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Abstract

Neoliberalism is often understood as being both an epoch of capitalism and a zealous ideological commitment to the primacy of private property and free markets. In practice, it has tended towards mobilising state power in the interests of capital, remaking societies and individuals in this process. Perhaps inevitably, education systems, the world over, have been reformed in light of neoliberalism’s overarching imperatives. It is in this light that we can best understand and make sense of recent reforms to Queensland’s senior secondary schooling system. While some details continue to be ironed out, the reformed system will revolve around three main planks: (a) an assessment model combining school-based and common external assessment, (b) a process that quantifies and standardises school-based assessment through external review processes and (c) a transition away from the Overall Position (OP) rank towards an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR). These changes to assessment and tertiary admission represent a pivot away from Queensland’s historical commitments to school-based assessment and teacher and curriculum flexibility towards a standardised national system of curriculum and external assessment. Ultimately, the reforms embody the ideological commitments of neoliberalism, perpetuating schools as producers of human capital. Hence, Queensland’s senior secondary schooling reforms ought to be understood through two different frames: firstly, as embodying the dominant ideological imperatives of neoliberalism and, secondly, that education is, within this context, being reconstituted to meet the perceived needs of capital.

Keywords

Neoliberalism critical analysis senior schooling capitalism Queensland

Introduction

Neoliberalism – an inherently contested term – is motivated by classical liberalism’s devotion to the institution of private property and the primacy of free markets. It is typically accompanied by socially conservative commitments to religious traditions and nationalism (Apple, 2006; Gilbert, 2013). Whereas classical liberalism prioritised negative freedom – freedom from external constraints, especially the state – neoliberalism has tended towards mobilising state power to tear down constraints on capital accumulation. This has meant, practically, mobilising state power in the interests of capital – shaping economies and individuals in ways that maximise efficiency and effectiveness and governing in the interests of corporate capital (Harvey, 2007b). To this end, among a host of measures, neoliberalism has tended to promote deregulation and the ‘rolling back’ of the welfare state and social services through privatisation so as to, as far as is possible, shift the production and distribution of services away from the state and community sectors, into the market (Harvey, 2007a; Prasad, 2006). Perhaps inevitably, education systems have been reformed in light of these imperatives (Luke, 2006). Education the world over is being reconstituted in the face of globalisation and the historically specific needs and demands of global capital (Weis et al., 2006: 246–247).

It is in this light that we can best understand and make sense of recent reforms to Queensland’s senior secondary¹ schooling system. While some of the details continue to be ironed out, the new system, to be fully implemented by 2020 (QTAC, 2018a; Queensland Government, 2016), will revolve around three main planks: (a) an assessment model that combines school-based and common external assessment, (b) a process that quantifies and standardises school-based assessment through external review processes and (c) a transition away from the Overall Position (OP) rank² towards an Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR).³ In line with recent reforms, these changes to assessment and tertiary admission continue to move Queensland’s senior secondary education system away from historical commitments to school-based assessment and teacher and curriculum flexibility towards a more standardised and quantifiable national system of curriculum and external assessment. These policy changes are consistent with the general aims of the now dominant neoliberal education apparatus which, as Apple identifies, operationalises schooling through a ‘discourse of competition, markets, and choice on one hand and accountability, performance objectives, standards, national testing and national curriculum on the other’ (Apple, 2004: 15). Within this, senior secondary schooling’s principle ideological function is to produce and shape human capital (Apple, 2007; McGregor, 2009).⁴ Hence, Queensland’s senior secondary schooling reforms ought to be understood through two different frames. Firstly, they embody the dominant ideological imperatives of neoliberalism; secondly, they represent how education is, within this context, being reconstituted to meet the perceived needs of capital.

The neoliberal reformation of Queensland’s education system was unlikely intentional on the part of policymakers, but is more plausibly rooted in the messy way that normativity is inevitably shaped by dominant discourses (Wilson, 2007) – in this case, those surrounding particular notions of performativity, standardisation, productivity and efficiency, education and human capital. Generally speaking, this paper looks to contribute to broader understandings of the ideological character of the Queensland education system, something hitherto lacking in the scholarly literature. Moreover, by explicating neoliberalism as the hegemonic ‘policy discourse’ (Tesar, 2016: 311) underpinning recent reforms, this paper situates changes to Queensland’s senior secondary system within both an Australian (Angus, 2015; Connell, 2015) and international (Ball, 2016; Gupta, 2018; Holland et al., 2016) context, wherein both schooling systems and the concept of ‘education’ itself are being challenged and transformed by neoliberal commitments. This paper thus lends further empirical credence to the contention (Apple, 2011; Grimaldi, 2011) that neoliberal ideology is significantly shaping education practices worldwide. Finally, the paper contributes to theoretical understandings of neoliberalism – specifically, how neoliberalism relates to capitalism more generally.

