Elitism for sale: promoting the elite school online in the competitive educational marketplace.

Drew, Christopher

Abstract

Australia's neoliberal education agenda drives a competitive market climate where schools compete for potential clientele. In this climate, school impression management and self-promotion has become an important factor in maintaining a financially viable school. Schools produce image management texts including school prospectuses, newspapers advertisements, and school websites. Examining fifteen elite school websites from New South Wales Australia, this paper argues that the websites construct elite ideological discourses in order to position themselves as desirable within the neoliberal education context. The placement of promotional images and hyperlinks in salient places on the websites reveals the importance of self-promotion and the production of images of elitism in the marketised education climate. The school websites examined are found to have multiple animated and interactive functions that are used in the promotion of the schools as elite.

Keywords

Educational marketing, websites, school choice, semiotics, competition, private schools

Introduction

Australia's schooling sector has been subjected to marketisation and privatisation under neoliberal rationalities advocated by successive Australian governments over the past three decades (Barcan, 2010; Youdell, 2004). Under the neoliberal agenda, the private education sector has claimed a significantly greater market share (Barcan, 2010), while the public sector has been forced to compete against the private sector for potential clients. This climate has precipitated the need for schools to promote themselves to achieve a slice of the market share and remain viable. In order to attract clientele, schools are increasingly producing costly promotional texts such as prospectuses, newspaper advertisements and television advertisements (Gottschall, Wardman, Edgeworth, Hutchesson, & Saltmarsh, 2010; Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004; Mills, 2004; Symes, 1998; Wardman, Hutchesson, Gottschall, Drew, & Saltmarsh, 2010). This paper examines elite boarding school websites as promotional texts, and argues that the semiotic design functions of the websites are influenced by the marketised neoliberal context in which they are produced. The marketisation agenda, it is argued, encourages image management and is implicated in the promotion of elitism and exclusivity.

Academic interest in school promotions has to date focussed on glossy print prospectuses developed by elite private schools (Gottschall et al., 2010; Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004; Saltmarsh, 2007; Symes, 1998; Wardman et al., 2010). This academic interest was instigated by Symes, whose keystone 1998 article Education for Sale in the Australian Journal of Education argues that school prospectuses are artefacts necessary in the post-privatisation educational climate if schools wish to compete in the education market. Since Symes' (1998) article, a small but growing number of academics have produced literature analysing the ideological rhetoric in print prospectuses, which is used to attain market share. In a number of the extant studies, fleeting observations have been made about the digitalisation of school advertising (Symes, 1998; Wardman et al., 2010). Symes, for example, explains websites as "buttoned-up prospectuses" (1998, p. 141), implying that websites mirror the promotional capabilities of their print counterparts. While the description of school websites as buttoned-up prospectuses may have been true at the time, in the years since Symes' influential study, broadband and the increased capacity of online bandwidth has vastly expanded the potential of the internet (Cranny-Francis, 2005), so that school websites are not merely online--or "buttoned-up"--prospectuses but have come to be both promotional and administrative hubs for school communities. Websites today have interactive and multimedia capabilities that surpass the visual and written semiotic capacities of their print prospectus counterparts. The internet domain has opened up new semiotic means--motive and sonic--for school advertisers to attract potential clientele. School websites are interactional domains through which communication can take place between schools and their communities. Websites can variously promote the school to potential clientele, provide newsletters for parents of current students and encourage former students ("old boys" and "old girls") to donate money.

The paper begins by outlining the trends in the literature on school promotional products. School promotions are explained here as products of the neoliberal era of school marketisation and privatisation. It then explains the study from which the data emerges, and includes a discussion of the selection of a corpus of fifteen elite school websites and a discussion of the social semiotic methods used for analysis. The functions of the elite school websites are then examined. I outline the ways schools can use animation, sound and movies on their websites in order to promote their elite credentials--a significant affordance available on the digital medium that was not available on print prospectuses.

