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1
POVERTY NOW
The educational outcomes and life chances of young people are shaped by the conditions of their upbringing. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the conditions experienced by children in the four schools in which we conducted our research, under the headings Place, Policy and People. We describe the conditions associated with place by tracing the socioeconomic histories of the neighbourhoods served by these schools, and some of the experiences of people who live there. The emergence of inequality as an issue of concern is traced through policy initiatives in both Australia and the United Kingdom. In the second part of the chapter, we locate our study within the tradition of educational research conducted in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, and provide an overview of selected projects that have been influential both in Australia and overseas. This section focuses on the concept of place as a site of research, and adds to the description of relevant prior literature commenced in the Introduction.
Our intention in this chapter is to provide background information about the contexts in which the research was conducted, as well as information about research conducted in these contexts. We acknowledge that there are many ways of representing the conditions described in the sections below. As authors, we settled on the following after much discussion and collective writing: We agreed that in order to read the descriptions of schooling, leadership practices and pedagogical repertoires described in later chapters, it would help to know more about these places, and the people who live and work there. Our interest in the impact of the overwhelming evaluative context of schooling on leadership and pedagogical practices, particularly those practices related to the teaching of literacy, also requires an understanding of policy frameworks; not just those of the present, but also the legacy of past policy, and funding practices.
Place: tracing the production of poverty
The shifting fortunes of communities in the northwestern fringe of Adelaide, Ācentred around the suburb of Elizabeth, provide the backdrop for three of the schools in our study, while the fourth is located in one of the regional āportā towns of South Australia. In all four schools, these fortunes have been integrally linked with industry, particularly manufacturing. In this section, we provide a brief historical tracing of the social and economic influences on the communities in which the four schools in our study are located.
Established in the 1950s, as part of a housing development programme intended to alleviate the Stateās housing shortage, the original housing estate, named Elizabeth, occupied 3,000 acres of land (City of Playford, 2015). It was composed of two large industrial areas, totalling 1,100 acres, situated in the west and south and separated from the residential areas by green corridors. The co-location of these spaces was intended to provide residents with easy access to places of employment, and industry with a large local supply of workers. The largest single industrial site was developed by General Motors Holden Pty. Ltd, which commenced operating in 1958 (Pocius, 2013).
In the 1960s, soon after the creation of these sprawling estates and factories, Australiaās manufacturing industry peaked. At that time, it accounted for one in four dollars of national output. However, by the turn of the century, this figure had dropped to only one in eight (Commonwealth of Australia, Productivity Commission, 2004). The death knell for manufacturing in the area sounded during the final year of our study, when General Motors Holden announced that it would cease operating from 2017. These shifts in the local economy of the northern suburbs reflect deep structural changes in the national economy due to technological change and increased international competition. The ascendancy of service industries has reduced the demand for unskilled labourers in manufacturing and agriculture, which has contributed to a relative decline in demand for such occupations. In the early 1980s, three-quarters of unskilled men had full-time jobs, but in recent times the number has dropped to fewer than 60% (McLachlan, Gilfillan & Gordon, 2013).
These changes have significantly impacted upon the now aging housing estates. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics Index of Relative Socioeconomic Disadvantage (IRSD), these estates are among the most disadvantaged areas in Adelaide. The index has a base score of 1,000 for Australia: scores above 1,000 indicate relative advantage and those below, relative disadvantage. The index score for South Australia is 984, indicating the relative disadvantage of South Australia compared to Australia. The index score for Elizabeth is 788.
This low score represents the accumulation of multiple factors that contribute to the experience of disadvantage for people who reside in the area. For example, compared to other metropolitan areas of Adelaide, Elizabeth ranks among those with the highest percentage of children living in jobless families; the highest percentage of the population aged from birth to 24 years with a profound or severe disability; and the highest hospital admission rates for children and young people aged from birth to 24 years (Glover, Hetzel, Tennant & Leahy, 2010).
Additionally, in terms of educational outcomes, compared to other metropolitan areas of Adelaide, Elizabeth ranks among those with the lowest participation rates in secondary schooling of 13- to 17-year-olds; the highest number of students reading at levels below the national minimum standard in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9; the highest rates of early school leavers; and the lowest rates of young people aged 19 years who had completed Year 12, the final year of secondary schooling (Glover et al., 2010).