The first part of this paper historicises reforms in Queensland’s education system since 1972. Beginning with the Radford Report and changes that came from adopting many of its recommendations, I broadly chart the evolution of Queensland’s senior secondary education system – the general structure of which remains in place – until the early 1990s. This provides a context for understanding current reforms. The paper’s second part develops a theoretical understanding of schools, in the neoliberal epoch, as producers of human capital. Of course, the notion of schooling as the production of human capital is not an exclusively neoliberal idea. Capitalism itself reduces people to a form of capital – in the form of labour, a mere commodity alongside others, the efficient use of which is essential to ensuring profitable returns in competitive markets. Neoliberalism deepens this inevitable – though not necessarily totalising – tendency, extending the logic of the market into hitherto non-economic realms. Schooling has not escaped this ontological and epistemological shift. The third section applies this theoretical framework, explicating (a) the ‘earning and learning’ reforms of the mid-2000s and (b) the upcoming movements towards alignment with a standardised and quantifiable national system of curriculum and external assessment as both embodying the ideological imperatives of neoliberalism and a concrete manifestation of this tendency towards schooling as the production of human capital. It will also (c) consider the reforms to tertiary entrance in the context of the relationship between school-leavers and the neoliberal university. Because of word constraints, this discussion will be illustrative rather than exhaustive.

From Radford to Viviani: The foundations of Queensland’s senior phase schooling

Four commissioned reports form the cornerstone of Queensland’s senior secondary education system, particularly in terms of assessment and entrance into tertiary education:

Public Examinations for Queensland Secondary School Students [the Radford Report] (1970);

A Review of School-based Assessment in Queensland Secondary Schools [the ROSBA Report] (1978);

Tertiary Entrance in Queensland: A Review [the Pitman Report] (1987); and

The Review of Tertiary Entrance in Queensland 1990 [the Viviani Report] (1990).

Queensland’s education system has, since 1972, been rather novel and distinct.⁵ Notably, it has tended to reject external examination systems in favour of school-based assessment and a more open curriculum amenable to teacher and school-based choices and judgements (Butler, 1992; McCallum et al., 1995). This tendency, which runs contrary to national and international trends then and now (Butler, 1992; Butler, 1995), can be traced back to the commissioning of the Radford Report (Radford, 1970), which articulated a number of distinctly politically ‘progressive’ recommendations, many of which were quickly implemented as cornerstones of Queensland’s Senior Schooling system by the Bjelke-Petersen government. While there has been much speculation as to why such a conservative government accepted the progressive recommendations of the Report, it is important to understand the articulation and then adoption of its recommendations as being relatively consistent with then dominant ideological tendencies and political-economic context (Kelly, 2014: 8).

The Radford Report acknowledges that objectivity, discipline and the practical application of knowledge are important considerations in determining assessment systems. However, it tends to prioritise freedom and autonomy, creativity, differentiation and diversity. Prescriptive standards that constrain the capacities of teachers to judge their students are rejected. The report ultimately advocates a school-based system of assessment that maintains faith in ‘the ability of teachers in secondary schools to form sound judgements on their students’ achievements’. It goes on to posit ‘that schools should be able to make assessments at least as reliable’ as external examinations ‘and more valid because they can take account of more performance than a single examination’ (Radford, 1970: 76). Even when advocating limits for the freedom of schools and teachers in terms of base curriculum standards and demands – ‘we are not proposing to give uninhibited freedom to schools to do what they want’ (Radford, 1970: 80) – the report emphasises freedom in a way consistent with the progressive, hopeful zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, embodied more generally in the New Left and social democratic social reforms.

The political-economic instability of the 1970s, highlighted by stagflation and interconnected economic crises, swiftly shattered the economic confidence of the early postwar years. In a schooling context, rising unemployment saw many more students than in the postwar years continue formal education until Year 12. This contradicted the confidence of the Radford Report, which held that ‘[m]ost of the students who leave school on completing Grade 10 take employment either immediately or later… or enter post-Junior vocational courses in Technical Colleges and Armed Services’ (Radford, 1970: 64). The ROSBA report (Scott, 1978), delivered eight years later, emerged in the context of a global crisis of capitalism and economic recession ⁶ – a response to the fact that the traditional pathways to employment emphasised in Radford were no longer as open to school-leavers.

The ROSBA report is thus decidedly less confident and more restrained. This is partially explained by the fact that ROSBA is an examination of the Radford schemes already put in place. It is inevitably more critical. However, ROSBA is generally more circumspect and modest. The optimism and progressivism central to Radford are replaced by an emphasis on the complexities of social reality, a conservative commitment to ‘traditional moral values’ and a defence of liberal capitalist society against internal threats (Scott, 1978: 18). Whereas Radford emphasised teacher competence and flexibility, ROSBA encourages the development of a ‘core curriculum’ in which students are taught ‘basic beliefs and ideas held to be valuable in our society and which gives it a sense of community’ (Scott, 1978: 19). While maintaining the commitment to school-based assessment, ROSBA introduces themes that would be developed further through both the Pitman and Viviani reports, emphasising themes of accountability, particularly in terms of advocating both competency-based assessment (that is, assessment results have objective meaning) and the external moderation of assessment results (that is, so results have greater credibility).

The Pitman Report’s focus was much narrower than its predecessors, picking up on a theme peripheral to the main points of discussion in the ROSBA report – notably the calculation of the tertiary entrance (TE) score. Its brief was ‘to review all aspects of entrance to tertiary institutions in Queensland’ (Matters and Pitman, 1987: 9). It is a response to the fact that students were pursuing increasingly diverse pathways into tertiary education. This tended to exert enormous pressures on existing procedures towards entrance into tertiary education and rendered the TE score ineffective as a performance marker for TE. The Pitman Report thus articulated the increasing recognition that the TE system needed reform. Though the findings of the Pitman Report were not formally accepted or legislated, many of its recommendations and ideas would animate the Viviani Report, released a mere three years later.

Viviani’s tone is much more urgent. The TE score, it posits, was being ‘clung to… long after its usefulness had declined’ (Viviani, 1990: 93). The Report’s scope also extends far beyond the TE score, noting the more generalised failure of the tertiary selection system: ‘the process of consultation, negotiation and co-operation between schools and universities on tertiary entrance has effectively broken down… there has been a serious decline in public confidence in tertiary entrance methods’ (Viviani, 1990: 3). This, just as the reports before it, was a response to a particular set of conditions. As Kelly (2014: 8) notes, these included a ‘larger and more heterogeneous student population, the more widespread education of a tertiary education, an expansion of universities… the offering of higher-level qualifications by TAFE and private colleges, and the demand for further education by people already in the workforce’. The TE score, abolished in 1989 (Matters and Masters, 2014b), was replaced by the OP score advocated by Viviani. The OP score would be calculated through a combination of a student’s grade on the Queensland Core Skills (QCS) and a student’s ‘field position’ in specific, approved subject areas. The OP score then forms the basis for university entrance.

Neoliberalism and schooling: Schooling as the production of human capital

Before exploring more historically recent reforms – which illustrate concretely the theoretical argument that, under neoliberalism, schools tend towards the production of human capital above all else – this section will explicate more fully this theoretical understanding. Human capital has been conceptualised in various ways. Commonly, it is conceived as investing in human beings, through various forms of education, to produce subsequent economic value that can be directed towards fulfilling tasks and goals. The concept goes back at least to Adam Smith, who defined it as follows:

The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labor, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit. (Smith, 1999: 377).

