Accounting for teachers: changing representations of education in The Australian Financial Review 1993–2022

ABSTRACT

The work of teachers, as representative of a significant area of social policy, occupies many column inches in newspapers internationally every year. This paper takes a close, systematic look at the education coverage of one national Australian newspaper, over a 30-year period from 1993 to 2022. Focusing on representations of school teachers in the Australian Financial Review (AFR), one of two Australian national daily newspapers, it presents a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of over 1,300 articles, using the conceptual lens of “news values” to take a close look at the ideas about teachers and their work in which the AFR has invested over the past 30 years. The analysis shows that while the focus was once on issues to do with remuneration, industrial action and school funding, that the educational purview of the AFR has broadened over the past 15 years to take in a more expansive view, both reflecting and reinforcing the expansion of the privatisation of education in Australia over this period.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• media
• teachers’ work

As a significant area of social policy, schooling, and particularly the work of teachers, as the human faces of school education, occupies significant “column inches” in newspapers each year globally. The complex relationship between media representations, public perceptions of teachers, and the evolution of education policy, has been the focus of much research over the past two decades, in Australia and elsewhere (e.g. Baroutsis & Lingard, 2023; Blackmore & Thorpe, 2003; Phelan & Salter, 2019; Rawolle, 2010). This paper takes a close look at the education coverage of one national Australian newspaper, over a 30-year period from 1993 to 2022, using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, and employing the conceptual lens of “news values” (Bednarek & Caple, 2014). Specifically, it focuses on representations of school teachers in the Australian Financial Review (AFR), one of two Australian national daily newspapers, with a four-weekly average readership to December 2022 of 3,600,000 readers across print and digital platforms (Roy Morgan, 2023). The study on which this paper is based was conceived as a follow-up to a larger study of representations of teachers in the Australian print media (Mockler, 2022), which highlighted the small but very interesting contribution of the AFR to a far larger corpus of print media texts, and particularly identified growing attention in the AFR to questions of “quality” in education over the 25 years from 1996 to 2020. This paper thus takes a close look at the ideas about teachers and their work in which the AFR has invested over the past 30 years. It argues that while the focus was once on issues to do with remuneration, industrial action and school funding, the educational purview of the AFR has broadened over the past 15 years to take in a more expansive view, both reflecting and reinforcing the expansion of the endogenous privatisation (Ball & Youdell, 2008) of education in Australia over this period.

The financial press, of which the AFR is a key part in the Australian context, fills a particular niche in the media landscape. The AFR itself has historically played a role in the financialisation of Australian society (Greenfield & Williams, 2007). Financialisation is understood broadly as “a gravitational shift toward finance in capitalism” (Sawyer, 2013, p. 5) that has taken place over the decades since the 1980s, and in a symbiotic relationship with neoliberalism and globalisation, as one of the key drivers of “an increasingly dominant finance culture” (Greenfield et al., 2004). At the same time, the expansion of finance culture and the role of the financial media in this is inextricably linked to the readership of newspapers such as the AFR. AFR Editor-in Chief Michael Stutchbury was reported as saying in 2021:

If you are a decision-maker at a significant company in Australia it should just be expected the job comes with a subscription to The Australian Financial Review because of our position as the leading provider of business, finance and political news and analysis in Australia. More and more I see the Financial Review as being almost a business community paper in a way. (Thomas, 2021)

Stutchbury here provides an insight into the AFR’s “imagined audience” (Richardson, 2007), while recent market research (Statista, 2023) indicates that the readership of the AFR is of relatively high socio-economic status, with 73% holding an undergraduate or postgraduate degree; and 49% reporting a household income in the top third of the population. Furthermore, 79% reported being based in cities. The AFR’s readership is thus an elite group: urban, wealthy, well-educated leaders in business, finance and politics, key players in what Thrift (2004) has named “the cultural circuit of capital”. As Dearman et al. have argued, the financial and business press are key to this circuit, which involves “the production and circulation of knowledge to business elites – the formation and spread of new ways of making sense of their circumstances” (2018, p. 115).

Consequently, regardless of whether the news in question relates strictly to business and finance or to other matters – such as school education – the AFR participates in this spread of new ways of “making sense of their circumstances” to a very particular audience with, on the whole, high levels of economic, social and cultural capital by virtue of their education, employment and/or financial status. Representations of education and teachers’ work in the AFR, particularly because of the relative power and influence in both economic and political senses, of its 3.6 million readers, provide particular insight into the way in which ideas travel between the fields of finance/economics/business and education, potentially adding to understandings of the mediatisation (Rawolle, 2010) of education policy.

On this issue of travelling ideas and logics, Sahlberg (2016, p. 135) has contended that corporate logics have played a significant role in the global education reform movement, citing “tougher competition, firing poorly performing staff, performance-based pay, and priority on measurable results” as the most significant manifestations of the corporatisation of education. In response, Winchip et al. (2019) have argued that what they refer to as “privatisation” is not only a key tenet but a “fundamental objective” of the global education reform movement, which they position as “an approach to education reform dominated by the interests of global capital” (p. 81). Other research has explored the impacts of corporate principles and practices on the logics of schooling, including via the increasing marketisation, privatisation and commercialisation of schooling. As Hogan and Thompson (2017) have argued, while these three labels are often used interchangeably in relation to education, they are in fact distinct but related concepts. They define marketisation as “the creation of a series of policy logics that aim to create quasimarkets in education” (2017, p. 2), while the twin processes of privatisation, “the development of quasimarkets through institutional and policy structures that privilege parental choice, school autonomy and venture philanthropy, often with the state regulating for public accountability” (p. 2); and commercialisation, “the creation, marketing, and sale of education goods and services to schools by external providers” (p. 3) might be thought of as two distinct forms of marketisation.

