Inequality and education

This book is written at the end of an era in Australian secondary education.

We began our research intending to study one aspect of the social background of educational success. We now find ourselves grappling with questions about curriculum reform, school organization, and how the system as a whole can be reshaped to meet profoundly changed conditions. Though this was unintended and unexpected, we can now see why it should have happened: partly the problem we started with, and partly the nature of the times. Before presenting our research findings, then, we must discuss their context. This chapter introduces the problem of inequality, the school system in which it arises, and the way it has been usually discussed — and misunderstood.

Before the Second World War, the secondary school system was a small device sitting on top of a mass primary system. High schools and private colleges took the 'cream' — the small number of boys (and fewer girls) who were going to get on — while technical schools trained some of the workers' children for trades. Most pupils left at or about the minimum legal age. Social inequality was hardly a problem: it was built in to the system from the start.

With the war's end there was an abrupt shift. Secondary schooling expanded with dramatic speed. It was widely argued that secondary education was the right of all, and that every child would have equal access. Not only to the secondary school, but through it to the university and the privileges beyond.

Thirty years later, the schools were still being criticized as giving working-class youth a separate and inferior education, and much less than equal opportunity. For a time, in the early 1970s, it looked as if there would be still more expansion (especially of tertiary education) in pursuit of the goal, and extra help for the 'disadvantaged' as well. It is now clear that that will not happen for the foreseeable future.

Growth has ended. Programmes like the Disadvantaged Schools Programme were small and weak when they began and have not become any stronger. Central government policy now tends to increase educational inequality rather than reduce it. The relationship of schools to the labour market has changed. A programme for a drastic reform of schooling in a socially conservative direction is emerging. Secondary education has reached a turning point that looks as abrupt as that of 1945.

This is not just the stuff of history. It is the circumstance of everyday experience for people like Wilma Roberts and Sophie Phelan. Sophie and Wilma are both 15 years old and both in Year 10: Sophie at Auburn College, one of the country's most prestigious girls' Independent schools, and Wilma at Rockwell High, a government school built, like the suburbs around it, in the 1950s.

Wilma has always enjoyed school, and done reasonably well. She has usually been among the top four or five in her class, and is now in the 'A' stream in a large and (by the standards of the system) well-equipped and properly-staffed school. Her parents want her to get the education they missed out on. Wilma's father, Dave Roberts, is a tradesman's assistant and knows that

I have missed many opportunities because I did not have the papers.

He left school thirty years ago, when he was Wilma's age, after 'wagging' most of his last two years. He wants Wilma to go on to Year 12 so that she can have her pick of any kind of job. Judy Roberts left school, like her husband, on the day she turned 15, and was in a factory job the next day. She doesn't push as hard as he does, but she too gives Wilma support for going on at school as long as necessary to get the job she wants. When Wilma watches TV, Mum tells her:

That won't help you. Homework will. You're losing marks!

It's just what the educational sociologists ordered; but somehow it's not quite working. Wilma is, as her Dad puts it, 'browning off' and 'losing interest' in school. She wants to leave at the end of the year. Most of the kids at Rockwell do. 'They can do it', says Wilma, 'why can't I?' The school is glad to see the back of many of them. 'So undisciplined, so noisy, so rude!', as one shell-shocked young teacher put it. Wilma wants to do a secretarial course.

In the meantime Sophie Phelan, and her school, are flying. Auburn College has had its ups and downs, but at the moment it has a long waiting list for places. Around 90 per cent of its girls take Matriculation and a good proportion of them get straight A's in the 'hard' subjects of maths, physics and chemistry. Sophie is likely to be one of them. Her teachers say that she is even brighter than her two older sisters. Both of them went through Auburn and both are at university doing professional degrees. James and Mary Phelan, their parents, did well at school too. James is a successful barrister and Mary was, until her marriage, a teacher. Sophie has always taken her schoolwork seriously, but now that Year 11 is looming, she is really starting to stretch out. 'I can't be anything', she says, 'unless I do well at school'. Her parents are amazed, even a little troubled, at the way their daughters work — much harder than they did. While Wilma wavers and Rockwell High struggles, Sophie and Auburn College accelerate away.

We met the Roberts and the Phelans in 1978, in the course of the research project which forms the basis of this book. We worked in twelve schools in two cities, and talked at length with a hundred 14 and 15 year olds, their parents, their school principals, and many of their teachers. Half of those hundred students were the sons and daughters of tradesmen, factory workers, truck drivers, shop workers; the other half were the children of managers, owners of businesses, lawyers, doctors. We wanted to find out why the relationship between home and school worked so much better for one group than for the other; and we were guided by a mass of research evidence which showed that Wilma Roberts and Sophie Phelan are not exceptions.

Here are some examples from recent Australian studies. In 1974 Martin and Meade began a survey of about 3,000 state high school Year 9 students in Sydney, whom they followed through the Higher School Certificate (HSC) in 1977. Among other things they asked about fathers' jobs, which were then divided into two groups representing higher and lower 'socio-economic status'. Here are the percentages of students in each group who stayed in school to the final year to do the HSC:

Higher status 43%
Lower status 28%

About the same time as Martin and Meade began their study, the Australian Government Commission of Enquiry into Poverty did a smaller but more intensive survey of 150 18 year olds in Melbourne, looking back at the level of education they had reached. This group too were classified according to their fathers' jobs. Here are the percentages of each group who remained to the HSC:

Fathers %

professional, managerial 52
...