Recruiting the ‘quality teacher’: equity, faith, and passion

ABSTRACT

The figure of the teacher is becoming increasingly significant in schooling systems around the globe. In this article, we consider how the market-oriented system of schooling in the Australian state of New South Wales may be reflecting and (re)shaping understandings of who teachers are and should be. To do this, we present a corpus-assisted analysis of advertisements for teaching positions gathered across the public, Catholic and independent school sectors, to explore how schools and school sectors construct images of the ‘good’ or ‘quality’ teacher. Findings indicate a stronger focus on the ‘person’ of the teacher in independent schools; and a surprising lack of pedagogical concerns within any sector. Our contribution is novel in first, using a relatively untapped data source to explore how the figure of the teacher is constructed in the public domain; and second, demonstrating the reciprocal relationship between teachers and schools in the marketing of educational products.

KEYWORDS:

• Teachers
• teacher quality
• corpus-assisted analysis
• marketisation
• recruitment
• advertisements

Introduction

Teachers are increasingly a target for policy intervention and commentary across the globe (Sorensen & Robertson, 2017). Yet teachers are not recruited equally within education systems (OECD, 2018). At a moment of global teacher shortages (Welch, 2022), it is therefore pertinent to explore how the desirable qualities of teachers are represented in recruitment efforts. In this article, we take the case of NSW, Australia, and ask: how are understandings of teachers and teaching constructed in recruitment advertisements for teachers? Immediately below, we provide some background regarding research on school advertising and market positioning, and differentiation and segregation in the Australian school system. Following this, we outline our Bourdieuian theoretical lens before explaining our corpus-assisted analysis method. We then present our results and discussion, centred around the candidate qualities represented within the dataset and how these differently construct person and practice.

Representing schools and teachers across systems

Understanding how schools construct and manage their image is an international research objective. In Wilson and Carlsen’s (2016) analysis of charter school websites in the United States, for example, some schools were seen to focus on ‘academic excellence, intellectual rigour, and a “timeless” curriculum’, with others positioned as ‘no-excuses’ schools appealing to a different, and less privileged, cohort of parents and families. Meanwhile in England, Maguire, Perryman, Ball, and Braun (2011) explored how public schools have sought to be distinctive, as ‘the compulsion to succeed and to “look better” than any other local competitors means that schools are inevitably caught up in a process of fabricating themselves’ (p. 6). In this article, we contribute by foregrounding the role of the teacher in such ‘fabrications’ (Maguire et al., 2011, p. 6), using an Australian education system as our case.

Australian research on how schools represent themselves and their teachers has focused largely on elite schools, often using print-based school prospectuses as data sources. One group of studies has explored the representation of gender in elite schools, particularly for students, with femininity constructed as passive and ‘natural’, while masculinity is active, strong and capable (e.g. Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson, & Saltmarsh, 2010; Wardman, Hutchesson, Gottschall, Drew, & Saltmarsh, 2010). Other studies have been more concerned with questions of social class. McDonald, Pini, and Mayes (2012), for example, contribute an analysis of different discursive strategies of schools, including bolstering and self-promotion to build institutional credibility. Somewhat paradoxically, one theme in this research has been a tendency toward particular forms of standardisation rather than innovation as schools position themselves within the market, for instance in relation to the ‘traditions’ of older corporate schools (Symes, 1998). More recent literature has made use of newer developments in school marketing. McDonald, Pini, and Barlett (2019) report on interviews with marketing professionals hired by independent schools, emphasising such schools’ growing managerial agendas. McCandless (2015), meanwhile, conducted a content analysis of school websites from a ‘maximally diverse’ set of schools in Victoria, finding that teachers in non-government schools were more likely to be depicted engaging one-on-one with students. There is resonance here with notions of ‘pastoral care’ – a key selling point of elite, private, often religiously-affiliated schools (Wang, 2016) – as well as common discourses of teachers as ‘charismatic subjects’ (Moore, 2004), born rather than educated or ‘trained’ to do the job. In McCandless (2015) research, less advantaged schools were found to emphasise discipline rather than such ‘pastoral’ notions, a finding which may reflect the particular contrasts and contradictions of the Australian system.

