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Framing Student Equity in Higher Education: National and Global Policy Contexts of A Fair Chance for All

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Student Equity in Australian Higher Education

Abstract

This chapter provides a survey of changing national and global higher education policy contexts over the past three decades, specifically from the perspective of the publication of the A Fair Chance for All discussion paper in 1990. We show how A Fair Chance for All emerged from a specifically Australian conjunction of social justice commitments to ‘a fair go’ and the emergence of neo-liberalism. In this respect, A Fair Chance for All constitutes an early Australian exemplar of neo-social governance, and its emphasis on the introduction of targets and performance measures foreshadowed the rise of policy as numbers in education. A Fair Chance for All also prefigured a shift in student equity policy in higher education to focus on aspirations, which sought to activate people in relation to their educational potential, and it enshrined a conception of equity as fairness that would come to shape education policies globally in the decades that followed its publication.

The party name changed from Labour to Labor in 1912, during Fisher’s second term as Prime Minister

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This project was titled ‘Raising aspiration for higher education in an era of ‘motivational deficit’ and was funded by The University of Queensland through an Early Career Researcher grant. The project Chief Investigator was Sam Sellar.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, The University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD, Australia

    Sam Sellar

  2. School of Education, The University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Trevor Gale

Authors
  1. Sam Sellar
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  2. Trevor Gale
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Correspondence to Sam Sellar .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Andrew Harvey

  2. Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Catherine Burnheim

  3. La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Matthew Brett

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Sellar, S., Gale, T. (2016). Framing Student Equity in Higher Education: National and Global Policy Contexts of A Fair Chance for All . In: Harvey, A., Burnheim, C., Brett, M. (eds) Student Equity in Australian Higher Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0315-8_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0315-8_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-0313-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-0315-8

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