Furthermore, Ball and Youdell (2008) draw a distinction between two interrelated forms of privatisation in education. Exogenous privatisation, “privatisation of public education” (p. 9, my emphasis) or the growth of private sector interests in public education, can be seen, for example, in the evolution of for-profit charter schools in the United States over the past two decades. Endogenous privatisation, on the other hand, “privatisation in public education” (p. 10, my emphasis) is about schools becoming more “business-like”. The appropriation and employment of logics and practices from the private sector at the heart of endogenous privatisation is resonant with Sahlberg’s (2016) contention around the significance of corporate logics to the global education reform movement.

A systematic analysis of articles focused on schooling, education and teachers’ work in the AFR over time can provide an important window onto the particular ways in which corporate or financial ideas have been brought to bear on education and teachers’ work, and the educational ideas with most relevance and traction for this specific audience. Tracing the educational issues and occurrences in which the AFR has chosen to invest over an extended timeframe can highlight the influence of corporate logics on media discourses of education and also shed light on the educational issues which the AFR expects to resonate for its elite audience of corporate and political “decision makers” and “thought leaders”. Consequently, this paper has a focus on endogenous privatisation, asking how far and in what ways processes of endogenous privatisation of education are reflected in coverage of teachers’ work over time in the AFR.

Newsworthiness and news values: A conceptual lens

Writing a decade ago, Bednarek and Caple (2014) mounted a strong argument that discourse analysis focused on media texts should pay greater attention to the construction of newsworthiness, as revealed in news values. They offer a typology of ten news values, namely consonance; eliteness; impact; negativity; personalisation; positivity; proximity; superlativeness; timeliness; and unexpectedness. News values “are said to drive what makes the news” and thus support us in “answering the question [of] why events make it into the news media” (Potts et al., 2015, p. 150).

In terms of how news values are discursively deployed, Richardson argues that this depends greatly on newspapers’ audience/readership, and what he refers to as their “(imagined) preferences”:

The precise manifestation of what these values mean to journalists sifting news from mere events is wholly dependent on the (imagined) preferences of the expected audience. Thus, the daily developments of the stock exchange are of significance to certain readers while daily developments in the lives of minor celebrities are thought significant to (perhaps) different readers. (2007, p. 92)

The issue of newsworthiness provides an important conceptual lens for this study, which asks how stories about teachers’ work and schooling/education more broadly are shaped to appeal to the (imagined) preferences of the finance, business and political leaders that constitute the readership of the AFR.

Beyond this brief introduction, the paper proceeds in three parts. The first provides an overview of the corpus of texts assembled for this study, and the methods of corpus-assisted discourse analysis employed in the study. The second part provides an account of the analysis in two sub-sections; one focused on analysis of the corpus as a whole and the second on change over time, comparing sections of the corpus. The final discussion and conclusion locates the key findings within broader analysis of policy and media discourses of education.

Methodological approach: corpus-assisted discourse analysis

This study employed corpus assisted discourse analysis, with a corpus of media articles constructed to inform the analysis, which proceeded inductively using a ‘corpus-led’ approach. This subsection provides an overview of both the corpus itself and of the methodological tools used in the analysis.

The texts

Constructed for this study, the Australian Financial Review Teachers (AFRT) Corpus is comprised of all articles published in the Australian Financial Review between January 1, 1993 and December 31, 2022 that include at least three instances of the words “teacher” and/or “teachers”. Articles were sourced via the Nexis UK database and files were checked to ensure that (a) no duplicates had been included and (b) that the teachers referenced within the articles were in fact school teachers. At this point, 168 articles, including those focused on (e.g.) yoga, Technical and Further Education (TAFE), and non-school-based music teachers were deleted from the dataset, leaving a total of 1334 articles.

Figure 1 highlights the distribution of articles by year from 1993 to 2022, reflecting an increase over time in the number of articles produced per year and a reasonably large variation between years.

Figure 1. Distribution of Articles 1993–2022.

Analytical tools

Employing both qualitative and quantitative lenses, corpus assisted discourse analysis incorporates tools drawn from corpus linguistic methods and critical discourse analysis. This study employed three key analytical tools, explored using Wordsmith 8 (Scott, 2020), AntConc 4 (Anthony, 2022), and ProtAnt 1 (Anthony & Baker, 2017). Importantly, these tools were used inductively to explore representations of teachers and their work, with each piece of analysis used to identify areas for further analysis.

Keyword analysis

First, in order to understand the “aboutness” (Scott, 2010) of the AFRT Corpus, keyword analysis was employed. Keyword analysis highlights words used more frequently (in a statistically significant sense) in a corpus under investigation, or a “study corpus” than in a “reference corpus”, ideally comprised of texts employing similar language. In this study, keyword analysis was conducted in two ways, first by comparing the AFRT Corpus to the corresponding Australian portion of the News on the Web (NOW) Corpus (Davies, 2016-), comprised of general news media texts; and second by comparing sections (or “sub-corpora”) of the AFRT Corpus to each other. While there are many potential statistical choices to be made in keyword analysis (Gabrielatos, 2018), in this study I used the Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC) as an indicator of statistical significance and the Log Ratio (LR) statistic (Hardie, 2014) as an effect size measure. The analysis used a high threshold: to be identified as a keyword, a word must appear in at least 5% of the articles in the corpus; have a BIC value equal to or greater than 10, presenting a “very strong” argument for statistical significance (Wilson, 2013); and a LR value greater than or equal to 2, meaning that a keyword is used at least four times as frequently in the study corpus than in the reference corpus. Furthermore, the keyword analysis focused on lexical, rather than grammatical (or “function”) keywords, in line with Baker’s (2006) observation that lexical words reveal more about discourses at work in corpora than grammatical words, which reveal more about register.

