The Association between Parental Educational Expectations and School Functioning among Young People with Disabilities:A Longitudinal Investigation

Past research has established clear educational inequities between young people with disabilities and their peers. In part, some of these inequities may be attributed to expectations. In this study, we examined whether parental expectations were related to school functioning at high school, with school functioning broadly defined as ease and frequency of engagement in school-based activities. Using the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children ( N = 3,956; 48.9% female; 5.01% with disability), we examined parental expectations and school functioning measured at three time-points, biennially from the ages of 12 and 13 through to 16 and 17. A multigroup, parallel latent growth curve analysis revealed that high parental expectations at the first timepoint predicted steeper increases in the trajectory of school functioning over time, but only among young people with disability. Parental expectations did not significantly predict school functioning trajectories for the remainder of the sample. Subsequent multigroup analyses that compared disability characteristics revealed that learning difficulties and speech problems, in particular, were associated with lower parental expectations. These results suggest that the perceptions of parents in the lives of young people with disability are important and efforts to shape them may have long-term benefits

‘It’s hard to blend in’: everyday experiences of schooling achievement, migration and neoliberal education policy

This chapter explores how the neoliberal logic of global education policy is experienced in the lives of disadvantaged migrant students in Australia. Policies based in competitive market logics not only concentrate social and economic disadvantages in certain schools but also place pressure on the pedagogical practices level to speak upward to comparison regimes instead of to the learning needs of students. These logics underpin an array of policy mechanisms which ‘identify’ migrant students and their learning needs and resource them accordingly. Currently the educational attainment of advantaged migrant students is aggregated with that of disadvantaged migrant students thus hiding the resource needs of the most disadvantaged, a move which evacuates an understanding of any of the intersectionalities which shape their access to resources. This chapter sketches this broad policy context and then complicates it with two distinctly-different resourcing experiences of being disadvantaged in this context. These cases allow insight into the way historical legacies and local contingencies interact with top-down policy. We need to better understand such instances of imbricated policy implementation as they challenge the logics of pedagogy driven by testing and performance regimes and point to different policy possibilities

Panel discussion: Expanding the story of ‘rainbow families’

The social history of queer activism has always been tied to the unfolding story of queer families. From early battles with child welfare systems after a parent came out as gay or lesbian, to advocating for access to reproductive health services and comprehensive legal recognitions for same-sex parents, the rights of the LGBTIQ community to make and create families has been a focus of protest for decades. While many of those rights have now been achieved, there remain a range of persistent and emerging complexities which shape the family lives of sexually and gender diverse Australians. Drawing on both personal and professional reflections, each of our panellists will explore the question of ‘who counts as a rainbow family today?’ Jennifer Skattebol will firstly discuss her research on the increasing visibility of LGBTI families in early childhood services, and will also reflect on the politics and consequences of visibility she and her family experienced when they took part in the unexpectedly controversial documentary film Gayby Baby. Christy Newman will then reflect on how she hopes our representations of queer families will expand following the achievement of marriage equality, drawing on her own experiences of raising children as a bisexually-identified mum in a same-sex separated family. Cris Townley will then discuss her doctoral research on how LGBTI family identities influence participation in community playgroups, and will also reflect on her own experiences in navigating the tensions between identifying as a lesbian parent and raising a gender-diverse child. Finally, Alison Eaton will discuss some of the work that Rainbow Families is currently engaged in to support LGBTIQ families, including a highly anticipated crowd-funded resource to support Trans and Gender Diverse Parents. She and the rest of the panellists will discuss the challenges of remaining responsive to appreciating and supporting the full diversity of rainbow families, as their story continues to unfold

Improving Educational Outcomes for Young People in Social Housing: Strive Scholarships - Final Report

This evaluation report is about the Strive Scholarship program – Social Impact Longitudinal Study and was commissioned by St George Community Housing in 2016. The purpose of the evaluation is to build an evidence base about the efficacy of the scholarship program which aims to support the educational attainment of young people growing up in St George Community Housing