Educational Provision for Refugee Youth in Australia: Left to Chance?

This paper investigates how education bureaucracies in Australia are using languages of categorisation and promoting community partnerships to construct and govern the refugee subject. We use a framework of governmentality to analyse education policies and statements emerging from two levels of government - Commonwealth and State. Drawing on web-based materials, policy statements and accounts of parliamentary debates, the paper documents the ways in which refugee education continues to be subsumed within broader education policies and programmes concerned with social justice, multiculturalism, and English language provision. Such categorisations are premised on an undifferentiated ethnoscape that ignores the significantly different learning needs and sociocultural adjustments faced by refugee students compared with migrants and international students. At the same time, educational programmes of inclusion that are concerned with utilising community organisations to deliver services and enhance their participation, point to the emergence of 'government through community partnerships'; a mode of governance increasingly associated with advanced liberal societies

Children and Safety in Australian Policy: Implications for Organisations and Practitioners

Child safety is now a national policy priority in Australia. Extensive inquiries and reviews have escalated legislative and policy responses focused on developing, maintaining and monitoring ‘child safe’ organisations. The recommendations of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse point to the importance of cultural conditions within organisations in supporting child safety and the need for responsive change in some organisations. Drawing on a recent policy analysis, undertaken as part of a larger Australian Research Council Discovery Project, this article examines how children and safety are constructed, within and across relevant state and federal government policies in Australia, and the implications of this. Distinctions are drawn between conceptualisations of children within the broader education policy context and two specific policy contexts in which children are considered particularly vulnerable to abuse – out-of-home care and disability. The findings indicate that policy discourses of ‘child safe’ potentially foster different emphases and approaches in organisations. These have implications for the way children are positioned in relation to their safety, how their rights are recognised and implemented, and what is required to foster cultural conditions within organisations to best support children’s safety and wellbeing