‘Shaking up’ neoliberal policy in schools: Looking for democratic alternatives in Jacinta’s satchel

Abstract

Our research is driven by a strong belief that the stories of young people gathered through ethnographic interviews can generate awareness not only of the complexities, uncertainties and possibilities of young people’s lives but also the ways in which their identities and life chances are shaped by broader structural, institutional and historical forces beyond their control. In this article, we introduce Jacinta, a young person who describes the events and conditions which serve to hinder and/or support her journey in school and beyond. We have used Jacinta’s story from a larger research project, to speak back to the impact the broader neoliberalising agenda is having on young lives with a view to reimagining democratic alternatives in education.

Introduction

Too often, schools empty children’s satchels; their dreams are strewn in the dust (Slee, 2011: 86).

Life at high school is basically boring. Last year I was swearing at teachers and getting angry. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t socialize (#24 Jacinta: 2011).

Most people still want democracy (Cox, 2002: 384).

Throughout this article we invoke the voice of Jacinta ¹ to invite our readers to listen carefully to what young people have to say about their experience of schooling. This is because we believe that young people are better placed to describe the unequal starting points and difficult home circumstances they face, as well as the often complicated negative experiences of high school that impact on their life chances (Connell, 1993). In retelling Jacinta’s story, we draw on Roger Slee’s (2011) metaphor of children’s satchels because it allows us to focus on young people’s experience of school rather than adults. We are also attracted to the vivid imagery of children’s dreams being strewn in the dust because it provides a starting point in a process of reclamation that honours the courage and determination shown by young people like Jacinta. In the face of adversity and an uncompromising school system, Jacinta’s story is seen as a political act that involves both a spirit of critique and possibility (Giroux, 1988).

In pursuing this agenda, we commence by acknowledging that young people today face an increasingly volatile and hostile world. This global world is underpinned by a precarious labour market driven by casual, insecure and poorly paid work in the service economy (Aronowitz and DiFazio, 2010). While Australia experienced a relatively mild downturn during the 2008–2010 Global Financial Crisis, young people suffered the brunt of the loss of full-time permanent jobs including apprenticeships, plus a disproportionate share of the increase in unemployment (Anlezark, 2011). Ironically, Western Australia in which this research was located experienced a significant mining boom and period of wealth creation. Yet, young people like Jacinta continued to be left behind, despite the increasing demand for skilled labour (Sennett, 2006).

We first met Jacinta in 2011 at a public high school located on the urban fringes of the capital city. Young people rarely have an opportunity to describe the realities of what is really happening in their complex lives in the context of an increasingly competitive and commodified world. Looking in Jacinta’s satchel provided us with an opportunity to examine how cultural processes of advantaging and disadvantaging impact on different classes of students. Importantly though, we wanted to see how schools might be reimagined as democratic spaces in which all children can flourish. To begin with, we want to describe something about the ways in which we gathered Jacinta’s story as a means of speaking back to the broader neoliberalising agenda and the pathologising and deficit thinking which sustains it.

Harvesting Jacinta’s story

Jacinta was one of 32 young people (14 males and 18 females) interviewed between 2011 and 2013 as part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant to investigate the kinds of conditions needed to support young people in ‘getting a job’ (Down and Smyth, 2010). The participants came from a range of ethnic backgrounds, and most from low socioeconomic circumstances. The purpose of the research was to listen to their experiences of the final years of schooling with a view to better understanding the barriers, obstacles and interferences they faced as they transitioned into the adult world. From their vantage point, we identified the kinds of pedagogical conditions required to support their dreams. We wanted to generate how these things looked from the point of view of students themselves as an alternative to the dominant human capital formation discourses focused on ‘achievement, standards, tests, and learning outcomes’ (Hedegaard-Soerensen and Grumloese, 2018: 1). Jacinta provided a rich insider’s perspective of what it means to be stigmatised and labelled as ‘vulnerable’, ‘deficit’, ‘troublesome’ and ‘at risk’ and how it might be different.

