School choice : a minority practice in Australia.

Abstract

Australia has invested heavily in promoting school choice as a path towards greater quality and equity in education. It now has the highest proportion of schools competing against others for enrolments of any country in the OECD (OECD, 2013). In theory, a broad range of choices, supported by subsidies for private schools and diversification of public schools, allows parents to select the best and most suitable option. Poorly performing schools will either improve their performance, or close as parents “vote with their feet”. Yet my research suggests that only a minority of parents consider more than one secondary school, even in this most marketised of education systems. The purpose of this paper is to present some findings from a study of school choice in Melbourne, Australia’s private school capital, and to offer an explanation for the paradox by which school choice policies fail to democratise choice, and indeed tend to narrow the curriculum and segregate students