Collocation analysis

Second, collocation analysis was employed. Analysis of collocation explores significant frequently co-occurring words, and aims to illuminate “discourse prosody”, defined by Louw (1993, p. 157) as “an aura of meaning by which a form is imbued by its collocates”, within a corpus. As with keyword analysis, a vast range of statistical tools are available to measure collocation. In this study, collocation between a “node word” or search term and its collocates has been explored using a 4:4 window (i.e. four words on either side of the node word), and using a combination of the Mutual Information statistic, which measures collocational strength and the T-score which indicates the confidence with which we can conclude that there is indeed an association between the two words (Church et al., 1994; McEnery et al., 2006). An intersection of MI ≥ 3 and T ≥ 2 has been used to identify collocates in this study.

Concordance analysis

Third, all words of interest, identified via keyword and collocation analysis, were subsequently explored in context using concordance analysis. Concordance analysis allows the researcher to seamlessly shift their lens-in-use from the “zoom” lens of the immediate context of individual instances of words out to the “wide angle” lens of words in whole-article context. Extensive concordance analysis was conducted for all words identified as significant in the statistical analysis, to ensure appropriate conclusions were drawn, to verify/disprove theories as they developed, and to illuminate further areas for investigation.

Prototypical texts

Finally, to allow a closer look at a set of systematically selected prototypical texts, the keyword analysis was further employed to identify a “principled selection” (Anthony & Baker, 2015) of downsampled texts. These texts were then analysed for their focus and scope, the dominant news values (Bednarek & Caple, 2014) employed, the sources quoted, and the assumptions evident about teachers, schools and education more broadly.

Stories of teachers in the AFRT corpus

This discussion of findings moves from those derived from analysis of the AFRT Corpus in its entirety to a closer look of change over time by virtue of analysis of three separate sub-corpora of the AFRT Corpus.

The “Aboutness” of the AFRT corpus

Keyword analysis identified 145 lexical keywords in the AFRT Corpus across the 30-year period from 1993 to 2022. Table 1 highlights the top 50 keywords, grouped by theme according to concordance analysis. While any division into discrete themes is somewhat arbitrary (and indeed there is some overlap between these categories), care has been taken to allocate each keyword to the theme it best and most often reflects, based on extensive concordance analysis. Beyond the expected discussions of financial issues, including remuneration and industrial disputes (reflected in keywords such as salaries and unions), and discussions of school funding linked to the keywords Gonski¹, socio and disadvantaged, a number of other focus areas come to light through the keyword and concordance analysis. For example, 15 keywords relate to classroom-related issues including aspects of curriculum (e.g. maths/mathematics, curriculum, grammar, vocational, STEM), and pedagogy and assessment (instruction). Keywords related to teachers and their work included those connected to discussions of the teaching workforce (e.g. shortages), and those related to initial teacher education (graduates, courses).

Table 1. Top 50 Keywords in the AFRTC, organised by theme, ordered by log ratio.

Industrial	salaries, unions
Funding	Gonski, socio, disadvantaged
Classrooms	maths, curriculum, classroom, mathematics, classrooms, instruction, grammar, subjects, vocational, STEM, learning, classes
Students	students, student
Teachers	teachers, teaching, teacher, teacher’s, educators, teach, profession, shortages, taught
Schools	principals, schools, schooling, educational, education, school, secondary
Performance	PISA, numeracy, NAPLAN, literacy
Teacher Education	graduates, universities, tertiary, courses
Education Policy	autonomy, sizes
Sources	Grattan, OECD, AFR

Beyond these general discussions of teachers and classrooms, the keyword analysis provides a window onto some of the particular educational issues on which the AFR has focused over the past 30 years. First, in relation to schools broadly, both autonomy, and sizes emerge as keywords, randomly selected concordance lines for each of which can be found in Tables 2 and 3 respectively.

Table 2. Ten randomly selected concordance lines for “autonomy”.

how schools should be run – with greater principal	autonomy	and even more rigorous testing. For reasons I
reforms. Priorities include teacher training, school	autonomy	and the curriculum.
are for more competition between schools, more	autonomy	for school managers and more accountability so
Of course, recommendations for greater	autonomy	for school principals and less time required on
in 2019 showed schools which gave principals	autonomy	had higher attendance levels than schools running
In line with earlier pledges giving principals more	autonomy,	Ms Gillard also promised yesterday that high –
The report also said ideas such as greater principal	autonomy,	national testing and competition between schools
austerity culture versus a culture of resource-rich	autonomy	that is able to deliver real change” he said.
The opposition is similarly enamoured with	autonomy.	The Coalition's Real Solutions For All Australians
join in. Key points Federal move to give more	autonomy	to 25 per cent of Australia's public schools. A $70

Table 3. Ten randomly selected concordance lines for “sizes’.

more teachers to the profession and reduce class	sizes."	A meeting of state and territory treasurers in
Cutting class	sizes	and constructing new school buildings are popular
the past, not repeating mistakes like reducing class	sizes."	As a nation we don't have a great
Research Institute has found that smaller class	sizes	have had only a small effect on student learning.
in pre-kindergarten programmes, small class	sizes	in earlier grades and teachers who said they had
new teaching methods that render traditional class	sizes	irrelevant. In western Sydney, 80 Catholic schools
concerns over behaviour management and class	sizes.	Just under 30 per cent of those surveyed said they
that tell us whether it's good to cut class	sizes	or pay teachers more” Leigh says.
which already have larger than average class	sizes,	said they did not affect education standards. “We
Dodd reported last week, the reduction in class	sizes	since the 1960s and “70s has driven federal and