Teacher positioning and inclusion in Australian school systems

The Australian schooling system is internationally unusual. Seen as an ‘extreme’ form of marketised schooling (Windle, 2015, p. 1), the system features a relatively large non-government sector. This includes a sizable Catholic sector, as well as independent schools, the vast majority of which are religiously affiliated, including independent schools with varying Christian church affiliations, and a small number of schools with Jewish and Islamic affiliations. The public sector in NSW, meanwhile – the most populous Australian state and the setting for this study – includes both comprehensive schools as well as specialist sporting and performing arts schools, and a large number of wholly or partially academically selective schools. On average, the public sector enrols students experiencing less educational advantage than the private sector (Lamb, Jackson, Walstab, & Huo, 2015). Within this context, research suggests a preference for more advantaged schooling spaces on the part of some teachers (Stacey, 2020), as well as a perception that ‘better’ teachers work in more affluent schools (Variyan, 2019). Although school choice is not a phenomenon limited to the Australian context, Australia’s considerable proportion of fee-charging and religiously-affiliated private schools makes it an interesting case when examining how teachers and teaching are understood within market-oriented systems.

While religiously-affiliated schools do not always require teachers to be of the same religion as the school, religious commitment can become the deciding factor between two otherwise equally well-qualified candidates (Evans & Gaze, 2010). Indeed research suggests that the relationship between religious identity and identification, and teachers’ work, is an ongoing concern within the sector. Buchanan (2020), for example, argues against ‘secular’ initial teacher education as failing to develop the right qualities desired by employers in religiously-affiliated schools, while Twelves (2019) explores a model of teacher education which can more fully integrate faith with teaching. It would therefore seem that who teachers ‘are’ is important to schools – not just what they ‘do’.

Theoretical framing

The research question for this article, asking how understandings of teachers and teaching are constructed in recruitment advertisements for teachers, is underpinned by, and aims to further develop a Bourdieuian perspective on the operation of schooling systems. We locate our understanding of the teacher job market in the context of a broader market-oriented education system, in which schools develop points of distinction (Bourdieu, 2010) so as to become the product of choice for parents and families and, as in the case of this article, the workplace of choice for teachers. Distinction, according to Bourdieu, is ‘difference, a gap, a distinctive feature, in short, a relational property existing only in and through its relation with other properties’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 6). As the research literature canvassed above has demonstrated, while positioning a school effectively within the market may not necessarily be about ‘innovation’ (Symes, 1998), it is nevertheless about looking ‘better’ than others (Maguire et al., 2011) and therefore ‘distinct’ in some way. As such, a Bourdieuian approach to this project is appropriate, with evidence that schools are engaging in increasingly concerted marketing efforts, both in Australia (McDonald et al., 2019) and elsewhere (Maguire et al., 2011).

The question follows as to how schools achieve ‘distinction’. According to Bourdieu (1986), while cultural capital ‘may be institutionalised in the form of educational qualifications’ (p. 16), the same qualifications, depending on the environment in which they are obtained, may nevertheless reflect ‘the acquisition of a different relation to culture’ (2010, p. 75). With the expansion of access to education to all social classes, ‘the effect is to force the groups whose reproduction was mainly or exclusively achieved through education to step up their investments so as to maintain … their position in the class structure’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 127). In Australia, such ‘stepping up’ has taken place in part through the growth of socially ‘restricted’ school sites (Windle, 2015), primarily within the fee-charging private sector. Another way in which distinction via education can be achieved is through ‘teachers [and] their teaching methods’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 76). One of three forms of cultural capital, the ‘embodied state’ (Bourdieu, 1986) is that of knowledge and dispositions appropriate to the field. Given current emphases on teacher quality (Mockler, 2020; Stacey, 2017), teachers’ embodied cultural capital may be particularly important in schooling fields today.

