Are the Bradley reforms on track? Depends on which ones you’re talking about.

This paper explores the complex issues of student engagement and school retention from a
critical/sociological perspective. Dominant discourses on youth alienation, estrangement and
underachievement are generally couched in a language of blame and deficits with responsibility for the problems being sheeted home to (a) individual students, families, neighbourhoods and/or cultural groups (b) teachers and schools, and (c) public education systems.

Secondary school students who had disengaged from mainstream classrooms have
demonstrated that they had maintained hope in achieving a positive outcome from education.
In a long-running schools-university project that employed a “students-as-researchers”
method to investigate apparent low aspiration for tertiary education, at-risk students
enthusiastically produced high quality results. This paper outlines the project and addresses
the features that the participants state were instrumental in their re-engagement and that
have re-connected them with formal education.