In relation to autonomy, concordance analysis shows widespread support in the AFR for increased (public) school and principal autonomy, beginning with a single article in 1997 and continuing throughout the corpus until 2022. Moves towards greater autonomy in Australia on the part of school systems began in Victoria in the mid-1990s and were a particularly hot topic nationally ahead of the 2014 federal election. Over a third of the 96 articles invoking autonomy date to the period from 2012 to 2014, and in each of these articles, greater autonomy is either assumed or argued to be a positive for schools and principals. School and principal autonomy is generally held to be one of the key tenets of the marketisation and endogenous privatisation of schooling (Ball & Youdell, 2008; Mockler et al., 2023), and the prevalence of autonomy in the AFRT corpus highlights the consonance of this concept with the finance and economics interests of the AFR.

Similarly, sizes, which, as represented in Table 3, almost exclusively relates to class sizes within the corpus, points to debates around the capacity of smaller class sizes to create “bang for the buck” of education spending. As an editorial from 2019 illustrates, not only has the AFR historically argued that class sizes represent a waste of education funding, in relation to class sizes they are prone to work the (false) dichotomy between smaller class sizes and “better teaching”, crafting an argument that teachers’ unions, who have historically advocated for smaller class sizes, are thus anti-quality teaching:

Even before Labor's Gonski agenda, the education unions’ obsession with smaller class sizes defied evidence that this is an expensive way of improving student learning. Better teaching provides much more bang for the buck. (The Australian Financial Review [Editorial], 2019, p. 50)

The interest in class sizes reflected in the AFR relates not only to the economics of education, wherein smaller class sizes are viewed as an expensive and non-cost effective strategy, but also to ideas about what constitutes “better teaching” and the (contested) evidence that smaller class sizes generate limited return through only small effects on student learning. Finally, a series of four keywords broadly related to school, teacher, system and national performance were identified in the analysis. These ranged from discussions of NAPLAN to international large scale assessments (PISA) and include discussions of literacy and numeracy, the key focus of national and international standardised testing.

Broadly speaking, the view of the “aboutness” of the AFRT Corpus yielded by the keyword analysis highlights a perhaps unsurprising interest in the newspaper in aspects of the economics of education, through a focus on salaries and industrial issues, along with an interest in more mainstream educational issues. These are generally linked to the newspaper’s economic/finance remit through either a consonance of ideas and the flow of concepts from finance/economics to education (such as in the case of autonomy), or via the productivity agenda (such as in the case of literacy and numeracy), where national and international standardised testing is presumed to hold insight into future economic prosperity.

The “Company teacher/s keep” in the AFRT corpus

Firth (1957, p. 20) famously wrote that “you shall know a lot about a word from the company it keeps”. Collocation analysis provides a particular window on representation through a systematic examination of the words that particular words of interest frequently co-occur with. The AFRT Corpus was constructed in order to explore representations of teachers and their work, and thus collocation analysis was undertaken for both teachers and teacher, both of which were, unsurprisingly, highly ranked keywords. Table 4 highlights the top 20 collocates (ordered by collocation strength) of both, allocated to four thematic groups devised on the basis of concordance analysis.

Table 4. Top 20 collocates of teacher/s in the AFRTC, ordered by mutual information.

	Teacher	Teachers
Industrial/Workforce Issues	shortages, shortage, supply, salaries, workforce, unions	Federation, qualified, nurses, salaries, paid, unions, union, pay
Performance/Quality	quality, improving, improve, performance, standards	professional, best, quality, better
Teacher Education	initial, training, courses, development,	training
Contexts of Teachers’ work	student, classroom, education	principals, primary, classroom, maths, teach, NSW
Other	former, focus	support

The largest thematic group of collocates across both node words related to industrial and workforce issues, where teachers were referred to either in the context of industrial negotiations or in the context of ongoing shortage and supply issues. Salaries, union/s, pay/id and associated collocates such as [NSW Teachers’] Federation and nurses, alongside whom teachers campaigned for pay and conditions at different points over the 30-year period, are representative of the discussion of industrial issues. Collocates such as shortage/s, qualified, supply, and workforce speak to issues around the shape and health of the teaching workforce. A number of more interesting collocates of both teacher and teachers relate to questions of quality and performance, including quality and performance themselves, along with improv/ing, standards and professional and the comparative, better, and superlative, best. As an example, Table 5 includes ten randomly selected concordance lines for quality as a collocate of teacher, and highlights an interest in improved teacher quality, a sense of crisis around declining teacher quality, and a proposed link between “teacher quality” and pay.

Table 5. 10 Randomly selected concordance lines for “quality” as a collocate of “teacher”.

referrals, affordability, location, teacher	quality	and culture”, says Hill. There are also great hopes
increased resourcing, improved teacher	quality	and embracing this as a national goal”, said Innes
The recommendations focus on improving teacher	quality	and giving school principals more flexibility,
under way – including a greater focus on teacher	quality	and intensive training and mentoring as well as
long been concerned about the decline in teacher	quality	and its effects on student performance. An
key points. We need more emphasis on teacher	quality	and mentoring; teachers with high expectations of
greatest driver of educational outcomes is teacher	quality	and our ability to attract, keep and engage the
areas including improving the link between teacher	quality	and pay. Another $147 million and $47 million will
for principals and schools, a focus on teacher	quality	and performance, including a capacity to reward
its changes on school funding and towards teacher	quality	and principal autonomy. Released overnight on

Teacher education, and particularly initial teacher education (ITE), was referenced by collocates including initial, training, and courses. Here concordance analysis revealed a link between purported quality of initial teacher education courses and quality of teachers, with a sense of ITE as “inconsistent and dubious, at best” and in need of improvement, as highlighted in Table 6.