To understand how schools and school systems may make use of teachers and teaching in the development of distinction within the market, we draw on advertisements for teaching positions. While structural analyses can tend to downplay teacher agency, especially in the context of large-scale forces of marketisation and commercialisation (Hogan, Enright, Stylianou, & McCuaig, 2018), it is also incorrect to position teachers as somehow outside of or irrelevant to these forces. From a Bourdieuian perspective, teachers as agents can ‘make choices’, but ‘do not choose the principle of these choices’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1989, p. 45). In the analysis we present below, a reciprocal relationship between teachers and schools becomes evident. We show how teachers themselves must possess particular educational and cultural capital to meet the requirements outlined in the advertisements, thereby utilising the teacher job market so as to forward their careers. But at the same time, in procuring desirable teachers, schools are able to enhance their position in the hierarchy of schools, building their point of ‘distinction’.

Methodology

Research on constructions of images of teachers has thus far tended to focus on media and policy documents (e.g. Mockler, 2020, 2018). Research on school marketing has drawn heavily on prospectuses (e.g. Wardman et al., 2010), as well as sometimes school websites (e.g. Wilson & Carlsen, 2016). Unlike websites, prospectuses and policy, advertisements for teaching positions are necessarily short and therefore must condense desirable qualities into brief text. Recruitment advertisements are also necessarily, directly and primarily about teachers (although, as we will argue, such texts also do important advertising work for schools). In this paper, we draw on this relatively untapped data source of recruitment advertisements for teachers, as the most appropriate dataset through which to explore how schools and school sectors construct the desirable qualities of teachers today.

Advertisements were gathered from the key recruitment websites for each sector over the one-month period of August 2019. The first author and a research assistant logged and copied listings at least once a week during that month with the aim to ensure all new listings were captured. Websites used were the NSW Department of Education job feed (https://teach.nsw.edu.au/find-teaching-jobs/jobfeed) for public schools, seek.com.au for independent schools, and teachers.on.net for Catholic systemic schools (the latter two websites had some listings that overlapped; these were only counted once). Teachers.on.net is the site that Sydney Catholic Schools directs prospective teachers to use (Sydney Catholic Schools, 2019), while seek.com.au is one of the oldest and largest recruitment sites in Australia.¹ The initial search gathered a total of 1230 advertisements, which was reduced to 893 after the application of the following inclusion/exclusion criteria: each advertisement needed to concern a job in NSW, in an identified primary or secondary school(s); and not be a double-up across sites. The advertisement also had to be for an actual teaching position (including heads of faculties and primary school assistant principals, ‘leaders of learning’ and various ‘coordinator’ and Religious Education roles, but not deputy principals, principals or system-level consultants). Table 1 provides a summary of the online advertisement data analysed.

Table 1. Advertisement data summary for August 2019.

	Public	Catholic	Independent
Temporary	64	140	103
Permanent	290	73	139
Casual	0	37	22
Unclear	0	2	23
Total	354	252	287
Grand total			893

Note: Where both permanent and temporary, or part time and full-time roles were advertised together (n = 2 independent advertisements), these have been counted as permanent and full-time respectively.

To analyse the data, we drew on methods from corpus-based discourse analysis (Baker, 2006; Taylor & Marchi, 2018), specifically keyword, collocation and concordance analysis. Keyword analysis highlights the ‘aboutness’ (Scott, 2010, p. 43) of a group of texts, by identifying words that are used more frequently (in a statistically significant sense) in one group of texts than in another, thus indicating the distinctiveness of each group of texts. Collocation analysis identifies words that frequently occur together in a corpus, highlighting ‘the associations and connotations they have, and therefore the assumptions they embody’ (Stubbs, 1996, p. 172). Concordance analysis brings a qualitative dimension to the quantitative identification of keywords, through an exploration of the identified keywords in context. Many different statistical choices are available to researchers conducting keyword and collocation analysis (Baker, 2006). In the keyword analysis, Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) values were used as an indicator of significance, with a high degree of evidence (BIC≥10) required for a word to be identified as a keyword (Wilson, 2013). Keyword analysis also employs an effect-size statistic, which indicates the magnitude of the difference between the two groups of texts, and thus governs the ordering of keywords for selection for further analysis. In this case, the Log Ratio statistic (Hardie, 2014) was used, as, along with BIC, it is sensitive to the varying sizes of the corpora under investigation. A high threshold was set: to be identified as a keyword, a word had to appear approximately three times more frequently in the group of texts under investigation than in the comparison texts (LR≥1.5). Additionally, to ensure that a keyword was not identified by virtue of its appearance many times in a very small proportion of texts, a parameter was set to ensure that a keyword must appear in 10% of the texts in the group. For the collocation analysis, an intersection of the t-score (designating statistical significance) (t > 2) and the Mutual Information statistic (indicating the strength of the collocation) (MI > 3) was used, as suggested by Church, Gale, Hanks, Hindle, and Moon (1994).

