Barbara Garrick

Learning How We Are Led at the Edge of the Day: an Evaluation of Neoliberal School Based Reform in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty First Centuries Barbara Garrick

Neoliberalism is the subject matter of this thesis, and is investigated through the implementation of neoliberal reform in schools in Victoria at the turn of the twenty first century. The neoliberal policy studied is the Schools of the Future: Preliminary Paper (1993). This was a policy of major change to schools during the era of the Kennett government. Neoliberalism is also studied through the implementation in Queensland of Leading Schools: Partnerships for Excellence. The pilot program (1998). This policy was a carbon copy of Schools of the Future: Preliminary paper (1993) and my experience with the reform coloured my reaction to neoliberalism and to my retrospective analysis of Schools of the Future: Preliminary paper (1993). The thesis investigates neoliberalism and neoliberal policy using different research lenses to research previously undertaken by Feeney (1997), Daniels (2001), and Thomas (1994-1997). This thesis investigates neoliberal reform from the point of view of emotions, which become clearer and perhaps more exaggerated during periods of sharp edged and unrelenting reform. These emotions consider women in a restructuring and reconstituting world, especially from my personal point of view as an aging woman in the workforce.