemisphere supra-national organisations such as OECD. Continuing a longstanding tradition of policy-borrowing from the colonial Mother England, national curriculum has been introduced alongside a raft of other federalising moves into education (and other the human services – the ‘left hand of the state’, as Bourdieu calls it (1999)). We read this as a response to globalising pressures that newly foregrounds the nation-state (Dale 2004), yet at the same time make its internal political legitimation more problematic. We observe that, in becoming increasingly federal in focus, educational governance can use strong standardisation and accountability regimes as means to redirect political attention from government legitimation and fiscal crises. What is emerging, then, is a sharing of state-level government responsibilities with the federal level, which then operates through contractual and tied funding agreements with the states, alongside the invention of new non-government bodies that help to distance both levels of government from policy implementation and its contestations.

Method

Within a postcolonial (Appadurai 1990) and sociological orientation, the study provides a purposive case of Australian governance of curriculum, placing it within a globalising context to understand the contemporary politicised formation of education policy (Rizvi & Lingard 2010). It examines key policy manoeuvres within and across levels of government in the recent iteration of attempts to install national curriculum in Australia. The study follows the web-trail of government media, that now replaces the more formally documented approaches to policy development in Australian Westminster-style government. We examine public policy developments, records of consultations and subsequent contestations, the installation of a new national curriculum body, followed by its replacement with another body, partnership agreements between state and federal governments, agreements on national testing and new forms of accountability in return for increased federal funding.

Expected Outcomes

We find that governance through nationalised curriculum, despite appearing to include the profession of teachers, becomes largely a technical matter of sequencing more and more pre-specified content areas, largely using 19th century discipline categories, and avoiding educational debates. Substantive debates about curriculum – e.g. content, process, skills, structures of disciplines, competing epistemologies, competencies, alignment of content with assessment, child-centred or constructivist approaches – lose force, while meaningfully participatory educational decision-making about practices is inhibited , made invisible under the pressures of standards, testing, and narrow forms of accountability. Strong intervention by a federalised domain of political governance encourages and supports ongoing marketisation and economisation of education, in a reductionist approach to curriculum content presented in measurable small pieces. At the same time – in unsettling the work of educators and in making education a more politicised focus of surveillance and measurement – the national curriculum process induces an ongoing need for continuing governmental intervention. This significantly restricts options for local participation in educational governance, (pace Kupfer 2008) even by teachers, let alone parents, students and community actors. It sets up a vicious cycle of short-term interventions related to election cycles that continue the ‘unsettlement’ of the education sector.

References

Brennan, M. 2011, National Curriculum: A political-educational tangle. Australian Journal of Education 55,3:259-280. Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global culture economy. Theory, Culture, and Society 7:295–310. Australian Curriculum Coalition. (2010, 22 October). Common view on the Australian curriculum. Letter to ministers of education. Retrieved 15 May 2011 from http://www.acsa.edu.au/pages/images/Australian%20Curriculum%20Coalition%20common%20view%20on%20the%20Australian%20Curriculum4.pdf. Bourdieu, P. 1999, Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Trans. Richard Nice. New York: New Press. Dale, R. (2004) Forms of governance, governmentality and the EU’s Open Method of Co-ordination. In larner and Walters (EDs) Global governmentality governing International Spaces.London: Routledge. Grumet, M., & Yates, L. (2011). The world in today’s curriculum. In L. Yates & M. Grumet (Eds.), Curriculum in today’s world: Configuring knowledge, identities, work and politics (239–247). World Year Book Education Series, Volume 2011. Oxon, UK: Taylor & Francis. Kupfer, A. 2008, Diminished states? National power in European education policy. British Journal of Education Studies 56,3:286-303. Reid, A. (2005b). Rethinking approaches to national curriculum: Beyond the railway gauge metaphor. Occasional Paper Series. Canberra: Australian College of Educators. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. Brisbane, Oxford, UK, & New York, NY: Routledge. Lingard, B., Porter, P., Bartlett, L., & Knight, J. (1995). Federal/state mediations in the Australian national education agenda: From the AEC to MCEETYA 1987–1993. Australian Journal of Education, 39(1):41–66. Stake, R. (1995) The Art of Case Study Research. London: Sage.

Author Information

Marie Brennan (presenting / submitting)

Victoria University, melbourne, Australia

School of Education

Melbourne

Lew Zipin (presenting)

Victoria University