Changing school loyalties and the middle class: A reflection on the developing fate of state comprehensive high schooling

Of all Australian secondary schools in the current period, the government comprehensive high school is in most difficulty. This article looks at the developing fate of this school in terms of middle class social practice in relation to changing schooling loyalties. The recent work of Michael Pusey, Stephen Ball, Janet McCalman, Richard Teese and Judith Brett on the middle class is reviewed to give the discussion an historical and contemporary sociological context. The main idea addressed is that the middle class is being ‘forced’ to leave public schools. Government policy on state aid since the (1960s is interpreted as encouraging the departure of the middle class from public schooling, though not evenly in all regions or different kinds of government school. The article analyses census data for New South Wales from (1976 to 2001, using the categories of family income, fathers’ occupation and labour force status as quantifiable indicators of changing school loyalties in the middle class. The article concludes that state comprehensive high schools face a difficult future. Increasingly these schools are seen as schools of ‘last resort’, or schools to which students are sent where active choices are not possible, or are not made by apparently neglectful parents. This occurs in a period in which ‘good citizenship’ is defined less in terms of responsibility to the welfare of broad collectivities in society, but in the informed strategic pursuit of private interest.