Table 6. 10 Randomly selected concordance lines for “training” as a collocate of “teacher”.

like academic ability, throughputs such as teacher	training,	and outputs, for instance, student results.
lead quickly to the question of teacher	training,	and the quality of graduates. Scrutiny on tertiary
later in life. And even then, the quality of teacher	training	at universities is inconsistent and dubious, at best.
Our education plan will focus on improving teacher	training,	ensuring we have a robust curriculum and
5 per cent of those entering traditional teacher	training	having entrance marks of more than 90. Just
We would need different initial teacher	training,	incentives to stay on, stable staffing and
"reading first” programme and improved teacher	training.	Mr Bush is also proposing a $US3 billion
based on the ideas and practice that underpin the	training	of student teachers at the University of
it needs qualified education groups and teacher	training	organisations to provide pre-service and teacher
Minister Christopher Pyne will use teacher	training	reform and an overhaul of the curriculum to

Collocates relating to the contexts of teachers’ work, included other actors such as student[s] and principals, and some of the physical (classroom, primary, NSW), curricular/pedagogical (maths, teach) and systemic (education) contexts within which teachers practice. Finally, three remaining collocates were grouped together as “other”. Focus and support, while used often within the AFRT corpus, were both used in highly diverse ways, defying allocation to a particular theme. Concordance analysis revealed that former is most often used within the corpus to position key informants, including commentators and politicians.

Thus, consonant with the keyword analysis, collocation analysis highlights a diversity of focus within the AFRT corpus, with stories both obviously related to the newspaper’s remit as Australia’s key national provider of business and financial news, and curiously, it would seem, disconnected from this remit. Teachers are often discussed as they relate directly to economic and financial interests, however, beyond this, their quality and preparation, are also the subject of significant attention in the AFR. The corpus is at least as focused on questions of performance and quality, of what goes on in teacher education and school classrooms as it is on questions around what might readily be recognised as the financial and economic aspects of education. While the links may not be as obvious as with the keyword autonomy, discussed above, here too we see the imprint of endogenous privatisation, linked through to concerns about comparative performance and aspects of performative accountability related to quality and standards.

Change over time: keywords and prototypical texts

The uneven distribution of articles across the 30 years of the corpus, however, raised questions of how far the “aboutness” of the corpus and representations of teachers within had remained static or changed over the 30 year period, and consequently, based on an exploration of keywords for each individual year of the corpus, the articles were further grouped into three sub-corpora, one representing the first decade of the corpus (1993-2002), one from 2003 to 2011, and one from 2012 to 2022 inclusive. Figure 2 highlights the number of articles in each of these groups, and the increased pattern of coverage in the AFR over this timeframe. While a neater division might have divided the 30 years into three ten-year sub-corpora, both the sharp increase in articles beginning in 2012 (the mean number of articles in the three years immediately prior to 2012 was 35, while the mean number per year for 2012–2014 was 76.7), and a discursive shift around that point suggested by the keyword and concordance analysis made this a more theoretically sound place to make the division.

Figure 2. Distribution of articles by sub-corpus.

Keyword and concordance analysis were undertaken for each of the three sub-corpora, with the keyword analysis used to identify the five most prototypical texts for each sub-corpus. These were then closely analysed to further illuminate the discourses embedded in the sub-corpus and consider how they were similar to and different from those embedded in the other two sub-corpora and chart change in the AFRT Corpus over time. Interestingly, all of the 59 keywords identified across the three sub-corpora (Table 7) were unique to a single sub-corpus, suggesting that the division points used were appropriate.

Table 7. Keywords in the AFRTC sub-corpora, organised by theme, ordered by log ratio.

	1993–2002	2003–2011	2012–2022
Politics	Kemp, Beazley, George, Kennett, Keating	Brumby, Brendan, Nelson, Bishop, Carr, Latham, Rudd, Howard, Bob, Stephen, Smith	Morrison, Pyne, Turnbull, Scott, Christopher
Industrial	Burrow, earnings, retirement, awards	servants, rises, nurses, strike, wage
Curriculum and Pedagogy	unemployment, Japanese, Japan,		STEM, instruction, wellbeing, digital, explicit, maths, risks, engagement, feedback, studying, expertise, approaches
Teacher Education			ATAR
Performance			NAPLAN, PISA, OECD's, backwards,
Sources			Grattan, Buckingham,
Funding			Gonski
Other	names, stock	church, art	Covid, pandemic

The 1993–2002 sub-corpus (Table 7) yielded 14 keywords, most of which are closely related to union-government relations. They include the names of politicians/political parties at federal (Kemp, Beazley, ALP, Keating) and state (Kennett, Spring) levels, and the names of union officials and organisations (Burrow, George, ACTU). Of the remaining keywords, Japan and Japanese partly reflect a focus in a small number of articles in this period on the teaching of English in Japan and other Asian nations, but also an interest in the role of “left wing” teachers’ unions in Japan in providing opposition to Japanese nationalism. Unemployment was reflective of discussions of the youth job market and the relationship between schools and vocational education in the 1990s, while retirement was mostly related to the financial circumstances of teachers in current or prospective retirement. Both earnings and awards are related predominantly to ongoing industrial negotiations. Keywords not related to one of the identified themes were names, which referred collectively to user names, screen names and domain names, all of which entered public discussions around education during this period, and stock, which appeared in a relatively small group of articles but highlights the proportionally more frequent discussion of, for example, the stock exchange in the 1993–2002 sub-corpus.

