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The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant educational disruption globally. When the pandemic forced schools to switch to emergency home-schooling, parental engagement in education became more critical. Some parents found home-schooling as an opportunity to form stronger relationships with their children. Others acquired an enhanced insight into their children's schoolwork. However, the emerging literature shows that, as not all parents were equally positioned to support their children's learning at home, emergency home-schooling has resulted in a significant learning loss. Guided by the concept of capital interaction, this article reports on a qualitative case study that investigated the experiences of 20 migrant parents in Victoria, Australia. A thematic analysis of the data reveals challenges associated with parental self-efficacy, financial hardship, language and technological barriers, time constraints, and disengagement and exhaustion. Remote learning may return in the future, and we must prepare for such disruption by improving equitable access to education delivered online and at home. To this end, the paper outlines some policy ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For young people, the end of secondary school represents a critical transition point. This article aims at understanding how schools support a particular group of disadvantaged students to transition into education, training, or employment. Drawing on a life-course perspective and with refugee-background African students as an empirical focus, this qualitative case study documents career support practices in nine government schools in the State of Victoria. The findings show that schools provide transition opportunities that support African students to envision their post-school educational and career trajectories. The arrangements include career planning, alternative pathways, and employment of community engagement officers. However, there are persisting challenges that impede this group of students from fully benefiting from these arrangements. The main barriers identified here are academic disengagement, doxic aspirations, misconceptions about qualifications, and low self-efficacy. The article also argues that the persistence of these challenges is attributable at least in part to such overlooked factors of engagement as institutional practices, student agency, and home environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A policy problem is a discursive construction, and the way in which the problem is framed determines both the nature of the policy responses and the possibility of resolving it. In this paper, drawing on critical frame analysis, we examined three major equity policies in the Australian early childhood education and care (ECEC) sector. In mapping out framing and reasoning devices of the policies, our analytical interest is to highlight the representation of inequality as a problem and unmask underlying assumptions of the equity responses. The findings show that disadvantage in Australia's ECEC sector has been framed as a lack of access, limited navigational capacity and cultural exclusion; and the framings are underpinned by economic, educational and social rationales. The analysis also reveals problematic categories, issue-omissions and conceptual shifts within the texts. The paper draws practical implications of the frame contradictions and silences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]