School marketisation: neoliberalism and the promotion of the elite school ethos

Contemporary educational discourse in Australia is primarily dictated by a neoliberal economic agenda predicated on competition, consumerism and individualism within an open marketplace. Neoliberalism has emerged at different points in time in different societies and has taken on its own characteristics within specific assemblages of power (Davies & Bansel, 2007; Ong, 2006). In advanced liberal societies such as Australia, which are characterised by rhetoric of individual freedom and the prominence of the free market (Rose, 1999), neoliberalism functions in the subjectification of the individual as a consumer citizen whose social role is to serve the market as an economically justifiable subject (Apple, 2006). The neoliberal doctrine assumes that the free market "will distribute resources efficiently and fairly according to effort" (Apple, 2005, p. 276). In this context, privatisation of capital and dilution of governmental market intervention is embraced, allowing market forces to dictate terms of trade (Stromquist, 2002). In Australia, neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s and 80s through governmental subsidisation of private provision of services (Davies & Bansel, 2007). Perhaps representative of the aggressiveness of neoliberal policies specifically in Australia, the 1990s saw ongoing governmental financial sponsorship of the growing private school sector to encourage parents, as choice-makers, to make the move to private schooling (Barcan, 2010; Davies & Bansel, 2007). The public provision of free education has consequently been steadily dismantled and public education has been "reconstituted under neo-liberalism as part of the market" (Davies & Bansel, 2007, p. 254). This has precipitated the growth of the Australian private schooling sector while leaving public education exposed to competition from private schools (Barcan, 2010).

The marketisation agenda provides the conditions for discourses of wealth and elitism to flourish (Gottschall et al., 2010; Saltmarsh, 2007). Social democratic philosophies of education as a free and accessible service used for the good of the collective public, regardless of wealth or social standing, are undermined in such a free-market climate (Barcan, 2010; Campbell, 2007). Wealthy citizens are rewarded for their wealth by being able to purchase exclusive "elite" education that carries with it social and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1997). Those citizens who cannot afford elite schooling are restricted in the ability to exercise choice within the education market, and are denied access to schools at the elite end of the private spectrum that carry with them the symbols of exclusivity and privilege.

Elite private schools constitute "a small subset of nonpublic schools" (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009) that are distinctive from both government schools and middle-class private schools. The characteristics of elite private schools that demarcate them as "elite" are perhaps most effectively outlined by Gaztambide-Fernandez (2009) who provides a set of five markers of elitism that, while not all necessarily present in all elite schools, are generally used to distinguish elite schools as elite. The identification of elite schools as private, he argues, is one constituent determinant of elitism inasmuch as it affords the schools the capacity to exclude undesirable clientele. Sophistication of curriculum, similarly, can position schools as elite. This can typically take the form of extracurricular activities culturally aligned with elite education such as rowing and rugby (Light & Kirk, 2001). Third, the schools' historical standings serve as particularly important markers of elitism, whereby their longevity functions as a signifier of generational cultural capital that mainstream public and private schools can often not match. This demarcation is particularly pertinent given the rapid growth of the Australian private schooling sector since the 1970s, which came as a result of neoliberal rationalities in education policy making (Barcan, 2010). The most elite of private schools can use longevity beyond this date as a selling point of institutional lineage available to only a small club of private schools. Fourth, geographical elitism--promoting architecture and vast grounds--further provides a signifier of wealth exceeding the average private or public school (Gottschall et al., 2010; Symes, 1998). Lastly, the ability to boast influential alumni and famous clientele can position schools as above the fray of the average school and thus elite (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009).

Since the exposure of the education sector to market forces and subsequent competition between schools for potential clients (Apple, 2006; Barcan, 2010), schools from public, private and elite education sectors have increasingly used aesthetic symbolism to promote their ideological narratives to attract potential clientele (Gottschall et al., 2010; Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004; Mills, 2004; Saltmarsh, 2007; Symes, 1998; Wardman et al., 2010). Studies have emerged which primarily examine elite school print prospectuses for the ways they construct ideological discourses of social class, gender and exclusivity in order to position themselves as desirable within the marketised climate. Notably, Symes (1998) argues that the production of print prospectuses by schools has been increasingly necessary as a result of the neoliberal restructuring of education discourses. Educational artefacts, Symes argues, can construct an elite aesthetic for schools attempting to position themselves as desirable for potential clientele.

Symes' study was a keystone text that led the way for subsequent studies to examine how schools attempt to position themselves as elite in print prospectuses, and, how schools' representation practices are implicated in the (re)construction of discourses about the ideal elite school subject (Gottschall et al., 2010; Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004; Saltmarsh, 2007; Wardman et al., 2010). School prospectuses can develop schools' credentials as elite institutions, positioning attendance at the schools as a symbol of cultural capital (Saltmarsh, 2007). These texts can similarly position the schools as desirable for the development of moral and conservative standing within societies (Gottschall et ah, 2010; Meadmore & McWilliam, 2001; Saltmarsh, 2007; Wardman et al., 2010). Particularly, scholars have identified how print prospectuses can position schools as institutions that regulate students' gender identities in order to raise children with desirably heteronormative masculine (Gottschall et al., 2010) and feminine (Wardman et al., 2010) subjectivities. These image management strategies, while used to position the schools as desirable institutions, simultaneously reproduce images of elite private schooling as a superior model of education, privileging exclusivity and gender norms as images of educational success (Gottschall et al., 2010; Saltmarsh, 2007; Wardman et al., 2010). Therein, the image management practices of elite schools actively work to shape discourses of educational "excellence" within the neoliberal context.

The study

Examining fifteen elite boarding school websites, which were analysed over a 3-month period in 2012, this paper considers how the websites produce elitism in order to attract potential clientele. The websites were selected through criterion sampling, whereby a criterion for the selection of data is designated at the beginning of the study (Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2007). With a focus on the makeup of schools in the specifically Australian neoliberal context, the criterion for data selection was: schools from New South Wales, Australia, which are private boarding schools, which run websites. Private boarding schools were selected because they are considered to be at the forefront of the marketisation agenda (Campbell, 2007; Gottschall et al., 2010). Boarding schools that are elite historically "represent clear examples of the 'ideal type' of [elite] school" (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009, p. 1096) as they represent a more concentrated elite lifestyle context. Private boarding schools in Australia are run by non-government bodies that manage the schools with financial sustainability in mind (Campbell, 2007). They work to attract clientele through the selling of their educational value to potential clients, and are thus representative of schools at the forefront of neoliberal rationalities. The schools selected collectively compete for clientele from across the state of New South Wales, the nation and, increasingly, the world (Campbell, 2007). These clientele include rural families (Welch, 2007), wealthy Australian families and wealthy international families. A list of private schools was taken from the New South Wales Board of Studies website (NSW Board of Studies, 2012), from which a shortlist of boarding schools was taken. Online search engines were used to find the schools' websites. Fifteen school websites were located for the analysis. An alphabetic system to describe school names--School A through School O has been developed in no particular order to de-identify the schools discussed in the study.

Social semiotic analysis was used to glean information from the websites about their functions and designs. A semiotic analysis involves the analysis of the signifying practices of a text in order to develop an understanding of the meaning being conveyed (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The semiotic approach employed in this paper draws on the "social" semiotic method of analysis of multimodal texts informed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and Cranny-Francis (2005). Social semiotics (Hodge & Kress, 1988) differs from the semiotics of early structuralist semioticians by examining the ways semiotic signs are situated within specific contexts that inform the text. As Symes argues, "mainstream semiotics, particularly in its Saussurean incarnations, had tended to be context-devoid" (1998, p. 135). In what Symes calls "the socialisation of semiotics" (1998, p. 135), semioticians in the late 1980s and 1990s began to consider context as an important factor in the creation of meaning. Accordingly, a social semiotic methodology acknowledges that textual signs must be considered within a specific context. The signifiers must be considered in relation to the cultural (Hodge & Kress, 1988) and intertextual (Cranny-Francis, 2005) inferences that can inform the reading of the text.

In this study, the political climate of marketisation, image management and consumerism--broadly under the banner of neoliberal economics (Apple, 2006)--forms a significant part of the context with which the websites are viewed. The images, text and hyperlinks placed on the websites, and their location on the pages, can reveal the ways the schools are situated within a political rationality that sets the schools' priorities and constructs a hierarchy of political values. Schools observe these rationalities in order to remain viable institutions in this climate of school marketisation. The semiotic functions of the websites are thus not considered as context devoid; rather, the website designs are significantly influenced by, and reveal, the priorities set by prevailing political rationalities.

