Making and breaking the Australian family
Family, diversity, and parent–school engagement policy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11229416 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Renee Desmarchelier (0000-0002-0524-5600, University of Southern Queensland, corresponding author), India R Bryce (0000-0002-3616-8003, University of Southern Queensland), Kate Cantrell (0000-0001-5689-614X, University of Southern Queensland) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-12 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-09 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Discourse Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0159-6306 • E-ISSN: 1469-3739 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01596306.2025.2599735 |
| OpenAlex | W4417180788 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 44 |
This paper interrogates Australian parent–school engagement policy and argues that extant policy assumes a normative, nuclear conception of “the family”. This assumption reinforces heteronormative ideals, places unequal childcare labour borne on women, and limits recognition of family diversity. Drawing on Carol Bacchi’s ‘What’s the Problem Represented to Be?’ (WPR) framework, we critically analyse ten national and state policy documents (2018–2024) and undertake thematic synthesis to surface how “parent” and “family” are constructed and with what effects. Across the corpus, parent engagement is usually positioned within neoliberal rationalities that render families responsible for initiating and sustaining engagement, while often implicitly defining legitimate participation through an idealised two-parent, heterosexual model. Policies routinely collapse heterogeneous caregiving arrangements into homogenised categories, obscuring gendered expectations that mothers perform the emotional and administrative labour of schooling, and discounting the distinct experiences of separated parents, step-parents, kinship carers, and First Nations families. Largely, diversity provisions can be seen as symbolic anti-racism that privileges cultural visibility while remaining silent on family formation, shared care arrangements, and intersectional inequities. We contend that these problem representations enact policy silences that normalise White heteropatriarchal nuclear families and risk misrecognising non-normative family configurations, with material consequences for equity and participation in schooling. We propose an intersectional, anti-essentialist reorientation of engagement policy coupled with context-specific guidance, to align policy with how Australian families actually live, and to support socially just parent–school partnerships
Politics · Public engagement · Public policy · Early Childhood Education and Development · Education Systems and Policy · Parental Involvement in Education
Engaging with Carol Bacchi
How Schools Do Policy
Parent Engagement and School Readiness
Parental involvement to parental engagement
Barriers to parental involvement in education
Equity Issues in Parental and Community Involvement in Schools
The How, Whom, and Why of Parents’ Involvement in Children’s Academic Lives
Introduction. «A critical practice of thinking otherwise»
Separated parents’ experiences with the Australian school system
Gender, Feminist, and Intersectional Perspectives on Families
Displaying Families
Problem-Solving as a Governing Knowledge
What makes a good mother? Two decades of research reflecting social norms of motherhood
Un/satisfactory encounters
Michel de Certeau, everyday life and policy cultures
Ignoring race
Ordinary’ and ‘diverse’ families. A case study of family discourses by Finnish early childhood education and care administrators
What’s the Problem Represented to Be? Problem Definition Critique as a Tool for Evaluative Thinking
Defining the ‘good mother’ and the ‘professional teacher’
The Good Mother, the Good Father, and the Good Parent
Heterosexism, Misrecognition, and Capitalism
Navigating a treacherous game
Parental involvement in middle school
Using thematic analysis in psychology
Mapping the Margins
Governing through parents
Discourses of the good parent in attributing school success
Intensive Mothering and the Unequal School-Search Burden
Doing and Displaying Gendered Boundary Work among Blended Families in Israel
Theorizing White heteropatriarchal supremacy, marriage fundamentalism, and the mechanisms that maintain family inequality
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |