ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of educational policy in Australia in order to set the scene regarding the ruling relations that dictate the professional lives of educators in the research site. We define how the survival school – as a private single-sex school – is subject to competing local and translocal forces as well as the market agenda. To enhance the analysis presented in the data chapters, we describe the pervasive influence of a high-stakes curriculum and testing regime and how this contributes to daily educational practices. Our interest is in capturing how the survival school is expected to perform while it struggles with overlapping tensions within an increasingly competitive local environment.