Analysed critically, Smith here reveals that, in capitalist society, human beings come to be understood as one among a number of resources to be managed to ensure economic viability. Very literally, capitalism reduces the human being to ‘a form of capital’ (Rikowski, 2004: 568) similar to and alongside other forms of capital, such as machinery, land or non-human nature. The idea of education as essential to shaping human capital is thus clearly not a new, nor an exclusively neoliberal, idea; its roots lie (at the very least) in the logic of capitalism itself. However, for the likes of Smith, the bourgeois subject tended to merely try and maximise utility while participating in the market. In Smith’s conceptions of social life, this attitude towards economic activity was sharply differentiated from behaviour in non-market realms – be they familial life, neighbourhood associations, national defence, public policy-making, the formation of political parties or the production of knowledge (Smith, 2010). To put it another way, ‘Smith took the position that the whole [hu]man is inclusive of, but not limited to, the economic [hu]man’ (Coker, 1990: 140). In contrast, the crucial feature of neoliberalism lies in the thoroughgoing extension of the logic of the market into all realms of life, including those hitherto conceived as non-economic. That is to say, the whole human is reimagined as the economic human. Neoliberalism can thus be understood as what Çalışkan and Callon (2009: 369) refer to as a process of ‘economization’. In this process, neoliberalism (re)produces ‘everyone as human capital’ (Brown, 2016: 3).

The domination of neoliberal ideas also produced a discursive shift in social and political life: ‘patients’ and ‘students’ are now ‘clients’; ‘citizens’ are ‘customers’; ‘public servants’ have become ‘service providers’. This discursive shift transforms and actively constitutes subjects as economic agents and reconstructs the social world of which they are a part (Foucault, 2008). Essential to the economisation process that renders everyone as human capital, neoliberalism constitutes an enormous subjectivation process wherein discursive formations transform the individual’s social role along economistic lines. Neoliberalism should thus be understood as ‘a simultaneously top-down and bottom-up (re)production through continually (re)articulated citational chains refracted both from discourse to subject, and from subject to discourse’ (Springer, 2010: 931).

Neoliberalism, as both an epoch of capitalism and an ideological project, has reshaped social and political institutions throughout the world. For Harvey (2016), it is best understood as a corporate capitalist class political project that, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at curbing the growing wealth and power of the working class. Specifically, neoliberalism was a reaction to how both the expansion of the welfare state and anti-corporate social democratic reforms that intervened in and interfered with markets threatened the general capacity for capital accumulation (Harvey, 2007a). For neoliberals, the market constitutes a superior mechanism of production and distribution (Peters, 2012) and the state an instrument to expand its role (Rose, 1999). Increasingly, the ‘economic’ takes precedence over the ‘political’. Competition, embodied in the market, is envisaged as an inherent good, a mechanism to promote dynamism and innovation. Where possible, tasks, institutions and processes are delegated to competitive market forces through processes of privatisation and deregulation (Weis et al., 2006). Schools have not escaped this trend; their form and function have been similarly colonised by the market and reorientated towards fulfilling the needs of capital. In light of this, what constitutes important knowledge – at least in ‘official’ educational contexts – has shifted. Historically, the touted economic benefits of education have been significant drivers in schooling reform. However, while economic considerations have inevitably tended to dominate education reform agendas in capitalist societies (Rikowski, 2004), these considerations competed with other social, emotional and personal conceptions of the purpose of educating young people. In assuming a position of ‘global orthodoxy’, neoliberal ideology has successfully marginalised education ‘policies and practices informed by the values of social justice and equity’ (Grimaldi, 2011: 1131). For instance, a notion of schooling as the production of human capital contrasts markedly with ethical conceptions of the telos of education. In particular, the idea that education ought to be fundamentally concerned with ‘influencing students to be and do “good”’ (Arndt and Tesar, 2018: 235) – to reflect on what it means to live as responsible, ethical, democratic subjects. Indeed, even when notions of social justice, citizenship or equality are invoked as essential components of educational reform (as, for instance, in the Queensland Government’s 2002 White Paper, discussed below), they tend to be either marginalised or re-framed in economistic terms (Grimaldi, 2011; Wilson, 2007).

The dialectical linkages between knowledge and power have been articulated many times over (Apple, 2004; Apple, 2006; Bourdieu, 1984; Foucault, 1977; Foucault, 1980). Indeed, such research situates schools as central in the reproduction of inequality and the maintenance of ideological hegemony (Gramsci, 1971). Neoliberal narratives have, in line with this, transformed understandings of ‘citizenship’. Individual responsibility is fetishised, while social and collective responsibility to others is neglected, sometimes even derided. Rather than facilitating education as a social ‘good’ in which students are prepared to participate as citizens in an increasingly diverse, interconnected world, schools prepare citizens as workers to compete in the global market. As this tendency becomes more and more one-sided, their social role is best understood, principally, as producers of human capital (White and Wyn, 2008). Inevitably, then, in an educational setting, capital and industry see students as ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1977), understood and envisioned singularly in terms of their economic potentialities – vessels to be invested in and seek future return upon.

