Why not university?: school culture and higher education aspirations in disadvantaged schools

This study addresses the social dimension of university entry as one indicator of systemic inequality in Australian education. The particular focus is on the experience of secondary education for students from disadvantaged schools and its contribution to their low rate of progression to university. Despite massive expansion in the Australian higher education system over the last fifty years, university participation remains the preserve of the middle classes. Young people from low socioeconomic backgrounds are up to seven times less likely to attend university than those from more affluent backgrounds (Stevenson et al, 1999). Using data drawn from in-depth case studies at three high poverty secondary schools on the urban fringe of an Australian city, this thesis presents an analysis of how schooling serves to perpetuate inequalities by effectively excluding the majority of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds from participation in higher education.

Australian research in higher education participation has been largely statistical in nature and has consistently highlighted the under-representation of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Such research has given little consideration to the reasons for this imbalance. Using an interpretive approach, this thesis explores the problem within the framework of the broader educational policy context in Australia and the various attempts to increase social justice in schooling and in higher education. Drawing on Bourdieu's social theory, along with significant British literature on widening participation, this thesis argues that student capacities to engage with the academic curriculum are shaped as much by their experience of schooling as by their class location. Likewise, student aspirations are mediated by aspects of both their school experience and class location.

Data is drawn from classroom observations, focus group interviews and in-depth, individual interviews with a total of 144 students, teachers and school managers in order to explore aspects of schooling that shape higher education aspirations and impact on their achievement. Four key themes emerge from the analysis: relationships with teachers, standards and expectations, school curriculum and subject choice, and the organisational and social structures within and between the secondary and tertiary education sectors which influence students' post-secondary pathways. School culture is shown to have a powerful influence on students' understanding of higher education, their aspirations and the realisation of those aspirations, reinforcing family and community attitudes and perceptions that university is something 'other people' do. As a result, the students in this study are poorly positioned to gain access to the intellectual, social and economic opportunities provided by university.

The thesis sustains Bourdieu's theories, demonstrating strong links between the practices of secondary schooling and social reproduction, confirming that the life chances of young people are highly structured by class. Despite the rhetoric of education as an instrument of social justice, the thesis concludes that the school is a critical site in excluding students from low socioeconomic backgrounds from university. As higher education has become the gateway to increasing proportions of the population achieving wealth and social advancement, the mechanisms of inequality by which students of particular backgrounds are excluded becomes an important question. This thesis makes a significant contribution to this question by exposing the ways in which schooling practice becomes complicit in and a vehicle for their exclusion. Ultimately this work suggests the need for re-thinking the relationship between schooling, educational disadvantage and university entry in order to break the cyclical process here identified.

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