Wordsmith Tools 8 (Scott, 2020) was used to conduct keyword analysis, comparing cleaned advertisements from each sector to those from the other two sectors. This focus on looking across sectors was deliberate, arising out of literature focusing on elite private schools and their marketing strategies (e.g. Wardman et al., 2010). At each point, extensive concordance analysis, using both Wordsmith 8 and AntConc 3 (Anthony, 2019), was conducted, to explore each keyword in context and to ensure that the meaning ascribed to each word was reflected in its usage across the group of texts. Collocation analysis was conducted to shed additional light on words identified in the keyword and concordance analysis to be of interest.

Using this method, 136 keywords were identified for the public sector advertisements, 97 for the Catholic sector, and 108 for the independent sector. Keywords were then independently coded and cross-checked by both researchers, who through this process inductively identified and sorted keywords into the broad categories of: candidate qualities, school qualities, remuneration and conditions, and systemic requirements. These categories were established and keywords were allocated to them through manual examination of each instance of each word in its context. We selected the categories of school and candidate qualities for our most extensive analysis, and here used concordance analysis to identify key themes, again analysed inductively through exploring the use of each term in context. Below, we provide a brief examination of school qualities, but reserve our most extensive discussion for candidate qualities, given our interest in this study in how teachers and teaching are constructed.

Results and discussion

Although our focus in this section is on representations of candidate qualities, it is worth noting that job advertisement texts also seek to construct images of potential workplaces. In this dataset, public sector keywords suggested a system of schools that needed to cater to a wide variety of student needs, from serving particular populations (‘Aboriginal’, ‘Torres Strait Islander’, ‘autism’, and ‘rural’ all appear as keywords for this sector) to enhancing particular talents (reflected in keywords ‘performing’ and ‘sport’). This sense of a ‘comprehensive’ system (contentious as the reality might be of such provision, e.g. Gerrard, 2018) was not evident in the analysis of private sector advertisements, however. Instead, the qualities for Catholic systemic schools were dominated by faith-related terms, being described, for example, as a ‘collaborative ministry of witness’, with an ‘evangelising mission’. Independent sector keywords, meanwhile, emphasised the schools’ ‘beautiful’ locations and other points of distinction such as ‘boarding’ facilities, describing the schools as ‘exciting’ institutions. Such distinct representations of schools play a part in the job market relationship, positioning the school so as to be chosen, and therefore applied to, by potential employees.

Candidate qualities

In this section, we present a discussion that interprets and contextualises the top 25 keywords for each sector. Table 2 presents a summary of these keywords as ordered by Log Ratio values and broken down into the two themes.

Table 2. Keywords indicating candidate qualities.

Candidate Qualities
Theme	Sector	Keyword
Teacher person and practice	Public	Initiate, build, wider, future, numeracy, engagement, improved, literacy, relationships
	Catholic	Achievable, learned, affects, contemporary, lives, feedback, continual, skilled, themselves, motivate, enrich, how, sound
	Independent	Passion, standard, motivated, you, candidate, candidates, enthusiastic, possess, excellent, love, dynamic
Meeting school and community needs	Public	Equitably, manage, directions, partnership, visible, teams, whole, implementation, individuals, executive, capacity, wellbeing, developed, lead, programmes, leadership
	Catholic	Inside, creatively, constructively, shares, matters, priest, parish, serve, faith, religious, share, beyond
	Independent	Christian, embrace, expected, participate, would, syllabus, HSC, ethos, advantage