Increasingly envisioned through an economistic lens in educational settings, students are commodified as future labour power. Schooling and education take on a role in which their principal aim is to prepare them for employment. In this process, human beings become ‘the passive playthings of external forces… investment in individuals’ education [a route to solving] all the structural problems of the economy’ (Olssen et al., 2004: 150). In this context, state power is mobilised in the interests of capital, its job being ‘to deliver human capital as an economic return from educational investment’ (McGregor, 2009: 351). The potentialities and subjective needs of students are, in economic terms, unimportant. The overriding imperative is that they acquire the broad and flexible skill base and attitudes necessary to function in an increasingly diverse and competitive international market.

Towards a neoliberal education system in Queensland

‘Earning or learning’ in the senior phase

The Queensland Government’s 2002 White Paper marked a considerable shift towards the dominant principles of neoliberal education, particularly insofar as schools ought to be understood as producers of human capital. While some emphasis is placed on the idea of education as central in the achievement of social justice (Harreveld and Singh, 2007), the overriding imperatives informing the White Paper centre around an epistemic shift towards understanding education as a lifelong process in which young people continually develop skills and knowledge so they are able to adapt to the continually changing demands of working life and compete in an increasingly competitive and interconnected global economy. There is a particular emphasis on the development of foundational skills such as

critical thinking, problem solving, collaborative learning, and communication. [Students] must be able to read and write, and work with figures, as well as master new technologies. They must be ready for lifelong learning so they can pick up new skills and knowledge and adapt as the nature of work continues to change. (Queensland Government, 2002: 12).

The White Paper was also a response to the fact that 10,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 17 were neither ‘gainfully’ employed in full-time work nor engaged in full-time schooling or training. In response, it declared these young people ought to be ‘earning or learning’ (Queensland Government, 2002: 12). This translated into law in the form of the Youth Participation in Education and Training Act 2003, which mandated a ‘compulsory participation phase’ of schooling. This compulsory participation phase begins when students are no longer compelled to attend school (i.e. after the completion of Year 10) and ends when they gain one of a variegated assortment of qualifications, including a Queensland Certificate of Education (introduced in 2008), or when they have participated in an assemblage of eligible options for at least two years after compulsory schooling ends.

This emphasis on earning or learning within the senior phase reflects broader global trends. As identified by Métais (2003), trends in the administration and composition of post-compulsory-years schooling can be boiled down to five key points of emphasis: (a) education as the development of a standardised base of knowledge and key skills (or ‘competencies’); (b) education for participation in an increasingly competitive globalised economy; (c) citizenship education promoting loyalty to liberal democratic politics; (d) more flexible and non-linear pathways into tertiary education and the workforce; and (e) a more personalised education responsive to the needs and talents of the learner.

In line with this, as Deleuze (1995) and Rose (1999) have both demonstrated, the category of ‘education’ has broadened out in neoliberal societies; it is no longer tethered to school. Rather, education has become socially diffuse, learning a perpetual, lifelong state necessary to maintaining and adding to one’s ‘market value’. More specifically, ‘earning or learning’ programmes – in which the state takes an active role in keeping post-compulsory students either at school, in training or in employment – are best understood as producers of human capital. While unable to actually create employment opportunities for adolescents, these types of programme aim primarily at, firstly, improving the future employability of young people through the provision of generic, transferable skills and, secondly, making them more competitive in an increasingly global market (Lehmann, 2012: 115–119).

The standardisation of assessment and curriculum

Queensland recently initiated a number of reforms of the senior phase system. An exhaustive list of recommendations can be found in the Queensland Review of Senior Assessment and Tertiary Entrance (Matters and Masters, 2014a). Unusually, this report did not attempt to solve a specific problem or emerge from broad public disapproval of the education system. Instead, it attempted to answer the following ideologically revealing question: ‘are current [senior school] processes as effective as they might be in meeting the future needs of students, employers and universities?’ (Matters and Masters, 2014c: x). With some modification, many of the recommendations have been accepted for implementation from 2019 onwards by the Palaszczuk Government.

