During the late 19th century and early 20th century, co-education on a secondary school level was still a source of controversy, resulting in a public discussion. The first co-educational secondary schools in the Polish territories were established over the course of the First World War. During that time, in light of a realistic chance for Poland to regain independence, the teaching community undertook discussions regarding the shape of education in independent Poland. Still, many people still viewed co-education with a degree of doubt. In the interwar period, however, the number of public and private co-educational secondary schools increased. They were located primarily in smaller cities. Additionally, men usually represented the majority of students. This dynamic was a result of allowing women to attend institutions that had originally functioned as all-male schools, thus creating a coeducational schooling system. The level of education in these institutions was generally low.
In Australia, market-based education policies promote the notion that government schools should flexibly tailor secondary education to the needs of young people and their local communities. Far from offering a “one size fits all” system, policies seek to enable clients (parents, students) to exercise freedom of choice in quasi-markets that offer different educational products to different individuals. The intended effect is a kind of bespoke education tailoring, whereby schools operate as flexible service providers, adapting to the needs and desires of local markets. In this paper, I analyse the policy turn towards market tailoring as part of broader shifts towards advanced liberal governance in education. Following this, I feature interviews with educators in two socially disparate government secondary schools in the Australian city of Melbourne. In doing so, I analyse the extent to which each school tailors its marketing practices to its local community. These interviews suggest inherent contradictions emerge when tailoring is attempted in a hierarchical market with normative and rigid indicators of ‘brand value’. Schools are caught, I argue, between paradoxical demands, requiring them to be simultaneously different and the same.
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