Teacher person and practice

Across the three sectors, representations of teacher candidates reflect differing emphases upon the person as opposed to the practice of teaching. As such, while schools may seek to be distinguished by their ‘teachers’ or ‘teaching methods’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 76), the former seemed to receive the greatest emphasis in our dataset, with personal qualities increasingly a focus in Catholic, and then again in independent school advertisements. Out of the three, public sector advertisements maintain the closest focus on teacher practice, although mostly articulated around generic notions of ‘improvement’. The top-ranking keyword ‘initiate’, for example, is mostly used as part of the phrase ‘initiate improvement in teaching, learning and classroom practice’.

The word ‘improved’ also features as a keyword, referring primarily to teaching that leads to improved student outcomes; ‘improvement’ is a common collocate of the word ‘teaching’. This focus on improvement is interesting; in emphasising a need for improvement the advertisements, perhaps unintentionally, position public sector schools as currently inadequate. This resonates with the findings in McCandless’ (2015, p. 816) study of school advertising, where public schools were argued to put more of an emphasis on ‘academic study’ and discipline than independent schools, understood as an attempt to ‘reiterate that [public schools] are work locations’, while independent schools were more about development of unique individuals. In our dataset, the emphasis on ‘improvement’ operates similarly, emphasising public schools as fields where ‘work’ is needed, thereby ‘imposing cultural practices that [the school] does not teach and does not even explicitly demand’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 18): in particular, classed expectations of achievement. This argument of differential expectations is further supported by other keywords reflecting a need for embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) in what might be termed the ‘basic skills’ of ‘numeracy’, usually but not always collocated with ‘literacy’, and a need for candidates to ‘build’ ‘relationships’ and ‘engagement’ (primarily with students).

As with public sector advertisements, Catholic sector texts present teacher practice such that candidates are not expected to particularly excel but rather be competent: they must set ‘high’ but ‘achievable’ learning goals for ‘themselves’ and their students, provide ‘feedback’ and know ‘how’ to structure lessons and differentiate. As with the public sector, these keywords remain relatively generic; with the exception of feedback, they might apply to any profession, and they also have a relatively low modality (knowing ‘how’ to structure a lesson does not imply, for example, that it is done particularly well). More interesting perhaps is ‘contemporary’, another keyword, which functions similarly to ‘future’ in the public sector advertisements, calling for knowledge and delivery of contemporary understandings, learning and teaching, and pedagogy. That ‘contemporary’ and ‘future’ feature in Catholic systemic and public school keywords respectively, but not independent advertisements may reflect a noted tension for private sector schools, especially those which are older and wealthier, in maintaining a greater focus on the cultural capital represented in traditions of the past (see e.g. Symes, 1998), while the public sector, conversely, has been critiqued for being culturally deficient, ‘transmit[ting] irrelevant and dated knowledge’ (McDonald et al., 2012, p. 4), and may be seeking to counter such critiques. While reflecting such concerns of the field, ‘contemporary’ nevertheless remains a relatively non-specific word in the Catholic advertisements, while person-oriented terms are stronger and more specific. Although being ‘skilled’ and having ‘sound knowledge’ is not particularly high-level, other terms are sharper, including a need to ‘motivate’ and ‘enrich’ the ‘lives of our students’. As with public sector advertisements, the focus on practice in these advertisements is broad and general; yet here, the focus on the person becomes more specific, suggesting that what is valued is teachers’ embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) in ‘enriching’ students’ ‘lives’.

