ABSTRACT
This chapter explains distinguishing features of Australia's different schooling sectors. It argues elite status is contingent not only on criteria such as exclusivity or the high cost of fees, but also on the success with which particular schools are 'consecrated' as elite within Australia's highly competitive and racialised educational marketplace. Australian schooling is generally categorised in line with historical differences that have existed in the funding and governance structures of the sector: public, Catholic and independent. Australian scholars have extensively documented the influence of successive neoliberal government reforms that have subjected Australian schooling to market forces in the latter part of the twentieth century, continuing to the present. Australian humanities and social sciences research concerning elite schooling has several theoretical and methodological influences. Qualitative research approaches build on and extend understandings of the production of elite social subjects. Recent ethnographies of elite girl's schools have been interested in understanding inconsistencies within discursive formations around gender and social class.
