Australian schooling policy: A risky proposition

Abstract

This article utilises recent Australian schooling policies and associated international educational policies as a stimulus to reflect on the extent to which schooling provides genuinely ‘educational’ opportunities for students. To do so, the article draws upon Gert Biesta’s notion of the ‘risk’ of education to analyse the extent to which recent and current key federal government policies in Australia, and significant OECD and UNESCO policies, seem to enable more educationally-oriented schooling. The article reveals that while there are multiple discourses at play in relation to federal government policies, the way in which these policies have become more ‘national’ in orientation, and the attendant prescriptive attention to ‘capturing’ students’ learning in more and more ‘precise’ ways, mitigate against the possibilities for more risk-responsive schooling opportunities for students. While educational policies are always open to contestation in their enactment, more economistic and managerial foci within these texts militate against more productive, ‘risky’, learning. As a consequence, Australian schooling policy is a ‘risky proposition’—not because it places students ‘at risk’ of harm but because it does not draw sufficiently upon notions of risk as a resource to inform educational provision in preparation for living in an uncertain world.