The 18 keywords identified in the 2003–2011 sub-corpus were similarly concentrated around union-government related industrial issues, with federal (Brendan, Nelson, Bishop, Latham, Rudd, Howard, Stephen, Smith) and state (Brumby, Carr, Bob) politicians’ names featuring heavily on the list. Industrial action on the part of teachers was referenced by keywords nurses (alongside whom teachers took industrial action on occasion) and strike, while pay negotiations were referenced by keywords servants, rises and wage. Beyond this, church reflects to some extent discussion of private schools during this period, both with respect to increased funding at the beginning of this period and increased attention to school funding generally towards the end. The keyword art reflects a diverse use of this word in the 2003–2022 sub-corpus, including some discussion of the arts within the school curriculum but also discussions of the role of art galleries in professional development of teachers of visual arts.

The 27 keywords in the 2012–2022 sub-corpus provide quite a contrast to those in the two previous sub-corpora. While the names of prominent politicians of the time are still present on the list of keywords (Scott Morrison, Christopher Pyne, Malcolm Turnbull), the focus of previous sub-corpora on industrial issues has given way to a focus on a range of issues that previously had not been front and centre in education stories in the AFR. These include different approaches to teaching and learning, including explicit instruction, feedback (for both students and teachers) and a close interest in national and international standardised testing regimes (NAPLAN, PISA, OECD’s) along with concern about student performance on both measures going backwards. The keyword analysis suggests that Grattan Institute and former Centre for Independent Studies research fellow Jennifer Buckingham emerge in this period as prominent sources in the discussion of classroom teaching and initial teacher education, the entry to which also becomes a focus in this period (ATAR). Teacher expertise, particularly related to STEM subjects, is also a focus in this period.

A deeper look at the discourses: prototypical texts

On the basis of this observed shift in the “aboutness” of the AFR Corpus over these three periods, the keyword analysis was used to identify a subset of prototypical texts for closer interrogation, using the conceptual framework of news values. Table 8 includes the headline and year of publication for the top five prototypical texts for each of the three sub-corpora.

Table 8. Prototypical texts, organised by sub-corpus, ordered by prototypicality.

1993–2002	Poll on privatisation (1996)
	Teacher unions to fight Coalition (1993)
	ACTU, teachers threaten national campaign to protect pay system (1996)
	Federal Budget to double funds for teaching Asian languages (1996)
	Education shaping up as a $130 m election issue (1993)
2003–2011	Teachers to strike as Carr cries poor (2004)
	Teachers strike in backlash against pay rise limits (2003)
	NSW teachers strike threat (2004)
	Wage claims put pressure on Vic budget (2004)
	Teachers’ mass school walkout (2003)
2012–2022	Direct instruction for science is top of class (2016)
	Curriculums fail kids (2018)
	Reading expert praises Coalition's direct approach (2013)
	Teachers are hitting the books during pandemic (2020)
	STEM academy motivates careers in previously struggling region (2020)

An initial scan of the headlines resonates with the diachronic keyword analysis, which suggested a largely industrial focus in the 1993–2002 and 2003–2011 sub-corpora, and a shift in the 2012–2023 sub-corpus to a focus more on curriculum, pedagogy and other aspects of teachers’ work. All five of the prototypical articles in the 1993–2002 sub-corpus are focused on aspects of education funding and wages negotiations, while those of the 2003–2011 sub-corpus are all focused on industrial action. Contrastingly, all five prototypical articles from the 2012–2022 subcorpus are focused away from these issues and rather on different aspects of pedagogy and curriculum, linked predominantly into issues of performance and quality.

NVivo 14 was used to closely analyse the prototypical texts, using the news values framework (Bednarek & Caple, 2014) which, as noted above, focuses on the construction of newsworthiness in media texts. Based on this analysis, six news values were identified as dominant across the prototypical texts in all three sub-corpora. Table 9 displays these news values, along with an example from one prototypical text in each sub-corpus.

Table 9. News values in prototypical texts by sub-corpus.