Harvesting Jacinta’s story involved a three-phase interview process. The first was ‘an aspirational interview phase’ – in which we familiarised ourselves with the participants. We wanted to gain a sense of how they were positioning themselves in relation to school and their imagined futures. Jacinta was 16 years of age and in her third year of high school during this first interview. In her words:

Life at ‘Bountiful Bay High’ is basically boring. Last year I was swearing at teachers and getting angry. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t socialize. I have a number of interests including soccer which I’ve been playing for 5 years. I also like playing guitar and stuff. I work at the fish and chip shop. It’s good because it’s a family shop and everyone is really close but it’s not something I want to do for the rest of my life. I want to be either a TV [television] presenter or go in the navy. I’ve got different things I want to do but can’t settle on one. I want to go to uni[versity] but I don’t think I’ll make it because my grades aren’t so good. (Jacinta, August 2011)

In addition to these interview extracts, we also annotated a set of reflective field notes (Burgess, 1988) to develop our own theoretical thinking arising from the empirical data; for example:

Jacinta was determined to complete her schooling and keep ‘off’ the poverty and street crime cycle (Hayes, 2010). Jacinta comes from a traditional working class background. Her father is the sole income earner and neither her parents nor any other family members have participated in higher learning. Joining the navy seems to be an avenue that Jacinta seeks in order to ‘escape’ and see more of the world. She can see the value of education in getting a job that will take her further than only working in a casual food outlet; however, she is concerned that her grades won’t take her any further than the navy. (Field notes)

At the end of each round of interviews, we created a summary table to ensure that we had a clear and accurate record of our ethnographic notes and reflections that would later become the basis for developing a series of participant portraits. This table included a header to encapsulate each unique story. For Jacinta’s caption we chose, ‘I don’t want to finish up in the fish ‘n chip shop’. Jacinta explained:

I want to join the navy because I want to get away from here (Bountiful Bay) and I want to travel and it is good money. I’m not sure what you have to do though to get into the navy. I think you have to complete year 10 and average level C’s. School is helping me because you need certificates and that. Jill has also helped me. Without her support I would probably still be wagging [truanting] and swearing at teachers. What I don’t like about school are the teachers, the uniforms and getting suspended. It makes me angry and upset when they say I am not going to make anything of myself. They don’t have a right to say that. Jill has helped me get back on track. I now see that you need an education to get on in life. You need education or else you finish up in the fish ‘n chip shop. (Jacinta, August 2011)

Jacinta attended an alternative training programme because she had been suspended from school. Although she developed a positive relationship with one of the tutors there, ‘Jill’, we learnt from Jacinta that the only real purpose of school at this point was in obtaining certificates or credentials in the hope it would lead to a job. As Fielding and Moss (2011) argue, this type of education is largely irrelevant because rather than preparing young people for their imagined futures, it simply offers more of the same, that is, ‘the accumulation of competencies and qualifications that will fit children for becoming flexible, self-regulating and risk managing workers and citizens’ (p. 28). Bauman and Vecchi (2004) explain that this competitive culture does more harm than good because the ‘seductive mobility of the global elites … contrast[s] with the misery of those who cannot escape the local’ (p. 7). Jacinta’s identity, therefore, in the words of Bauman and Vecchi (2004), ‘speaks the language of those who have been marginalized by globalization’ (p. 7).

Nine months after our first meeting with Jacinta, we followed up with a ‘developments phase’ interview – in which we continued our initial conversation. In this second interview we asked questions in light of her experience and any intervening events and factors impacting on her decisions about the future. Here, we attempted to deepen our understanding of the impact of influential others and the importance of relationships in making crucial choices about learning. Jacinta explained:

‘The Link’ [an alternative education setting for disengaged students] has helped me a lot by talking about my life and family issues. I don’t do ‘The Link’ anymore though because Jill left. She would come here at school for one session a week and we did anger management and career goal setting. About four to eight of us did the program. The school psychiatrist and the nurse have also helped me quite a bit. I can talk to them. A couple of teachers helped me. There are only two nice teachers in the whole school. I like them because they don’t judge you. I have to put up with the others. I never used to be able to deal with teachers I didn’t get on with. I used to get really angry and swear and throw things around the room but I have quietened down a bit. My friends (from my old school soccer squad) have helped me to work through some issues. Some things at home have made it difficult for me. When I first started school here my Mum was going to jail. I was hanging out with the wrong people. I hardly came to school because I didn’t want to be here. Life at home wasn’t good and there was the usual fighting. (Jacinta, May 2012)

As Caine et al. (2013) argue, ‘relational changes and interruptions create turmoil and confusion for youth as they struggle to make sense of, and recompose, new stories to live by’ (p. 209). These deeper contextual insights of ‘what it means to be human’ (Waterhouse, 2007: 273) were gained after our second 40-minute interview with Jacinta. It provided another layer of rich material with which to create a narrative profile crafted from the interview transcripts with minimal editing (Smyth and Robinson, 2014). These profiles comprised emergent themes, messages, ideas, issues, concerns and questions based on what we had heard from Jacinta and other participants. The profiles were then expanded over the three years to include any new events, circumstances and decisions in the life of our participants to ‘make an aesthetic whole’ portrait (Waterhouse, 2007: 278). Pivotal to this narrative work is the primacy of ‘what students themselves have to say’ (Cook-Sather, 2013: 359) as a means of making sense through our own observations and reflections. By way of example, we recorded the following field note after our second interview with Jacinta:

Jacinta explains how she gathered resources to help her cope, especially after her favourite tutor left. She has found the school support services and a couple of understanding teachers (who don’t judge her) and reunited with her soccer friends. Jacinta admits she was hanging out with the wrong people when her mother was going to jail but has taken herself into a new support circle and living with a friend and her friend’s family. (Field notes)

We described the third interview as ‘a life event and outcomes phase’ because we were interested in finding out where Jacinta was at after the first two interviews. We wanted a sense of what was happening over time as well as providing her with an opportunity to reflect on the course of events and the sense she made of things. In the passage below, Jacinta shared something about her sense-making (Souto-Manning, 2014; Waterhouse, 2007):

At school I was getting harassed and then got into a fight and ended up on the news. What happened was that many people were threatening me like, ‘I’m going to kill or rape you’. They were former students—people that had dropped out of school. They chased me with bottles and things. I went up to a girl who was harassing me and we got into a fight. I’d had enough. We were in school uniform at the time and I was made out to be the bully when really it was the other way around. The media got hold of it because it was on UTube. They just wanted something to fill the news. No charges were laid and it really annoyed the hell out of me because they didn’t have the actual story―they just went on what other people said. They went to my Facebook account and said things that I didn’t actually say because idiots were posting things on my wall that weren’t true. I deleted my account. I’d had enough. (Jacinta, March 2013)

McGregor (2015) and Stanwick et al. (2017) make the point that rather than labelling students like Jacinta as ‘disengaged’, ‘troublesome’ or ‘at risk’, the focus should instead be on understanding why they have become ‘disenfranchised’ in the first place. It was during this third interview with Jacinta, when she was more at ease and trusting of our conversations, that she felt comfortable reflecting on her experience both in and outside of school. This interview allowed us to unravel some deeper insights into the complexities of her everyday life and the reasons why ultimately she left school:

I had a soccer scholarship at Anchorage High and I blew it. I didn’t get kicked out of school, I just left. School was bad. The teachers didn’t really care. I have to admit that in Year 9 I was a bit of an ‘arsehole’ but I had improved from Year 9 and 10 but they still wanted to push me out. They just wanted certain students to go. There was only one teacher who cared. I had a lot of respect for her and she wasn’t going to ‘kick me to the curb’ if you know what I mean. Some teachers don’t care. It’s like they wouldn’t want to know what is going on. It’s like they just care about their pay cheque if you know what I mean. The math’s teacher last year … all he did was tell us to open our books and then gave us a test. I left in third term. (Jacinta, March 2013)

