Over the last decade, education researchers have been concerned with the ‘impression management’ activities of schools in the current climate of school corporatisation. Among these activities is the dissemination of school prospectuses that, far from being merely arbitrary sources of information, are seen as strategic texts that communicate the ethos of educational providers to potential clientele. Through sociocultural, feminist and post-structuralist frames, we consider how the positioning of masculinities is utilised as a marketing technique in such texts and, in turn, how such texts are implicated in the discursive construction of idealised schooling subjectivities. We undertake a semiotic analysis of the prospectuses of six private boys schools in the Sydney region of New South Wales, Australia, considering how masculinities are represented within binaries that position older boys as hard, strong and capable, and younger boys as small, weak and vulnerable. We argue that schooling is depicted in these texts as providing the necessary training ground for boys making the transition from boyhood to manhood. We argue that these images of masculinity continue to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with narrow notions of social privilege.

This article continues a discussion about the ways in which gender is constructed in the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. While before we focused on the construction and promotion of valorised masculinities in elite private boys school prospectuses (Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson & Saltmarsh, 2010), we now extend that work by investigating the versions of femininity celebrated in the promotional materials of elite girls schools. We also contrast, compare and critique the subjectivities constructed by elite private girls schools in relation to the elite private boys schools. Drawing on feminist and post-structuralist theoretical frames and semiotic techniques, we consider how the text, layout and images of the prospectuses work to legitimate and/or disrupt hegemonic versions of ‘well-rounded’ femininity predicated on physical beauty, passivity and subservience.

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The notion of responsibility makes a significant appearance in a range of Westernised education policy documents concerned with student conduct, welfare and values. While policies may differ in the extent to which responsibility is explicitly defined or generally assumed, most seem to emphasise an ideal social subject who is accountable, self-regulating and actively contributing to civic life. Drawing on insights from Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler, I argue that the emphasis on neoliberal and neoconservative discourses in Australian educational policy can work to undermine more unconditional forms of responsibility grounded in notions of ethics, care and recognition of the other.

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