IS BEING DIFFERENT AND THE SAME? THE PARADOXES OF ‘TAILORING’ IN EDUCATION QUASI - MARKETS

In Australia, market-based education policies promote the notion that government schools should flexibly tailor secondary education to the needs of young people and their local communities. Far from offering a “one size fits all” system, policies seek to enable clients (parents, students) to exercise freedom of choice in quasi-markets that offer different educational products to different individuals. The intended effect is a kind of bespoke education tailoring, whereby schools operate as flexible service providers, adapting to the needs and desires of local markets. In this paper, the author analyses the policy turn towards market tailoring as part of broader shifts towards advanced liberal governance in education. Following this, the author features interviews with educators in two socially disparate government secondary schools in the Australian city of Melbourne. In doing so, the author analyses the extent to which each school tailors its marketing practices to its local community. These interviews suggest inherent contradictions emerge when tailoring is attempted in a hierarchical market with normative and rigid indicators of ‘brand value’. Schools are caught between paradoxical demands, requiring them to be simultaneously different and the same.