Indeed it is the independent school advertisements which are most extensive in their detailing of person-focused candidate qualities: ‘candidate’, ‘candidates’ and ‘you’ all appear as keywords. Interestingly, McCandless (2015, p. 816) found that photographs of teachers in school promotional material were more commonly one-on-one in independent schools, resembling ‘a parent with their child’ more than ‘the image of a teacher before an entire class’. This ‘personable’ emphasis reflects a focus on teacher rather than teaching ‘quality’ (Mockler, 2018). Given the hierarchy of emphasis on personal qualities (becoming more intense in focus from public, to Catholic, to independent sectors), it would also seem that such ideas of ‘teacher quality’ as a form of embodied cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) function differentially as signals of distinction (Bourdieu, 2010). Indeed, the independent school advertisements suggest a need to ‘excel’ more so than those of the public or Catholic systemic sectors, perhaps reflecting assumptions within the sector of better quality teachers (Variyan, 2019). Candidates for independent roles need ‘passion’, to be ‘motivated’, ‘dynamic’ and ‘enthusiastic’, embody a ‘high standard’ and be ‘excellent’ in their subject area and/or in communication, organisation, interpersonal and classroom management skills. The word ‘love’ also appears as a keyword, usually in relation to a love of subject area but sometimes in terms of religious commitment (e.g. supporting ‘the Gospel values of justice, peace, love, compassion, acceptance, generosity and service’ or ‘teaching the Augustinian values of Truth, Love and Community’). Quite explicitly, candidates are described as needing to ‘possess’ particular interpersonal or organisational skills, or a ‘proven record of student success’ or ‘“can do” attitude’. Interestingly, while superlative person-oriented terms feature strongly in this sector, a focus on ‘practice’ once again does not. This is also true when collocates of ‘teaching’ are examined; there is mention of general teaching ‘methodologies’, but nothing more specific than this.

Meeting school and community needs

The second overall theme in the candidate qualities is that of meeting school and community needs. This second theme is linked to the first, of teacher person and practice, in that meeting school and community needs requires candidates to demonstrate particular personal qualities and practices which ‘go together’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 229) with that of the school and ‘befit the occupants’ of the position (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 469). Public sector advertisements, for instance, suggest a need to support student ‘wellbeing’. There is also an apparent concern for candidates to be able to manage resources ‘equitably’ and work in ‘partnership’ with parents, the community and students, perhaps reflecting the sector’s enrolment of a wide range of students, including those experiencing educational disadvantage (Lamb et al., 2015). Candidates are required to engage with the school’s existing strategic ‘directions’ and ensure ‘implementation’ of shared visions, changes, syllabus documents, and ‘quality’ teaching. They must also be committed to and implement ‘programs’ (usually related to wellbeing, or ‘teaching and learning’) across the ‘whole’ school. There is therefore an emphasis on the ‘work’ of teaching, mostly in relation to meeting the needs of school contexts.

Prospective teachers in Catholic systemic schools are also required to be able to work within the expectations and culture of the school. There is a sentence that appears frequently in these advertisements, for instance, which requires candidates to ‘work creatively and constructively within a range of communities inside and beyond the school’. A key, and rather unique feature of the Catholic dataset, however, concerns religious commitment, and it is here that the person of the teacher again becomes central. The keyword ‘priest’ features in relation to the symbolic capital of a reference from a ‘parish priest’, as a ‘recognized, hence legitimate’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 75) authority that enables the delineation of those who do and do not belong; a method of mediation by religious institutions within educational ones. Relatedly, candidates also need cultural capital in the form of knowledge of and commitment to the Catholic ‘faith’ (with ‘faith’ also featuring as a school quality in describing schools’ ‘Catholic faith community’), so as to support and promote ‘religious’, academic and pastoral efforts in the school. Such requirements have been documented elsewhere in the literature, with individual schools requiring a range of commitments from individual teachers (e.g. Evans & Gaze, 2010). That these candidate qualities are presented across the dataset (albeit with a heavier concentration in schools in the Parramatta diocese), however, suggests an important interconnection between school and candidate religious identity in the Catholic systemic schools of NSW and the value of religious cultural capital in the teacher job market. This finding also extends the theme identified throughout the dataset of the importance of the teacher as person rather than teaching as practice, with the ‘person’ here articulated as one with individual, faith-based responsibilities who can ‘fit in’ with and thereby enhance the cultural capital produced by the school.