	1993–2002 Sub-corpus	2003–2011 Sub-corpus	2012–2022 Sub-corpus
Eliteness (of high status or fame)	The Opposition spokesman on education, Dr Kemp, welcomed the publication of the discussion paper (Dwyer, 1993).	NSW Premier Bob Carr said the government had every right to try to keep a lid on costs (Mellish, 2004).	The Centre for Independent Studies challenged inquiry-based learning. Senior researcher, Dr Jennifer Buckingham, said PISA results from 2009 and 2015 show inquiry-based learning is associated with lower scores (Bolton, 2020).
Impact (effects/ consequences)	"The effects of the Kennett Government's actions in Victoria will take that State from being a leader in school education to nearly the bottom of the list” (Dwyer, 1993).	It is expected to shut hundreds of schools, forcing thousands of parents to take the day off or take their children into work (Skulley & AAP, 2003).	An author of a new paper on using phonic skills to improve children's reading has welcomed new Education Minister Christopher Pyne's commitment to return to direct instruction in schools (Dodd, 2013).
Negativity	THE trade union movement's campaign to have the Federal Government re-elected has accelerated, with a vote by teacher unions at the weekend to mount a campaign against the Federal Opposition (Bolt, 1993).	Employers First formerly the Employers Federation of NSW estimated the strike would cost $100 million in lost output and efficiency (Skulley & AAP, 2003).	… the OECD also found little evidence in favour of reducing class sizes for science teaching and warned that it was probably not worth the extra burden on school budgets (Dodd, 2016).
Positivity	The increased money for Asian languages is one reflection of the Howard Government's priority for schools (Grattan, 1996).	The Victorian government is close to solving a major pay claim by 25,000 public servants (Skulley, 2004).	A teacher whose school is in one of the lowest categories for socioeconomic disadvantage has been recognised with an award for enrolling 30,000 students in specialist STEM courses … (Bolton, 2020).
Superlativeness (high intensity/ large scope)	The president of the 180,000-member Australian Teachers Union, Ms Sharan Burrow, said yesterday the election campaign, to cost a six-figure sum, would be the biggest ever launched by teachers and reflected their concern over the coalition's education and industrial policies. (Bolt, 1993).	But the state government says the Commonwealth Grants Commission's decision to slash NSW's allocation by more than $300 million has forced it to make big cuts. (Day, 2004).	Something like the COVID-19 pandemic would only be overcome through using science, but since the 1990s there has been a “massive decline” in maths and science study at Australian schools. (Bolton, 2020).
Timeliness (recent, about to happen)	President of the ACTU, Ms Jennie George launched an industrial campaign in Melbourne yesterday with the Australian Education Union (AEU) and Independent Education Union (IEU) (Murphy, 1996).	Teachers across NSW yesterday voted to strike after the Carr government succeeded in getting a pay case before an industrial commission reopened by crying poor (Mellish, 2004).	"It's really positive,” said Jennifer Buckingham, whose co-authored paper, Why Jaydon Can't Read: The Triumph of Ideology over Evidence in Teaching Reading, will be published by the Centre for Independent Studies in its Policy journal on Monday (Bolton, 2018).

The news values analysis highlighted, first, that all six dominant news values were deployed in all three timeframes, albeit differently. Eliteness, which involves status markers such as titles and reference to expertise (and as such is often linked to sources quoted within media articles), is evoked consistently in the 1993–2002 and 2003–2011 sub-corpora in relation to politicians and senior union officials. Within the 2012–2022 sub-corpus, eliteness is more likely to be evoked through reference to “experts”, often drawn from thinktanks such as the Centre for Independent Studies or Grattan Institute, or the OECD and in particular its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reports. In the first two sub-corpora, impact is largely linked to the impact of industrial action or government policy around industrial or workforce matters, while in the 2012–2022 sub-corpus, impact is more closely linked to impacts of particular pedagogical or curricular arrangements on students and student learning, with direct instruction and phonics common touchstones. In terms of negativity, the 1993–2002 and 2003–2011 sub-corpora tend to focus on negative assessments of actual or proposed industrial action, including union “campaigns” for or against the government of the day and the consequences of industrial action, while in the 2012–2022 sub-corpus, negative assessments are more likely to be focused on classroom-related matters, such as, in the example provided in Table 9, class sizes. Positivity, in the 1993–2002 and 2003–2011 sub-corpora, tends to be directed at government policy which either provides greater funding (as is the case in the discussion of increased funding for Asian languages in schools in the 1992–2002 example); or a breakthrough in industrial negotiations, as is the case in the 2003–2011 example. The clearest example of positivity from the 2012–2022 sub-corpus prototypical texts came from an article celebrating an award for a teacher who had developed a “STEM Academy”, partnering with large corporations to build students’ mathematics and science capacities. Superlativeness in the 1993–2002 and 2003–2011 sub-corpora is generally linked to funding and/or the size of actual or proposed industrial action, while in the 2012–2022 sub-corpus it is reflective of concerns around pedagogical or curricular change. Finally, while timeliness is most usually linked in the first two sub-corpora to reporting of events and to discussion of education issues with reference to forth-coming elections, notable in the 2012–2022 sub-corpus was an article reporting the contents of a forthcoming Centre for Independent Studies report.

Together, while the discursive resources in use to create newsworthiness remain consistent over the three groups of prototypical texts, the news values analysis suggests a shift in the substance of what constitutes a newsworthy story involving teachers over this time for readers of the AFR. Newsworthiness in the earlier two sub-corpora tends to be anchored to issues of industrial negotiations and action; funding; and government policy impacting on schools. Contrastingly, although consistent with the keyword analysis, newsworthiness in the prototypical texts from the most recent (2012-2022) sub-corpus is linked to issues and questions of performance, pedagogy, curriculum, and quality. This suggests a shift from an almost-exclusive focus on economic capital-related dimensions of education to one on “human capital” (Rosen, 1989) and manifestations of performance on international league tables, again reflective of the growing endogenous privatisation of education that took place during this time.

Concluding discussion

This systematic analysis has identified that the Australian Financial Review’s coverage of school teachers and their work has changed since the early 1990s. Not only has there been a demonstrable growth in the amount of coverage focused on teachers, the shape of that coverage has also changed. Previous research (Mockler, 2022) has highlighted the growth in the number of articles focused on teachers published in the AFR as a proportion of articles on teachers published in national and capital city daily newspapers, from an annual average of 0.8% between 1996 and 2000, to 3.8% between 2016 and 2020. This indicates heightened interest in teachers and their work on the part of both the newspaper itself and, presumably its readership.

The past 30 years have seen the rise of the global education reform movement, and the interrelated rise of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) as a powerful force in contemporary schooling, largely a product of its international large-scale assessment program (PISA) (Verger et al., 2019) and associated subsequent initiatives such as the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS). Woodward (2009, p. 99) argues that the OECD has over this time become a key external “sculptor” of contemporary education in Australia and elsewhere, and the AFR coverage analysed here reflects this.

