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Within individual countries, the paths towards increasing educational attainment are not always linear and individuals are not equally affected. Differences between boys’ and girls’ educational attainments are a common expression of this inequality as boys are more often favored for continued schooling. We examine the importance of birth cohort, sibship size, migration, and school accessibility for explaining both the gender gap and its narrowing in secondary schooling in one district in Northeast Thailand between 1984 and 1994. Birth cohort is a significant explanation for the narrowing of the gender gap. Migration, sibship size, and remote village location are important explanations for limited secondary education opportunities, especially for girls.

In light of contemporary critiques of New Zealand comprehensive schooling published mainly in the popular press, it is timely to re‐examine the origins of and the rationale for the widespread adoption of this model of education. The comprehensive schooling philosophy, it was recently alleged, has produced a situation in which ‘as many as one in five pupils in the system is failing’ and where ‘there is a large group at the bottom who are not succeeding’. This group was estimated to include some 153,000 students out of the total current New Zealand student population of 765,000. In this context, however, Chris Saunders and Mike Williams, principals of Onehunga High School and Aorere College in Auckland respectively, have noted that having underachieving students in secondary schools in particular is not a recent phenomenon. A large ‘tail’ of poor performing high school students has long been a cause of concern, Williams suggests.

The purpose of this paper is to trace the restructure of the Victorian Education Department in Australia during the years 1980-1992. It examines how the restructuring of the department resulted in a generational reorganization of secondary schooling. This reorganization culminated in the closure of secondary technical schools that today continues to have enduring effects on access and equity to different types of secondary schooling.

The history is based on documentary and archival research and draws on publications from the State government of Victoria, Education Department/Ministry of Education Annual Reports and Ministerial Statements and Reviews, Teacher Union Archives, Parliamentary Debates and unpublished theses and published works.

As an outcome the restructuring of the Victorian Education Department, schools and the reorganization of secondary schooling, a dual system of secondary schools was abolished. The introduction of a secondary colleges occurred through a process of rationalization of schools and what secondary schooling would entail.

This study traces how, over a decade, eight ministers of education set about to reform education by dismantling and undoing the historical development of Victoria’s distinctive secondary schools system.

In Bangladesh, girls’ ability to complete schooling is compromised by poverty and the practice of early marriage. Although most girls enroll in school, rates of dropping out are high around puberty. This paper uses a panel survey (2001 and 2003) of nearly 3,000 adolescent girls in rural Bangladesh to predict schooling outcomes. The analysis explores household and community factors to explain school enrollment, dropping out and marriage. Girls in poor households are more likely to drop out before reaching secondary school. Girls in wealthier households are more likely to drop out later, because of marriage, and having more siblings increases this possibility.

This article suggests an explanation for the complex history of the relationship between the government high school and the Australian middle class. The main elements in the constructing of a framework necessarily include the following inter‐related effects: the historic alienation of the Roman Catholic population from the Australian public school system, federal government interventions into school policy and funding, demographic pressures, the rise of neoliberalism, and the development of distinctive and multiple ethnic populations in the cities. The final section of the article takes as its case study, the history of middle class schooling in the city of Sydney, especially from the mid 1970s to the end of the century. Sydney is an atypical Australian city in many respects, and the study of its middle class and schooling does not stand as representative of the Australian experience. Nevertheless, its great population and significance in the national economy makes its story a crucial story in the national context. Because much of the evidence for this last section derives from the Australian census, it is introduced by a brief discussion of census‐making. Preceding that section of the article is a summary discussion of the significance of social classes in the history of Australian schooling.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the incidence of public education subsidies in Ghana. Since the late 1990s, Ghana’s government has increasingly recognized human capital as key to alleviating poverty and income inequality, causing dramatic increases of government expenditures to the education sector. At the same time user fees have been introduced in higher education while basic education is being made progressively free. The question then is, whether these spending increases have been effective in reaching the poor and to what extent? What factors influence the poor’s participation in the public school system?

The authors address the key issues by employing both the standard benefit incidence methods and the willingness-to-pay method.

The results give a clear evidence of progressivity with consistent ordering: pre-schooling and primary schooling are the most progressive, followed by secondary, and then tertiary. Own price and income elasticities are higher for private schools than public schools and for secondary than basic schools.

Given the liquidity constraints African governments face yet there is the need to improve the human capacity of the countries, this study offers solution to how to optimally allocate the educational budget.

The use of policy simulations to ascertain the incidence of public spending on education is innovative as far as previous studies in Africa is concerned.

The study aims to provide insight on the potential effectiveness of demand-side financing for catalyzing improved educational outcomes in Malawi; and, given the extent of cost-related constraints to school contexts in other low-income countries, the results have relevance for education policy decisions more broadly.

