The politics of educational disadvantage: the impact of central government policies on secondary schools' capacities to improve educational outcomes for their socially disadvantaged students

Deposited with permission of the author. © 2004 Ann Morrow.This thesis uses the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) developed by Sabatier and Jenkins-Smith (1993) to analyse the politics of educational disadvantage in Australia. The historical influence of two competing coalitions at Commonwealth and at State level in New South Wales and Victoria is traced. For most of the 20th century there has been a dominant conservative coalition and a minority coalition that has favoured reforms to assist socially disadvantaged groups in each of the three jurisdictions. However, the composition of these contending coalitions and their relative strengths have varied substantially from State to State. The theoretical model provided by the ACF was supplemented by explorations of Halligan and Power’s (1992) ‘regime dynamics’ framework which helps explain these differences in terms of the differing politico-administrative cultures of Victoria and New South Wales