Access to higher education remains elusive for many young people despite substantial investment in outreach interventions, most of which target students in underrepresented equity groups. This paper explores an alternative approach to widening participation in Australia that focuses on teacher professional development to support student…

In this paper, the experiences and aspirations of seven students who are members of an excellence program at a large Australian university are foregrounded. The theoretical concepts of performativity and responsibilisation are drawn on to highlight (1) how these students responsibilise themselves and (2) how they are responsibilised by the…

Despite an expenditure of over $45 billion in the last decade aimed at meeting the "Closing the Gap" strategies, successive Federal and state governments have overseen a generation of Aboriginal students who have experienced a failure of promised improvements to their educational outcomes. Recent scholarship has highlighted the paucity…

The capacity to aspire for young people is significant, as they cannot choose to be what they cannot experience or imagine becoming. Student exchange programmes that expand experiences of STEM may increase opportunities, interests, and participation for rural young people in the STEM subject field. This paper creates a cartography with data…

This paper examines the promises made in education policy regarding people's future education, employment and social mobility. Specifically, the paper analyses how the term "potential" functions in education policy texts and discourses to make tacit promises at an affective level. Contemporary education policies often invoke the need to…

For marginalised secondary school students, mainstream education may no longer appear to be an inviting place. While proposed solutions to problems of disengagement and marginalisation appear to concentrate on finding ways to coerce students back to mainstream education through, for example, "learning or earning" legislation, this…