School Teacher Parents and the Retreat From Public Secondary Schooling: A View from the Australian Census, 1976-2001

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Elsa

This article measures how the children of school teachers participated in the shift from public to non-government secondary schooling in Australia between the 1976 and 2001 Censuses. Using evidence linked to prior work on New South Wales public comprehensive schooling and on relations between middle classes and public institutions, the study examines teachers’ distinctive position as both providers and consumers of schooling. Results show sector- and gender-based differences in parents’ moves, alongside broader public-sector decline tied to funding, discourse, and market-based “choice”.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Data sources and research focus

Middle class shift and sector differences

Policies, discourse, and parental “choice”

School Teacher Parents and the Retreat From Public Secondary Schooling: A View from the Australian Census, 1976-2001 Helen Proctor The University of Sydney Abstract This article uses data from the Australian Censuses of 1976 and 2001 to measure the extent to which the children of school teachers participated in the middle class shift from public to non-government secondary schooling of the closing decades of the last century. It builds on recent work by Craig Campbell and Geoffrey Sherington on the history of the New South Wales Public comprehensive high school, as well as recent analyses of the relationships between the middle classes and public institutions by sociologists such as Michael Pusey (for Australia) and Stephen Ball (for the United Kingdom). School teachers are of particular interest for a number of reasons including their historically uneasy status relative to other professional occupations and their complex roles as both providers and consumers of school education. The article finds that while school teachers collectively moved their children out of government high schools in common with other middle class parents over the period, there were differences within the category according to parent’s gender and sector of employment. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a decline in the public sector’s share of secondary school students in Sydney relative to non-government schools of various kinds, with similar trends in all Australian cities as well as those regional areas where the presences of non-government schools made ‘choice’ possible. This occurred as a result of policies, discourses and behaviours including increases in state funding of non-government schools, the encouragement of a market in low-fee schools, a broad loss of faith in the effectiveness of public institutions and the promotion of the idea that it is a parent’s duty to be an actively-choosing consumer of their child’s school institution. It is the activities of parents that is the focus of this article, which contributes to a growing body of literature which places the family at the centre of class-making, or, as Ball puts it, “[locates] the motor of inequality within the family” (2003, p. 4) . The elevation of parents’ rights or obligations to work in an individual way for the advantage of their own children, and federal and state governments’ promotion of The Australian Educational Researcher, Volume 35, Number 2, August 2008 •123 HELEN PROCTOR ‘school choice’, marked a discontinuity both with a post-war settlement in favour of comprehensive secondary schooling and an earlier twentieth-century meritocratic model which explicitly sought to separate the educational fate of the child from the social or financial status of the parent. Brown (1990) described a similar shift in the United Kingdom (under a rather differently-structured education system) as an‘ideology of parentocracy’, the construction of a system predicated on the resources and motives of parents rather than early twentieth century ideas of the deserts or talents of the child or post-war concepts such as uniform provision and the collective good. The casualties of such a system might be the children of parents who are poor or parents who are not expert in the necessary networking or research who are thus condemned to struggle in the ‘residualised’ schools abandoned by others (Teese, 2000; Thomson, 2002; Vickers, 2004) . The late twentieth century drift away from the public high school was not evenly distributed in terms of social class. It was especially marked in middle class families (Campbell & Sherington, 2006; Campbell, 2007) and it is middle class parents who are the focus of this article. Education management is a very important way that the middle classes ‘do class’, to use R. W. Connell’s terminology, and middle class parents have been historical pioneers of school choice. An examination of their practices of school choice reveals both expertise an

FAQs

What data sources does the article use to study schooling changes?

It uses data from the Australian Censuses of 1976 and 2001 to quantify the shift in secondary schooling participation.

Why are school teachers a key group in this research?

School teachers are central because of their historically uneasy status and their complex roles as both providers and consumers of school education.

What main findings emerge about teachers’ children and schooling sector shifts?

Teachers collectively moved children out of government high schools over the period, but differences appear within the category by parents’ gender and sector of employment.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Elsa