Selling points: the designs of elite boarding school websites

Online promotion on school websites represents a progression in mediums for image management from print to digital as schools continue to seek out new ways to market themselves to prospective clients. School websites deliver an initial symbolic impact for schools: the use of a website situates the school as a digitally savvy, contemporary and professional institution. As Symes notes, school promoters will do "anything to press home ... that the school is keeping abreast of the latest technology" (1998, p. 144). A schools's competence with information technology can instantly send a message to prospective clients that the institution can provide its students with a competitive edge in an information age.

When potential clients--local, national and international use search engines to access information about elite schools, they are directed to the homepages of the school websites. The information placed on homepages holds symbolic importance as the "first impression" that the viewer of a school website will have of the school. For prospective clients searching for schools for their children, this can be the first time that they have ever had any contact with the school, so the homepage functions as a high-stakes text. The school website's contents and the representation of them are therefore highly relevant to the school's image management practices. Over and beyond the traditional school promotional medium of school prospectuses, school websites have semiotic functions unavailable to the print medium--namely, animation and sound. Elite schools can now promote their elite identity online, using not only the traditional textual and visual modes but also sonic functions and digital animations.

Most school websites in this study had prominent hyperlinks to embedded pages promoting the schools' boarding experience to both Australian and overseas students. The international promotional function on the websites is indicative of the ways these elite schools have positioned themselves to benefit from the lucrative education market precipitated by neoliberal restructuring of the education sector. Here, education is seen through the neoliberal frame of economic profiteering as opposed to as a free and accessible social good. The schools sell their boarding and educational experience as a prime opportunity for Asian children to prepare for a globalised workforce by familiarising themselves with the English language and western cultures. An embedded video on the School C website, for example, highlights the benefits to specifically Asian students who want to board at the school in order to learn English to make the most of globalisation when they enter the workforce. A student on the video explains, "My parents want me to improve my English and get a better job in the future." Furthermore, the video attempts to differentiate School C from its inner-city counterparts and gain a slice of the international market share by promoting the advantages of schooling in the countryside. An Asian student explains that "I did have many choices for my schooling in Australia but I chose [School C] because it's in the countryside and that takes away more [sic] distractions." These promotions to prospective international clientele on the elite boarding school websites thus function to both position the schools as education exporters in a globalised and neoliberal education climate of education as a profit-making industry and differentiate schools from their competitors in order to attract potential international clientele.

Of interest here is how the schools' promotions target not only traditional ruling-class Australian families but also wealthy and savvy international potential clientele. The interaction between the traditional Australian elite school clientele and non-traditional international elite school clientele is delicately framed by the elite boarding schools. School J, for example, sells the international flavour of the school as beneficial to the traditional elite school client base by exclaiming that the international student group "[provides] a rich diversity and broadens our perspectives along with assisting all students to embrace our growing global world." The school thereby attempts to simultaneously attract new international clientele and use them as a selling point to retain the traditional, Australian, elite school client base.

Key iconography of elite school websites

A key icon on all school website homepages is the school name. On the websites examined in the study, the school name was most commonly provided in large, bold and capitalised text written in strong font in the upper-left or upper-middle sections of the page, along with an image of the school crest. Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) identify the left-hand segment of a page as the location for representation of something that is an anchoring position, providing the image that orients the viewer to the text. The top of the page, meanwhile, is the place for idealistic images which orient the viewer to the idealised narrative of the institution (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). It is a location where the school's ideals and ethos can be promoted. Often large, capitalised and emboldened, the school name is designed to be a highly salient element of the web page. It is intended to be the first thing that the eyes see on the screen, demanding attention and orienting the viewer to the school to which the webpage belongs. The font selected for the school name is revealing of the school's desired image. For example, School C, and all-boy's school, has its school name written in strong font which is bold and upright like a stoic stone pillar, with angular Roman serifs. The regal font represents the school's desired image of majesty and grandeur. As van Leeuwen (2006) explains, angularity can signify stoicism and masculinity, as opposed to personal and feminine cursive font. Similarly, its boldness signifies daring and assertiveness as opposed to the delicacy of thin font (van Leeuwen, 2006). This all-boy's elite school thus uses the stoic and masculine font on this website to signify that it is a regal and strong locale. The font used in the school name at the top of the homepage can thus orient the viewer to the identity of the elite schools--both in name and character.

