Gender Equity Issues in Educational Effectiveness in the Context of Global, Social and Family Life Changes and Public Policy Discourses on Social Inclusion and Exclusion

This paper provides a critique from a feminist perspective of the development of public policy discourses about school effectiveness and improvement, in the context of global social changes. The aim of achieving educational effectiveness and school improvements has become an international global phenomenon and the consequent public policy discourses have become sophisticated political strategies to tackle educational effectiveness through new managerial approaches to social welfare and social inclusion. In particular, two public policy discourses have been developed recently, namely parental involvement in education and training for paid work, as revised strategies to deal with social exclusion and achieve school effectiveness. Nevertheless, these two public policy discourses tend to disregard the economic, social and familial contexts of education, whilst claiming to address global economic, political and social transformations. Thus, in this paper, the implications for questions of gender equity in relation to both families and children or young people in education are foregrounded The analysis also centres upon the ways that the two public policy discourses draw on the parallel new evidence-informed approaches to policy but draw selectively on evidence, ignoring aspects of research about global family life changes towards social, cultural, racial/ethnic and sexual diversity and their relation to educational changes. It is also the argument that there have been various and diverse developments in perspectives to social scientific research, blending an array of qualitative and quantitative approaches, and including greater emphasis on reflexivity. Some readings of the research evidence would suggest that the public policy discourses lead to policy strategies that may have contradictory implications for particular families, and especially mothers. They may also have complex implications for gender equity in terms of educational achievements of young people, linked to race/ethnicity and social class. Gender and sexual identities are also changing in response to wider social and familial transformations. If public policy discourses are to achieve their aims of educational effectiveness and school improvement for all in an inclusive society then social and feminist research evidence about family life changes and implications for gender equity for parents, children and young people would have to be addressed.