At this stage we were guided by Lather’s (1986) notion of ‘dialectic theory building’, whereby our narrative data was able to confirm, adapt and/or modify our existing theory. It appeared that Jacinta was being unfairly categorised and in need of remediation in the form of more vocational training, functional literacy and numeracy (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), 2016). In the words of Rose (1989), students like Jacinta are deemed to be ‘marginal’ and ‘designated as “slow learners”, or “remedial”, or eventually, “vocational”’ (p. 8). The problem with this kind of individualisation of complex social problems is that it fails to challenge broader structural, historical and institutional forces impacting on the life chances of young people, thus perpetuating existing pedagogy, curriculum and assessment practices. This increasingly authoritarian and conservative ideology serves to further alienate and entrench unjust educational experiences for students like Jacinta.

Looking inside Jacinta’s satchel

Fascism … fighting it means fighting to win back the minds and hearts of people … It means putting your ear to the ground and listening to the whispering of the truly powerless. (Roy, 2009: 44)

As mentioned in the previous section, it was during the complex and intricate interview phases that we created a narrative portrait of each of our participants around a dominant idea/theme/issue or concern ‘waiting to be told’ (Caine et al., 2013: 208). This process provided a platform with which to theorise what young people like Jacinta were telling us while also engaging their voices in ways that ‘capture[d] both the complexity as well as the aesthetic nature of human experience’ (Smyth et al., 2008: 8). In this process, we wanted to not only put our ‘ears to the ground’ as Roy (2009) suggests, but also ‘open eyes’. Bauman (2005) puts it well when he argues that it is the ‘excluded’ who ‘ceased to exist in the eyes of others, so they gradually cease to exist in their own eyes’ (p. 115).

Qualitative research of this kind, where we look inside the satchel of Jacinta and really open eyes and listen, offers an opportunity to trace the social interactions between researchers and participants that evolve over time. Cortazzi (2005) and Ezzy (2002) both confirm that in establishing this form of relationship with research participants means that we do not separate ourselves from them and we therefore capture and write about their lived experiences. During our interviews with participants we asked open-ended, semi-structured questions such as, Can you tell us something about yourself? What job would you like most when you leave school and Do you feel confident about getting the job you want? We intentionally adopted this tone to offer a listening adult ear (to the ground) and when required, the occasional words of encouragement (to those we believe would otherwise be powerless). We wanted our conversations to ‘look backward and forward, inward and outward, to tell and retell’ (Caine et al., 2013: 208). From many years of doing this type of research, we have discovered that this process has some positive ripple effects in developing a greater sense of agency, identity and self-worth among some of our participants. By way of example, Jacinta reflected on her evolving sense of agency during our second interview:

Now I am doing a Certificate II course. I am a bit confused about the subjects but they are part of tourism which will be useful for me because I want to be an air hostess or travel agent. This is a new idea I came up with myself. I certainly know I want to travel. I’ve not been out of Western Australia. I don’t want to be in the fish and chip shop for the rest of my life. I work there a couple of days a week. It is okay but I’d rather be doing something else. I think I’ll stay for Year 12 because I want it to be on international airlines—whatever company will take me. You have to have another language don’t you? (Jacinta, May 2012)

Things are a little better for me now. I’m not hanging out with ‘the crowd’ anymore. I don’t go out and get in trouble with the cops. I decided that I didn’t want to be left behind and have no money. I wanted a good job. I didn’t want to be a druggie/loser on the dole. (Jacinta, May 2012)

By this stage, Jacinta was willing to share more intimate aspects of her life, and as a result we gained a more nuanced understanding of the challenges she faced as well as her hopes and dreams. As Krumer-Nevo and Sidi (2012) explain, we are working with ‘feelings, experiences, and history as a vehicle in understanding’ (p. 299). By the end of the third interview with Jacinta we noted that she was taking steps to create a more optimistic future for herself:

I moved out of home and I’m staying with a friend and her family from soccer. I’m getting ‘there’. My friend’s parents are really supportive in what I want to do. It’s a lot different to home. I don’t want to end up like the rest of my family. At Mum’s place there was no routine. It wasn’t very good—just violence and all sorts of things. Then I moved out to my friend’s house where it’s really quiet and I have a routine. I feel I can get my life on track kind of thing.

