Taking Stock of Gender Reform Policies for Australian Schools: past, present and future

This paper begins with a brief narrative of the past 20 years of gender reform for Australian schools and of recent developments — including the attention paid to boys’ education. This narrative points to the implications of changing Commonwealth federal state relations for gender reform. The second section offers an account of the micro‐politics of macro‐reforms. This draws from research on the reception of gender reform policies in schools and discusses the practices and processes of schools’ gender reform work, indicating some of the limitations and strengths of gender reform policies. The third section identifies the current contexts of gender reform, which include the more extended fields of educational policy and politics, the broader politics of the state itself and more widely still, major economic and cultural shifts. Here the paper will offer an interpretation of the ongoing process of centralised and decentralised restructuring in education and of its implications for feminist work for change in schools. It concludes by briefly mentioning some bigger cultural shifts which are affecting and effecting gender construction and gender relations as globalisation has an increasing impact on our lives.