Democratisation through school choice? Rhetoric and reality in the Australian ‘education revolution'

The Australian government, under the guise of a self-proclaimed ‘education revolution’, has taken steps to encourage schools to compete with each other for students, and families to pick and choose between schools.  This has been framed as a democratising move in two ways: firstly by providing a new ‘right’ to choose between schools, and secondly by forcing up the quality of schooling system-wide through scrutiny and elimination of underperforming schools.  However there is, to date, little evidence as to whether families are taking up this democratic right to choose, and if they are not, what is preventing them.  This paper places under empirical pressure the claim that market-based educational provision eliminates boundaries to access.  A survey of families with a child undergoing the transition from primary to secondary school (n=666), and interviews with parents and school transition co-ordinators, provide the basis for identifying boundaries structuring access to secondary education in Australia.  The research investigated school selection strategies, the ways in which families made decisions, and the constraints under which families made these decisions.  The findings show that school choice is a reality for a minority of families, with more than half contemplating only a single secondary school.  For many, geography provided another important boundary, while price added further restrictions.  The process of school choice provides an important opportunity for the construction and reproduction of class identities and boundaries, represented symbolically in a hierarchy of schools and school sectors.  We conclude that policies emphasising the importance of school choice as a form of parental involvement give disproportionate weight to the symbolic boundaries of between-school and between-sector differences.  The weight of these symbolic boundaries is subject to cross-cultural variation, and families with different cultural and migration histories read these signals in contrasting ways.