Life’s pretty good now. Sometimes I am surprised how well I’ve pulled myself away from the trouble I was in. I wanted to give up but I got out of it so why give up now? In two years’ time I can see myself working in a travel agency, having my licence and a car. I’ve got my Learning Permit. The people I live with are going to organise driving lessons. (Jacinta, March 2013)

Jacinta’s comments reveal a great deal about the complexities of human life, something that is unlikely to be gleaned from more impersonal data collection techniques such as surveys and standardised test scores so prevalent today. It also reinforces Connell’s (2013) argument that ‘education itself has resilience, has grounding in social needs, that cannot be suppressed – and that will be heard’ (p. 110). Jacinta maintained a sense of hope for her future life by seeking to distance herself from the prospect of menial, piece-rate and poorly paid work (‘I don’t won’t to finish up in the fish ‘n chip shop’) and a reputation within the school community that was not only disparaging and demeaning but heavily swayed by notions of the what constitutes a ‘good student’ (Thompson, 2012). Jacinta was focusing instead on more socially orientated outcomes such as capacity building, independence and decision-making (Wyn, 2009).

Throughout this section, we have used Jacinta’s voice to demonstrate that there is much to learn from students’ narratives concerning the processes of inclusion and exclusion (Gunter and Thompson, 2007) and the value of this kind of methodology in ‘speaking back’ to neoliberal policy and practice. In the next section, we explain something about the broader neoliberal context in which Jacinta’s life is located.

Neoliberal policy, competition and residualisation

According to Valencia (2010), students like Jacinta, ‘are not at risk for school failure, but they are placed at risk by schools’ (p. 117, emphasis added) because little is done to address the substantive and complex historical, structural and pedagogical forces shaping their lives (Skattebol et al., 2012). Giroux (2008) argues that neoliberalism’s market-driven ideology operates to devalue ‘the democratic impulses and practices of civil society within narrow economic relations’ (p. 113). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that schools are considered as places of private rather than public benefit as neoliberalism changed ‘the connection between politics and the economy’ (Robertson and Dale, 2013: 8). We need look no further than the current obsession with ‘Better Education’ https://bettereducation.com.au and ‘My Schools’ https://www.myschool.edu.au/ to demonstrate how market values of competition and self-interest have largely supplanted the language of social justice, democracy, inclusion and engaged citizenship. Similarly, Grimaldi (2012) explains how neoliberalism has reframed educational social inclusion policy in Italy from a ‘contextualised, multidimensional and critically informed approach’ to discourses of ‘growth, competitiveness and human capital’ (p. 1150). Another example, closer to home for Jacinta, is from the Western Australian Education Department Strategic Plan for Public Schools (2011–2019; Department of Education and Training Western Australia (DET), 2015), which claims that success will be measured by the ‘percentage of students demonstrating literacy and numeracy proficiency’ (p. 5). The same department advises that one of the best ‘ways to accelerate learning’ is by ‘setting improvement targets against achievement standards and comparative data of like-schools’ and ‘increasing the percentage of senior secondary students studying challenging levels of mathematics and science’ (DET, 2016: 2). Smyth and McInerney (2014) explain that when schools (and children) are unable to perform according to these kinds of instrumentalist measures; ‘they will be put out of business-literally, closed, teachers sacked, the school re-named and opened under new auspices, or sold off to the private sector’ (p. 73).