There are three main planks constitutive of the reforms. The first is a transition away from the OP rank towards an ATAR. According to the report, there is little support for the OP system within universities. Notably, OPs are seen as outmoded. Nearly 50% of Year 12 students are currently considered for tertiary entrance on criteria besides the OP, and many students bypass the OP system by using the QTAC Selection Rank as an alternative. Moreover, the system is seen as unnecessarily convoluted – there are many moving, and often conflicting, elements, many introduced in an ad hoc manner (Matters and Masters, 2014a: 2). Perhaps most significantly, replacing the OP with ATAR will standardise tertiary entrance by bringing ‘Queensland into line with other states and territories’ (Queensland Government, 2016). The second of the report's main recommendations is an assessment model that combines school-based and common external assessment. It specifies a mix of 50% school-based assessment and 50% external assessment on the grounds that this would produce more objective and ‘fair’ assessment standards across schools and throughout the state (Matters and Masters, 2014a: 7). After further investigation and consultation, many subjects will have 75% school-based assessment, while maths and science will have 50% (Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority, 2016). The report's third main recommendation is to quantify and standardise school-based assessment through the implementation of more rigorous external review processes (Matters and Masters, 2014a: 17).

These changes to how assessment is administered and how tertiary admission operates represent a move away from Queensland’s traditional commitments – since the Radford Report, at least – to school-based assessment and teacher and curriculum flexibility towards a standardised, centralised and quantifiable national system of curriculum and external assessment. There are, of course, some discipline-specific reasons to support the centralisation of curriculum and assessment standards. Mathematics, for instance, is predicated on vertical knowledge structures in which the understanding of more complex procedures depends on the understanding of more simple ones. Centralisation could, in this context, breed efficiency, general standards and some subject-specific consistency and competency. Conversely, history is predicated on the attainment of qualitative knowledge unsuited to quantitative, formalised standards and centralised curricula that place ideological power in the hands of a small minority to impose their subjective conception of history as objective reality.⁷ This differentiation of the amount of school-based assessment reflects a level of sensitivity to discipline-specific concerns. However, I do not want to get caught up in these debates.

Instead, I want to explicate how this pivot towards a standardised system of curriculum and external assessment embodies neoliberal imperatives⁸ and perpetuates schools as producers of human capital. Emphases on ‘accountability, performance objectives, standards, national testing and national curriculum’ constitute the central planks of neoliberal educational reform globally (Apple, 2004: 15). The technology of standardisation is particularly essential for constituting market rationality because it enables quantification and profiling. As Moore and Robinson assert, elaborating Marx’s critique of political economy: ‘[c]apital encourages universal communication, but only in quantified terms, and thus, anything that cannot be quantified and profiled is rendered incommunicable – meaning that it is marked and marginalised, disqualified as human capital and denied privilege’ (Moore and Robinson, 2016: 2775). Relatedly, the centralisation of testing and curricula is designed to develop consistent skill sets and knowledge bases across the community, preparing students for participation in the economy as workers and entrepreneurs. Moreover, one of the main effects of external assessment (which are generally ‘high stakes’ tests) and centralised curricula is to standardise and regiment classroom practices. As Mahiri (2005: 82) explains:

Moment ‐to ‐moment, the curriculum controls teachers’ and students’ time and activities, and it does not require a trained and skilled teacher with disciplinary, pedagogical, and cultural knowledge to implement it as long as the students submit. Standardized teaching and learning correspond to standardized tests. Specifically, teaching and learning become Taylorized. Rigidly enforced and timed, piecemeal tasks are required of teachers and students, with few accommodations for diverse styles of learning or teaching. Administrators would be able to come into classrooms and check to see that their ‘workers’ are on the precise lesson, page, and the exact task prescribed for a given time slot.

Increasingly standardised and quantifiable systems of assessment and curricula have the effect of increasing administrative control over both students and teachers. One of standardised testing’s functions is to instil discipline into a kind of ‘delivery system’ in which teachers constitute labour and students the commercial products: that is, standardisation is crucial to the reconstitution of education as an assembly line centred on producing students as ready and able participants in the economy (Au, 2011: 36).