This study utilizes a non-equivalent groups research design to compare the educational experiences and outcomes of two student groups – those who did and those who did not receive a needs-based scholarship to attend secondary school and college in the Dowa, Kasungu, and Lilongwe Districts of Malawi. The authors assess impacts across a range of short and medium-term outcomes, including: school attendance, withdrawal, attainment, graduation, employment status, employment quality, and post-schooling income.

The scholarship substantially reduces the household cost of participation in school, and reduces the distance travelled to school. As a result, scholarship recipients attain between 1 and 1.5 years of additional schooling and graduate at higher rates. In terms of post-schooling outcomes, recipients are in higher wage-earning occupations after leaving school. Overall, results suggest that scholarships are an effective demand-side strategy for improving educational attainment, progression, and potentially longer-term labor market outcomes.

The study adds new evidence on policy approaches for expanding access to educational opportunities and increasing labor market outcomes in a context (Malawi specifically and sub-Saharan Africa more broadly) where evidence on such demand-side interventions is still growing.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse factors that influence access to secondary education, and strategies for improving access to secondary education in Kenya.

A logit model estimated using the Welfare Monitoring Household Survey while a simulation model is used to evaluate some of the strategies for improving access to secondary school education.

The main determinants of access to secondary school education at household level include household's income, education level of household head, household residence, sex of child, availability of schools, and age of student.

Factor such as property ownership by household and indirect costs to schooling not adequately captured due to non‐responses.

Strategies for expanding secondary school education include: expansion of infrastructure through strong partnerships, enhancing efficiency in use of human and financial resources, developing sustainable poverty reduction and resource targeting mechanisms, increasing household awareness on the importance of secondary school education, and addressing gender disparities.

The value of the paper is in its innovativeness to empirically estimate factors that determine access to secondary education and simulate resource requirements for secondary school education with the aim of identifying appropriate strategies for improving access.

This chapter is about the modern (Western) educational regime, educational industry paradigm and schooling process, while focussing on statutorily imposed and legally enforced schooling as the main aspect of the hidden curriculum within a globalizing world.

It is about children's productive labour through schooling, whereby children's labour power is consumed, produced and reproduced on behalf of social formations under the capitalist mode of production (CMP).

The claim that a well-educated population is essential for development so that all societies share an interest in having children participate in schooling as much as possible is the central element of the Western education industry paradigm, the global appeal of which is reflected in how compulsory schooling has been embraced almost everywhere in conjunction with being heavily promoted within the ‘international community’ and widely endorsed by researchers, scholars and similar observers.

Contrary to Bowles and Gintis's correspondence principle, the structure of schooling is not an identical to the structure of the workplace in that it entails compulsion, whereby schooling is as efficient and effective as possible in meeting the needs of the CMP.

The CMP benefits from the state having shifted confinement as a mechanism to force people to work onto schooling; or, from compulsory social enclosure, whereby schools increasingly resemble military and prison systems.

Compulsory social enclosure helps to ensure that children's productive capacity – or labour power – is enhanced to the benefit of the CMP, this being the major factor in accounting for its appeal and advance on the world stage, globally.

Korean educational migrant (kirogi) families have received widespread popular attention due to their ironic form of family that sacrifices the togetherness of a family. Recent trends suggest that this practice is spreading to the less affluent classes and that many such families are heading to ‘new’ destinations, including Singapore. This study examines the transnational schooling and life experiences of Korean transnational educational families in Singapore. It addresses the questions, why did these families choose Singapore? Why did transnational schooling, which parents almost unanimously said that they had organised for the betterment of their children's future, lead to some families getting stuck in the destination country?

Fieldwork in Singapore and Korea was conducted between April 2006 and September 2007. In-depth interviews with both mothers and fathers who have at least one child attending public, private or international schools in Singapore, at the primary or secondary level, were conducted with 18 families. The analysis was conducted using a grounded theory approach and NVivo 7/8.

Although the Korean state's emphasis on international competitiveness and parental aspirations for their children's future upward social mobility were common motivators, Koreans in Singapore were also attracted by the relatively low cost, English–Chinese bilingualism and other ‘family-friendly’ features in Singapore. However, kirogi children had highly contrasting schooling experiences and they met with mixed success in gaining what they expected. Furthermore, many children in public schools faced demotion and other difficulties in their new school environments. Some less affluent families found themselves facing dilemmas of cross-border schooling. This study shows that transnational schooling does not necessarily operate equally favourably for participants from diverse class backgrounds. It also demonstrates that the societal contexts of reception in both the countries of origin and of destination, including the buffering institutions and reference groups and peer culture, are important factors shaping the schooling and life experiences of educational migrant children and in reconfiguring their trajectories.