New South Wales, for example, which has the largest concentration and longest history of selective schooling, is a relic of when secondary schooling was the destination of only a minority of young people, mostly from the middle or upper classes.

Secondary schooling was not universal in Australia before the 1960s, and it was only in the 1980s that everyone had the opportunity to complete Year 12.

The schools were to offer students a meritocratic “ladder of opportunity”. That is, they would be open to everyone, regardless of wealth or social class, so long as academic entry requirements were met. This, and the absence of religious criteria, set them apart from private schools.

Selecting whiteness

However, the foundations of selective schooling in Australia were always deeply raced and classed.

Despite being accessed by manyworking class students, their credentials were geared towards middle class occupational groups. And their essential whiteness was ensured by several factors:

Their establishment period coincided with the establishment of the White Australia Policy, which restricted non-Europeans from migrating to Australia.

Aboriginal children could be legally excluded from the feeder primary schools and often were.

Non-British migrants arrived in Australia in larger numbers from late 1940s. As early as the 1930s, many children of European Jewish refugees attended selective high schools.

But from the 1960s to the 1980s, the children of non-English speaking migrant families were more often categorised as educationally disadvantaged, and rarely seen as “displacing” the academic opportunities of Anglo-Australians.

Falling out of favour

During the 1960s and 1970s, selective schools fell out of favour with policymakers and many parents. They were mostly