By comparison, the area around the āportā school in our study has an IRSD score of 884. The area was established much earlier than Elizabeth. It had a population of less than 150 people in the mid-1840s, but this figure increased as its port became a regional hub for the transportation to Adelaide first of wool, and then of grain and flour. The school recorded its first enrolments in 1877. Since 1889, the townās economy has been closely tied to heavy industry, which has impacted on the health of the population, especially of young children (Taylor, 2012). The industry responsible for the pollution that affects health is the single biggest employer in the area, accounting for 17% of all workers; and it indirectly supports the employment of more than 2,500 people in the area (Nyrstar, 2012). According to 2011 Census data (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2014), the most common occupations in the area included Labourers (18.1%), Technicians and Trades Workers (15.6%), Machinery Operators and Drivers (14.1%), and Community and Personal Service Workers (14.0%). The unemployment rate (13.8%) was double that of the State and of Australia as a whole. More than 30% of all children below 16 years of age were in families with very low incomes, indicating particularly high levels of disadvantage. Reading scores for Year 3 children (in Government schools) living in rural South Australia were well below average, and the town was among those with the lowest outcomes.
These kinds of neighbourhoods epitomise the structural changes affecting advanced industrial economies across the globe since the end of the Second World War, and particularly since the 1980s. Urban and peripheral industrial areas like these, built to serve locally concentrated industries, and/or to accommodate expanding urban populations or alleviate inner urban housing pressures, were always relatively poor (Power, 1997; Young & Willmott, 1957). They also historically had low levels of formal educational attainment ā since formal qualifications were not a requirement for labour market entry ā although often alongside rich local ecologies of learning and teaching through local cultural societies, workersā educational associations and political activism (Rose, 2002). Yet work was relatively plentiful and rates of pay typically sufficient to support family life and participation in local activities. The effects of globalisation and technological change are now well documented. First came rapid job losses. These set in train a series of consequences in response to the economic shock. Although locally variable, these include population decline, low housing demand and physical dereliction; loss of shops and community services; declining mental and physical health; loss of hope, community tensions, vulnerability to crime, antisocial behaviour and drug-dealing (Lupton, 2003; Thomson, 2002; Wilson, 1997). Next came job replacement, usually much more limited in number as the new economy laid down its jobs in different places than the old. Jobs were also of a different kind: the new volume labour of late capitalist economies, such as packing, food processing, warehousing and distribution; or service jobs, such as cleaning, catering and hospitality. These new jobs have typically been less secure and less well paid than manufacturing jobs, and they are often organised around shift work or antisocial hours ā creating a new working āprecariatā vulnerable to a low-pay, no-pay cycle, and a set of economically marginalised neighbourhoods where people depend on this kind of work if any at all (Shildrick, MacDonald, Webster & Garthwaite, 2012; Standing, 2011).
But at the same time, other places and people have benefited from economic change. Recent attention has been focused on the top 1% ā the elites whose incomes and wealth have expanded exponentially, greatly widening inequality (see for example Dorling, 2014). In the United States, for example, the share of total gross income of the top 1% was nearly 20%, more than double its share in 1979 (Atkinson, 2015). The ratio of the 90th income percentile (the near top) to the 10th (the near bottom) is also often cited. Between 1984 and 2008, across most Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, the household incomes of the richest 10% grew faster than those of the poorest 10%, resulting in widening income inequality (OECD, 2011). Middle incomes have also grown further apart from bottom or near bottom incomes, as the differences between homeowners and renters, and those in secure work and those in insecure work or dependent on state benefits, have become more pronounced. Since the global financial crisis, these widening inequalities, the tough end of which are so visible in Elizabeth and āthe portā, have attracted increasing international attention, with academic books such as Thomas Pikettyās Capital in the Twenty-first Century (2014) and Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickettās The Spirit Level (2010) becoming popular bestsellers. In the words of Barack Obama, it is āthe defining challenge of our timeā (The White House, 2013). The relationships in late capitalist economies between affluence and poverty, and between booming downtowns and residualised suburbs, are now so well demonstrated that Stilwell could argue that what needs āto be explained is why capitalist societies are not even more unequal than they areā (Stilwell & Jordan, 2007, p. 150; see also Massey, 2007).
As these patterns of neighbourhood poverty and intensifying inequality have come...