Standardised tests and curricula constitute technological tools (Ellis, 2008) essential to enabling the quantifiable comparison and measurement of teacher and student performance. In standardised assessment regimes, all performance is measured against essential standards. The assumption of such regimes is that the assessment instruments themselves are objective, fair and universal – that one can measure deviance and normality (i.e. student a does not meet the standard, while student b does). This is the very basis of their claim to legitimacy: that they can apply to individuals across a range of contexts. The very basis of standardisation’s claim to legitimacy lies in the suppression of individual and contextual differences, be they between schools, across the state or across the world. In this process of decontextualisation, standardisation ‘objectifies’ (Au, 2009) teachers and students alike, transforming them into abstract numbers constituted purely by their assessment performance. Lipman articulates it thus (2004: 172):

Students, as well as teachers, with all their varied talents and challenges, were reduced to a test score. And schools, as well as their communities, in all their complexity – their failings, inadequacies, strong points, superb and weak teachers, ethical commitments to collective uplift, their energy, demoralization, courage, potential, and setbacks – were blended, homogenized, and reduced to a stanine score.

This process of quantification – of understanding, skills and knowledge – is essential to the measurement and comparison of students. Indeed, standardised tests and curricula ought to be conceived – and are typically understood by policy-makers –as tools crucial to facilitating the measurement and comparison of students, as well as the development of particular competencies and skills across diverse populations (PISA, 2014). External assessment and standardised and centralised curriculum systems ensure two things: (a) that certain skills in areas like literacy, numeracy, ICT capacities and communication have been taught and (b) that students are proficient in them to certain basic standards so as to enable participation in the workforce (exemplified in the imperatives informing the Queensland Government’s 2002 White Paper or the notion of ‘general capabilities’ operating in the Australian Curriculum). A base standard of skills is necessary for capital so that students arrive in the workforce as ready-made labour power able to properly participate as sufficiently skilled workers (PISA, 2014: 1). The reorientation of education towards the development of general skills and knowledge deemed necessary for effective participation in economic life effectively narrows and delimits the purposes of schooling. Education is less, as stated previously, about social justice or creating forms of democratic subjectivity, but is instead an economic investment. It is an explicit investment in human capital, a route to creating flexible, creative, ICT-capable and, of course, numerate and literate subjects capable of participating in the global economy of the 21st century. The centralisation of curricula and testing regimes necessary to deliver this knowledge and skills constitutes education as a form of ‘technical-instrumentalism’, wherein ‘the curriculum and even knowledge itself’ becomes a ‘means to an end, not ends in themselves’ (Young, 2008: 21). In this case, education becomes a means to fulfil the ends of global capital.

Moreover, standardised tests allow the development of quantifiable measurements that specifically detail deviance from the mean, which then allows for appropriate ‘interventions’ to improve performance. The capacity to distinguish levels of achievement across diverse contexts rests on the assumption that the tests have some universally objective basis. An effect of the process of quantification is to objectify people, to turn them into ‘mere’ numbers, ripe for categorisation and comparison. Standardised tests and centralised curriculum ensure human capital is sufficiently developed – that through schooling, those skills, characteristics and knowledge necessary for participation in an increasingly global, technologically advanced market have been acquired. This places ‘education firmly within the paradigm of factory production’ (Au, 2009: 38), wherein students are ready-made, quantifiable objects to be measured, evaluated and exchanged. In objectifying students for those purposes explored, students become commodities, value to be utilised by capital. This is also a process of subjectivation – students are reimagined as subjects of value, as economic agents to serve capital. External assessment thus plays a part in a broader process that reconstitutes teachers as labour and students as products, commodities to be shaped to fulfil the needs of industry through the production of those variegated skills and general capabilities needed to facilitate participation as workers in a globalised market.

Tertiary entrance and the neoliberal university

Queensland’s senior secondary reforms – focused as they are on both senior school assessment practices and tertiary (university) entrance – need also to be situated within the nexus of the relationship between school-leaving students and the place of those students in the neoliberal university.⁹ A number of reforms to the Australian tertiary education sector in recent decades (Matters and Masters, 2014c: 9–14) enormously expanded the number of university places taken up by school-leavers – most notably, establishing a national target aiming for 40% of 25–34-year-olds to attain a bachelor-level or higher qualification by 2025. The reforms to the university sector, of which these targets were a part, were initiated to ensure it ‘is structured, organised and financed to position Australia to compete effectively in the new globalised economy’ (Bradley et al., 2008: xi). This places the senior reforms firmly within the ambit of a more broadly neoliberalised education system, wherein students are (re)conceptualised as human capital. The ‘skilling’ (and subsequent credentialling) of students is seen as essential to both their (future) place within the economic system as commodities to be utilised by capital and as a structural ‘fix’ to macro-economic policy anxieties.