As the findings of our research and other case studies have revealed, neoliberal strategies and a culture of performativity and accountability (Ball, 2003) do not lead to egalitarianism or social justice; but instead ‘reinforce discriminatory practices’ (Grimaldi, 2012: 1150). We hear this loud and clear in Jacinta’s story, as she describes in her own words how the culture of school improvement, prescribed texts, skills development and standards are far removed from the complex reality of her own life. This is because the focus on grades, competition, ranking and streaming do not accommodate Jacinta’s dreams, desires, needs or interests:

A few things at Bountiful Bay haven’t helped. In English we get a thick book and every time we have an assignment we don’t know what we have to do. All the others in the group agree. The worksheets and assessment tasks are hard. Maths is also pretty hard.

I left the soccer academy because Mum went to jail and then I started smoking. Then I lost motivation because of all the things that were happening. I came to ‘Bountiful Bay’ to try and start again with another school. (Jacinta, May 2012)

Neoliberalism has not only created a ‘dual track economy’ (Smyth and McInerney, 2014: 66) but a two-tiered education system in which poorer students are ‘put at a disadvantage’ (Smyth and McInerney, 2014: 64) in an increasingly residualised, stratified and ghettoised public school system. Some students within this system may have the positional advantage to do well in high stakes testing and make entrepreneurial decisions that better suit their aspirations. This is because they are able to develop social networks which allow them to make more advantageous choices in the educational market place. Others, however, like Jacinta may not have the resources or capabilities to realise their potential because they are ‘perceived as lacking in effort or the necessary skills to achieve’ (Gillborn and Youdell, 2001: 82).

Based on Jacinta’s story we can begin to see how the cultural processes of advantaging and disadvantaging occur for different classes of students. There is an urgent need to not only reform the social context, especially in terms of a collapsed youth labour market, but also to enhance the opportunities and support available to these students. In Jacinta’s case, this involves giving greater recognition to the impact of family circumstances and social context on her performance at school. Staying on at school and appreciating the long-term benefits of education is not easy for those from financially and emotionally distressed households who are under pressure to both earn an income to support themselves while also experiencing the emotional fallout from complicated family circumstances. In our final conversation with Jacinta in March 2014, she revealed something about her own health and mental well-being. We described some of our own reflections after we last spoke with her:

Jacinta has just applied for the navy, but was having to go back for another interview to provide the authorities with a medical certificate for her anxiety. She had just completed the security course. ‘Things are pretty good’ she said, but one does have to question ‘why’ before even beginning training that she is already labelled as ‘having anxiety’. Have records of her past come to haunt her once again? And whose anxiety are we really talking about? Does Jacinta really deserve to own all this anxiety? Jacinta’s school and service providers responded by asking her to do anger management courses, further reinforcing that she alone was the problem and accountable for her own fate. Once again, the question arises as to how appropriate short term, sporadic courses are for young people in these circumstances. Someone less determined and self-motivated than Jacinta to make the change could easily fall over again. (Field notes)

Creating democratic alternatives: what can we take from Jacinta’s satchel?

Jacinta’s story reveals a great deal about the impact of neoliberalism on young lives as the ideology of competition, productivity, accountability, measurement and deficit thinking hold sway over the nature, purpose and processes of education. More importantly, Jacinta’s story offers some new scripts and possibilities as she shared her dreams and desires to ‘become somebody’ (Wexler, 1992). Set in the context of a bleak set of socio-economic conditions, Jacinta showed remarkable courage and determination in making something of her young life. Throughout this process of discovery Jacinta still found it difficult not to blame herself because she needed to quieten down and deal with her anger in order to continue with schooling. As explained in the previous section, this can in part be explained by the obsession with performance and measurement which currently drives education policy and practice without ‘asking whether what is being measured adequately represents a view of good education’ (Biesta, 2017: 316).

