Explore – GAE: Grassroots Activism and Education

GAE aims to present and inspire new ways of engaging with and researching policy by focusing on the community groups that were animated by education reform, rather than narratives of policy successes and failures.

The GAE database has been produced through two research activities:

We identified 14 major Australian federal and state education policy inquiries from the 1970s and 1980s that received submissions from community groups. Conventionally, a list of submissions to inquiries was provided as part of each inquiry’s report, or locatable through adjunct papers.* We then focused on identifying the groups and associations who made submissions to each inquiry, and found them to include: community groups, parent and citizens organisations, unions and advisory councils and peak organisations.
The production of newsletters was a key community organising activity during this period. We identified a number of community groups invested in education activism and policy agitation through the newsletters they produced, now deposited in archival and library collections. This is by no means an exhaustive list and we hope that this generates further interest in researching the newsletters of this period.

In taking this approach, it is notable that some of these community groups have little or no other traces in the historical record. Many of these groups were ad hoc, ephemeral and almost invisible in the public record, while others either grew or were absorbed into more formal structures and yet others were subgroups, splits or fractions of larger organisations. Some of these groups may have been formed for the purposes of responding to the policy inquiries, enmeshing these inquiries in the making of grassroots community organising.

This database constitutes one major arm of research related to our larger ARC project. Other outputs and foci can be found on our publications page.

*We have been unable to find the submissions to the White Paper on Strategies and Structures for Education in Victorian Government Schools (1980).