Education In Australia

Gender disadvantage in education has been highly contested issue in Australia over the last three decades, debate still remains and policies developed by government continue to change. As the educational climate can be seen to have transformed overtime there are changing views as to which gender is identified as disadvantaged.

Historically schools have provided differently for students according to their sex since early colonisation. In which time differentiated educational practices based around gender were one of the explicit aims of education (Haynes 1998). The significant ideological shifts in gender disadvantage and schooling policies in Australia, can be described as different societal shifts of belief systems (Keddie 2009). The consequences of which reflect a highly contested and complex policy terrain marked by changes in gender theorising; feminism and …show more content…
These four priorities were: raising awareness of the educational needs of girls; equal access to and participation in an appropriate 8 curriculum; provision of a supportive and challenging school environment; and equitable resource allocation (Commonwealth Schools Commission, 1987). This policy set the scene to focus on the key areas of disadvantage faced by girls in education with a key goal to consider broader issues of gender distribution and cultural injustice. In particular focusing on addressing issues of cultural injustice through a “problematising of the institutionalised patterns that privilege traits associated with masculinity” (pg 8 Keddie 2009) As McInnes (1996) states not only did the policy seek to rectify disadvantage in girls education but it adopted a more critical view of boys’ education and explored issues associated with sexuality and sexual harassment as Yates (1998) states, the adaptations indicated a change from the inferiority of femininity expressed in earlier