Moreover, whereas universities previously selected students for limited places on the basis of their entrance rank (i.e. OP or ATAR), these reforms produce what Matters and Masters (2014c: 9) describe as a ‘demand-driven model’ that led to enormous amounts of competition among universities for enrolments. To put it in the words of the Matters and Masters Report: ‘[w]hereas once students were selected they are now, except for the high-demand courses, sought’ (2014c: 13).

That students are now sought, rather than selected, is unsurprising considering the ‘marketised’ nature of Australia’s tertiary education sector. The first move towards a marketised university sector in Australia was the reintroduction of fees associated with university study in the later 1980s. As Connell (2015) argues, this redefined university education, in a manner typical of neoliberal discourses, as a commodity to be bought, rather than a citizen’s right. Moreover, while most Australian universities tend to be both government-founded and government-funded, there are broad pressures placed upon them to operate ‘like a business’ so as to ensure financial viability. This is reflected in the changing role of university vice-chancellors, who, in contrast to their historical perception as leaders of a teaching and learning community, report to university councils akin to the way CEOs answer to boards (Rea, 2016). Such realities are unsurprising, considering that successive Australian governments have systematically defunded and underfunded the university sector (Centre for the Study of Higher Education, 2013).

The adjustment of funding mechanisms by successive Federal governments means that student fees are now essential income streams for universities. This helps one to make sense of the fact that the tertiary education sector ‘strong[ly] supports… the introduction of an ATAR… in Queensland’ (Matters and Masters, 2014c: 56); it will enable and encourage more students to more easily enrol in university study. The main reason the ATAR will simplify enrolments is because it is a ‘more inclusive’ ranking system (Queensland Government, 2018b: 4) vis-a-vis the OP. Rather than the ‘academic’ OP, the ATAR will be calculated from a more diverse range of student learning, including vocational educational training and SAS subjects (often considered ‘hands-on’ and ‘practical’) alongside traditional ‘academic’ subjects. The changes to tertiary entrance – the transition from the OP to the ATAR system – are designed to facilitate and encourage school-leavers to more easily enrol in university study through a range of diverse pathways. In this way, the ‘docile bodies’ that are moulded into human capital by an increasingly neoliberal education system become also the ‘clients’ of the neoliberal university, sources of capital that assist higher education institutions to more effectively balance their budgets.

Conclusion

This paper began by historicising the reforms in Queensland’s senior phase schooling from 1972 until the early 1990s. The Radford Report initiated changes that, together with subsequent incremental reforms, would form the structural basis for the senior secondary education system until the present day. The second part of the paper developed a conception of schools, in the neoliberal context, as producers of human capital. The third section illustrated these theoretical claims through an analysis of recent reforms.

Queensland’s pivot away from historical commitments to school-based assessment and teacher and curriculum flexibility towards a more standardised and quantifiable national system of curricula and external assessment from 2019 onwards continues senior schooling down its current trajectory of schooling as the production of human capital, something particularly evident in the pervasive ‘earning and learning’ discourse that continues to surround the senior phase in Queensland. These tendencies in Queensland gel with broader national and global trends in which education systems are being (re)constituted as producers of human capital – education as the production of workers capable of participating and competing in an increasingly global market. This flags a broader concern about the nature and purpose of education: should the practical totality of education and schooling be about preparing students as workers to participate in capitalist markets, or ought education aim to operate so as to prepare students as complex human beings capable of understanding themselves and their own needs – a rich process of self-realisation in which students are encouraged to fulfil their potentialities?

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Morgan Rodgers Gibson is a PhD candidate in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His thesis is concerned with the intersections of Frankfurt School critical theory and anarchist praxis. Morgan’s research interests include political philosophy and political theory, the Frankfurt School, anarchism, anti-capitalist praxis and critical pedagogy. Morgan’s articles have appeared in journals such as The Australian Journal of Political Science and Antipode.

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Towards a neoliberal education system in Queensland: Preliminary notes on senior secondary schooling reforms

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

From Radford to Viviani: The foundations of Queensland’s senior phase schooling

Neoliberalism and schooling: Schooling as the production of human capital

Towards a neoliberal education system in Queensland

‘Earning or learning’ in the senior phase

The standardisation of assessment and curriculum

Tertiary entrance and the neoliberal university

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References