Overview

Sue Thomas provides a meticulously detailed account of the relation between media representations of education policy, and the process through which policy is developed. Focusing upon a major review of the Queensland school curriculum, known as the Wiltshire review after its chair, Professor Ken Wiltshire, Sue Thomas provides us with an analysis not only of the process and outcomes of the review-itself an important contribution-but she also presents a detailed analysis of the mass mediated context in which it took place and therefore the issues and public pressures with which it was required to deal...

What Sue Thomas's book does is open up a whole area of investigation - the media discourses used to represent education-as fundamental to an accurate and informed sense of the context within which the actual work of education goes on. The links between public perception and policy formation are explicit and dramatic, in this account, substantiating Sue Thomas's conviction that educationists would be well served by better understanding, and perhaps directly intervening in, the media representation of education issues and policy.

This is brave and eminently useful research. Brave, because it works across several disciplinary fields where there has been a failure to accept the importance of the issues it raises. Taking on several disciplines at once to remind each of them of the gaps in their understanding is certainly an important task, but it takes courage and endurance to complete. Useful, because while the project has a highly political provenance, it is not a work of polemic: it is detailed, thorough, and socially engaged research. The evidence presented here will enable further study and carries potential to expand the range of information available to the disciplines concerned.... this is a most valuable piece of work that deserves publication and dissemination amongst all those interested in the public debate about Australian education.