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A governmental research inquiry was conducted into the policy to raise the school leaving age in Western Australia. The study aimed to problematise the policy so as to identify and examine the rationale and intervening practices with young people who were deemed to be at-risk of not meeting the new school leaving age requirements. Drawing on interviews and policy documents, this paper elaborates the concept of 'apparatus' as defined by Foucault and Agamben to identify the contexts and consequences of the way the policy produced and reproduced an 'at-risk' youth subjectivity. The paper shows how a binary between school completers and non-completers emanated from a context about a crisis in falling retention and early school leaving, myopically focusing on NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) subjectivities as both the cause and solution to the policy objectives. Consequently, the policy apparatus is productive of the very circumstances it seeks to address, and therefore it recursively cycles around a problem it does not solve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors explore the occurrence of different learner profiles in secondary education, as well as their relationship with test performance and student characteristics. Based on a cluster analysis of 1,931 secondary school students' self-reported text-learning strategy use and study traces, the authors identified and validated four distinct learner profiles: integrated strategy users, information organizers, mental learners, and limited strategy users. Integrated strategy users engaged in different text-learning strategies and obtained the highest scores on the performance test. Limited strategy users generally used only a limited number of text-learning strategies and scored the lowest. In addition, a significant difference was established in gender and reading ability distribution across learner profiles, but home language distribution was not found to be significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational privatisation has received increasing scholarly attention in recent decades. In much of this work, educational privatisation is viewed as the outcomes of certain government policies or as the result of the influences of education businesses in school systems. This article presents a portrait of an educational entrepreneur in Cambodia to show how privatisation has been enacted by individuals. The empirical data for this article were collected between February and May 2014 using classroom observations and in-depth interviews. The method of portraiture was employed to understand educational privatisation through the perspective of the research subject while embracing the subjective nature of interpreting findings by the researcher. This article develops the literature on educational privatisation by offering a detailed look at the way in which historical memory shapes the behaviour of individuals. This analysis shows how educational privatisation is not only a process of government policy but also a social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]