Finally, in the independent schools dataset, an explicit need to fit within the particular context of the school is also present. However, it takes on a somewhat different character, reflecting the market value of high academic achievement and the kinds of religious ‘values’ that are sometimes argued to be absent in, for instance, the public sector (Maddox, 2014). The keyword ‘advantage’ is associated with particular qualifications such as being able to teach high-level Mathematics, and there is a consistent emphasis on achievement as related to formal, external measures, with the keywords ‘syllabus’ and ‘HSC’² functioning as symbolic capital, with such terminology being ‘recognized as legitimate competence, as authority exerting an effect of (mis)recognition’ (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 18). Candidates must also be supportive of the Christian or sometimes more specifically Catholic ‘ethos’ and ‘values’ of the school. Although we note that faith-related keywords are less numerous in the independent sector than they are for Catholic systemic schools, these terms, as with those related to external measures of achievement, nevertheless express difference, and therefore distinction (Bourdieu, 2010) within the sector.

Conclusion

Distinction exists ‘only in and through the relationship, in and through difference’ (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 224) and the advertisements we have analysed demonstrate a clear hierarchy of sectoral differences. Public sector advertisements reflected a need for candidates who could support and build basic capitals like ‘literacy’ and ‘numeracy’, and cater to diverse student groups, including those experiencing disadvantage. At the other end of the spectrum, independent school advertisements described ‘beautiful’ school sites and sought ‘excellent’, ‘enthusiastic’, and ‘dynamic’ teachers. The advertisements therefore reflect the positioning of the education sectors in terms of advantage, with independent sector schools presenting themselves as particularly ‘distinct’ and desirable schooling spaces.

Such distinction is, importantly, mobilised through the figure of the teacher-as-person, which emerges within these advertisements as a form of cultural capital, with advertisements becoming a way of ‘asserting’ distinction (Bourdieu, 2010, p. 256). We do not argue this to be evidence of different classes of teachers; instead what we hope to highlight is how teachers are constructed as a mechanism of differences between schools, including relating to class. The ‘person’ and the ‘personal’ of the teacher is thus intertwined with the school market, an argument which connects with the identification of a growing focus on teacher rather than teaching quality (Mockler, 2018). The lack of focus on practice in our analysis suggests that teachers are valued more for their person, especially in Catholic and independent sectors, than for their expertise, reflecting a conception of teachers as charismatic individuals ‘born to do it’ rather than developed through professional learning and education (Moore, 2004).

This analysis extends our understanding of how cultural capital in teacher job markets can operate. The cultural capital possessed by teacher candidates (for instance, having particular religious credentials) can be converted into a competitive teaching salary in a wealthy independent school. Yet as Bourdieu (2010) has noted, and as we have demonstrated, value also flows in the other direction, with school sites able to obtain teachers’ cultural capital and integrate this into the fabric of the school ‘product’ on offer within the market. By focusing our analysis on teacher job advertisements in this article, we have therefore been able to offer new insights into how the socio-cultural economics of modern schooling operate, not only upon teachers, but specifically through them and the cultural properties they represent, contributing a new dimension to discussions of teacher ‘quality’ today.

While our use of corpus-assisted methods with teacher advertisement texts may be novel, however, we recognise that our analysis in this paper is necessarily narrow. Not everything that is considered important to a school can be included in a job advertisement text. Nevertheless, our findings do suggest features of candidates and schools deemed important enough to foreground in such limited space. Future research might consider teachers’ positioning within school advertising more broadly, so as to better understand the extent to and manner in which images of teachers are mobilised within school markets today.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the research assistant work of Dr Shannon Said, which supported the data collection for this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University of New South Wales: [Grant Number PS43393].

Notes

1 As seek.com.au is not agreed upon sector wide for independent school advertising, we acknowledge it is possible that some independent school advertisements were missed. However, we note that the number of advertisements procured is larger than the sector’s proportion of enrolments and as such we think it unlikely that many, if any, were missed.

2 The ‘HSC’ is the Higher School Certificate, referring to the final examination and assessment process for secondary schools.