In the twenty-first century Australian national governments have enthusiastically leveraged the national results from OECD studies. Such is the perceived importance of PISA rankings, for example, that when Australia’s first Commonwealth Education Act was passed in 2013, it included a commitment “for Australia to be placed, by 2025, in the top five highest performing countries based on the performance of school students in reading, mathematics and science” (“Australian Education Act” 2013, p. 3). Despite this clause being somewhat quietly removed from the preamble of the Act in 2018, the commitment was renewed in 2021 by then-Minister for Education Alan Tudge, who, in launching a national review of initial teacher education, included this rationale:

Now, this review is going to be looking at the most important factor to help turn around some of these education standards, and to try to help us get back to where we should be – and that is at the top league of nations in relation to education performance. We always used to be there, but we’ve declined over the last 20 years, and our goal is, by 2030 to be back near the top. (Tudge, 2021)

Australia’s enthusiastic embrace of the “Top Five” worldview has occurred in parallel with local interventions. Many of these have seen the rapid development of a federal field of education (Savage, 2021) out of what was, until the turn of the century, less a field than a series of loosely connected initiatives (Lingard, 2000). The “Education Revolution” platform on which the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labor Government was elected yielded, between 2007 and the Government’s demise in 2013, a national curriculum, a national standardised testing regime, national professional teaching standards, a national website for publication of results of national standardised testing, and national accreditation of initial teacher education programmes. The “education revolution” itself had been fuelled by a renewed turn towards human capital. In laying out the necessity of a “revolution” in Australian education, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was fond of referring to education as “the engine room of the economy” (e.g. Rudd, 2007, 2008), and through this and other rhetorical moves, “the complex issue of what counts as a nation’s intellectual and social capital [was] connected to an argument about political and economic security” (Kelly, 2017, p. 163).

The heightened policy attention to reform and revolution, and consequently to international comparisons, saw growing attention to discussions of “teacher quality” (Barnes, 2022; Mockler, 2020). Associated with this has been the ascendancy of what Larsen (2010) has termed “the discourse of teacher centrality” in Australian education policy: the assumption that student performance and achievement rely primarily on the “quality” of the teacher. This notion has been embedded front and centre of the policy rhetoric of subsequent Australian Ministers for Education, from both sides of the political divide, over the course of this time:

There is nothing more important to learning than the quality of the teacher standing in front of the classroom. (Gillard, 2009) (Minister for Education, Australian Labor Party, 2007-2010)

It is not money or smaller classrooms that make a difference because we have increased spending by 44 per cent in the past decade and reduced classroom numbers by 40 per cent. It is the quality of our teacher education training and the way we teach that has impact on student performance. (Pyne, 2014) (Minister for Education and Training, Liberal-National Party Coalition, 2013-2015)

… the teacher effectiveness in the classroom is the most important thing which determines the successful outcomes of our kids (Tudge, 2021) (Minister for Education, Liberal-National Party Coalition, 2020-2022)

We got to meet today with the people who have the most important job in the world. Teachers. The things that they do more than anything that we do, really will create the world that we're going to live in in future. (Clare, 2022) (Current Minister for Education, Australian Labor Party)

This heightened attention to the role of the teacher, often connected discursively and rhetorically to discussions of Australia’s performance on international league tables, the declining levels of literacy and numeracy of Australian children as measured on international large scale assessments, and so on, means that there has been, over this period, greater media attention to what goes on in and around Australian schools. At the same time, the increasing orientation of Australian schooling systems to forms of new public management, exemplified in school autonomy reforms including the “Independent Public Schools” initiative in Western Australia and Queensland (Blackmore et al., 2023) and the New South Wales “Local Schools, Local Decisions” initiative (Stacey, 2017) made aspects of the internal workings of schools, perhaps for the first time, newsworthy for the readership of the AFR. As market logics came increasingly to drive Australian schooling during this time (Lupton & Hayes, 2021), it seems that issues to do with schooling took on greater resonance for readers of the AFR, expanding from discussions of predominantly the financial aspects of industrial negotiations and school funding to closer attention to teachers’ work and school structures, particularly as they could be related to the role of education in shoring up human and consequently economic capital.

While this paper reports on research conducted via close examination of a single newspaper in one national context, it has broader relevance as an example of how reporting on teachers and their work has been reshaped by the trend towards endogenous privatisation of education. With teachers and teaching positioned increasingly as means to the non-negotiable end of educational effectiveness measured in terms of international competitiveness, teachers’ practices have taken on a level of newsworthiness, even within the financial press, that was previously absent. Reflecting the “transformation of identities” Ball and Youdell (2008) posed as a consequence of privatisation, we see here a valorisation of “teacher as technician” (p. 87) approaches and the positioning of other forms of pedagogy as inherently problematic.

The impacts of neoliberalised schooling policy on schools and teachers have been well researched in Australia and elsewhere, and this study has offered an insight into the effects of such policy shifts vis-a-vis the positioning of schools and teachers in the public space. Over the years from 1993, and particularly since 2012, the AFR’s laser-like focus on remuneration and funding in education-related stories has given way to a far broader engagement. This broader engagement reflects an emergent understanding on the part of the AFR and its readers around the interplay between what goes on in schools and classrooms and consequent educational and economic outcomes, a manifestation of the financialisation of the field of education which, while not responsible for increasing endogenous privatisation of Australian schooling systems and structures, provides an interesting window onto these forces in action.

Acknowledgements

This research was undertaken in 2023 while on Visiting Fellowship at Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford. The generosity of the Principal, Fellows and College community is appreciatively acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Businessman David Gonski led two key reviews related to school funding in Australia between 2010 and 2018.