Educational provision for refugee youth in Australia: left to chance?

Abstract

This article investigates how education bureaucracies in Australia use languages of categorization and promote community partnerships to construct and govern the refugee subject. We use a framework of governmentality to analyse education policies and statements emerging from two levels of government — Commonwealth and state. Drawing on web-based materials, policy statements and accounts of parliamentary debates, the article documents the ways in which refugee education continues to be subsumed within broader education policies and programmes concerned with social justice, multiculturalism and English language provision. Such categorizations are premised on an undifferentiated ethnoscape that ignores the significantly different learning needs and sociocultural adjustments faced by refugee students compared with migrants and international students. At the same time, educational programmes of inclusion that are concerned with utilizing community organizations to deliver services and enhance participation, point to the emergence of `government through community partnerships' — a mode of governance increasingly associated with advanced liberal societies.