In this section, we want to pause and critically reflect on what Jacinta’s story has to do with democratic schooling. Michael Apple (2017) recently explained that one of the key tasks of scholars is to ‘act as critical secretaries’ by which he means documenting the voices of the oppressed, silenced and marginalised. In his words, the ‘subaltern always speaks’. The real dilemma is, however, the extent to which ‘anyone [is] listening to them?’ Jacinta is our ‘absent present’ someone who speaks for and represents many young people who are labelled ‘at risk’, ‘disinterested’ or ‘disengaged’ largely through no fault of their own. We agree with Ecclestone’s (2017) argument that, ‘alternatives to neoliberal interests propose more relational, socially sensitive, networked and reflexive goals’ (p. 59). These are democratic goals, not of the elite private kind (private freedom, private will, private interests, private property) but of the ‘public common good kind where humans can flourish’ (Yeatman, 2017). As Reid (2012) argues, ‘the public good is greater than the sum of its individual parts, and is arrived at through rational, respectful and critical deliberation among the public’ as it ‘seeks to maximize the benefits for society as a whole’ (p. 6). This, he argues is the kind of education which promotes collaboration and community rather than an emphasis on individual competition.

This is urgent … we need to re-imagine the public and rethink education as experienced by young people like Jacinta; not only in her locality but across transnational and global borders. This is what Jacques Derrida calls ‘a democracy to come’ because ‘it is always a promise’ and ‘never a point at which it has fully finally arrived’ (Royle, 2003: 44). Peters (2004) elaborates:

The prospect of a critical pedagogy of difference, of a genuinely multicultural and internationalist pedagogy suitable for the futures, is located at the interstices and in the interplay between a ‘democracy to come’ and a ‘subject to come’, a global subject whose critical function is to both initiate and interrogate the new International. (p. 73)

So what does Jacinta’s story tell us about a ‘democracy to come’ and how we might begin the task of reimagining the public? As Francis et al. (2017) explain, ‘constructing a vision of what a socially just education system’ is ‘may require a complete rethink of what constitutes a school’ (p. 426). At the culmination of our research (Down et al., 2018), we proposed a set of key structural, pedagogical, cultural and community-related conditions to support students as they navigated their way in the adult world in searching for ‘secure full-time work’ (NCVER, 2018).

To this end, we advanced a constellation of key ideas, principles and values as the cornerstones of a new kind of public school. These ideas, principles and values include understanding the complexity of the labour market. This means moving beyond the self-fulfilling prophecy of streaming and allowing students an opportunity to access powerful forms of school knowledge. It also means ‘rethinking’ class to overcome the cultural processes of advantaging and disadvantaging within schools and preparing students for life after school. It addition, it means blurring the boundaries between school and community knowledge in navigating the world as young people engage in socially worthwhile community projects organised around real world standards.

In creating schools that are more hospitable places for learning, all students, irrespective of backgrounds are more likely to feel welcomed, respected and trusted. In developing their interests and passions and negotiating the curriculum based on their needs, interests and desires they will be more engaged with their learning and more likely to pursue further challenges and questions confronting them in the present and into the future. When schools attend to lost, confused and meandering students and provide them with additional resources, then educators can work with the complexities of young people’s lives. In acknowledging these wider contexts, educators in turn are better placed to comprehend the significant life stresses young people face in their families and their communities.

Conclusion

Jacinta’s story has provided some important messages about the complexity and messiness of students’ lives and the different starting points they bring to school. While Jacinta’s story reflects particular local conditions, the themes translate broadly across most Western countries grappling with the fallout from neoliberalism. As Yelland and Saltmarsh (2013) explain, ‘researching global childhoods is best conducted by local researchers with knowledge of their own culture and contexts’ (p. 2).

Smyth and McInerney (2014) argue that ‘the most powerful form of resistance with which to “speak back” to forms of educational policy idiocy, is through crafting and conveying the experiences of young people in respect of their schooling’ (p. 128). Jacinta’s story is an exemplar of who ‘should be listened to’ because she is an ‘informed and profound witness of what is being done … educationally’ (p. 128). We need to radically rethink the school as we know it today and abandon the outmoded industrial model (Wyn, 2009). Yet we still need to have faith that ‘education can make a difference’ … especially if it ‘contains a broad social mix’ (Furlong, 2013: 149). This will require reworking education in terms of structure, pedagogy, curriculum, assessment and relationships (Oakes and Saunders, 2009). It will also require imagination and a willingness to put students at the centre of everything the school does.