Alongside the school name is often a school crest. The school crest is a symbolic anchoring sign that often contains images such as open books to signify scholarship, swords to signify strength, holy crosses to signify Christianity and Latin mottoes to signify tradition and cultural elitism (Synott & Symes, 1995). These images are strategically placed on the crest to signify and valorise the elite ethos of the school. Accordingly, the school crest is placed on the school homepage to mark the homepage as a location governed by the school's elite values. For example, one school's crest, which is placed on the top-left of the homepage beside the school name, is described elsewhere on the website:

The open book represents the Bible; the stars are those of the Southern Cross; the shell represents the connection between the School and [parent school], from whose funds the School was founded; while the Torch refers to the School's motto. (School A)

Here, the coordinates are set for this school's religious (Bible), national (Southern Cross) and economic and cultural associations (funding from parent school). The school thus reinforces its commitment to particular elite ideological narratives, which position it within the marketplace: it is a Christian school, proud of its Australian identity and economic ties to another elite private school. The school motto, to which the torch refers, is written along the bottom of the school crest. This motto, vitai lampada tradunt, written in Latin to signify traditionalism (Synott & Symes, 1995), translates to "They hand on the Torch of Life"--signifying the goal of the school to "hand on" its elite traditions to future generations. The school is referring to its majesty by highlighting the longevity of the school. By promoting its traditions, the school is indicating to the observer that it is a "historically elite" (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009, p. 1093) school that can boast longevity beyond the average, and therefore less exclusive, school--private or otherwise. All of this information about the eliteness of the school is visually incorporated into the school crest, which in turn is placed on the homepage, inculcating this school's homepage with the valorised elite values produced on the school crest.

On the top-centre or top-right of the school website homepages is often an animated image which acts as a first photographic impression of the elite school, its architecture or its grounds. A key understanding in semiotics is that the right-hand segment of a screen is dedicated to information that is new to the viewer--something to be learned (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). The top, as stated, represents the ideal (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). Accordingly, the images placed on the top-right of school websites are often idealistic images of a particularly significant schooling location or happening which the school would like to promote. For example, School B has images of its shining new classrooms on the top right to signify the school's innovation, which fades after a few seconds into an image of the school's majestic old dormitory buildings which signify tradition. The two images symbolically construct an impression of the elite boarding school as both traditional and innovative; both conservative and pioneering (Meadmore & Meadmore, 2004). The blend of tradition and innovation are used as selling points for the school, simultaneously promoting its longevity as an elite education provider and promoting its continued deliverance of elite education into the present day. Another school (School A) has in this upper-right section an image of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In the case of this school, the image of the bridge highlights the significance of the elite school's geographical location. It shows the viewer that the school is in the heart of a world famous city. This, perhaps, is to create the school's image as being a part of, and equally as savvy as, a bustling world city (Gottschall et al., 2010; Symes, 1998). By placing the image of

the harbour bridge on the website, the school is positioning itself within the marketplace as having a unique connection to Sydney, its landmarks, and their associated prestige. As Gaztambide-Fernandez (2009) points out, the geographical positioning of the school is a central indicator of a school's exclusivity, and thus elite credentials. Prestigious spaces "mark the atmosphere of elite boarding schools" (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009, p. 1108) inasmuch as they indicate that the schools have acquired some of the most desirable lands possible. Furthermore, the symbolism of the lands as private and gated as opposed to public parklands or sporting grounds highlights the exclusivity of the schools. Not only do the schools have access to the grounds but that have exclusive access to them. The message to potential clients is that their children, too, can gain access to such exclusive locales by purchasing the school's education experience. Geographical exclusion of people who do not attend the schools thus functions as a central tenant to the symbolism of elite school education. It serves a particularly pertinent function in the image of School A as an all-boys school inasmuch as space and gender intersect to highlight how this space is both exclusive to the wealthy and to males. The masculinity of the school is therefore highlighted by the private space of the school, as if to say that behind the gates of this elite school is one of the few spaces that can be shared by wealthy men, to the exclusion of all others. The great symbolism of the images of exclusive lands on the elite school websites is thus not only the amassment of lands but the amassment of lands in ways that marginalise in terms of social class and gender.

Image management: prominence of promotion over administration

Often, directly beneath the top-of-page elements on school webpages--the school name, crest and a photograph of school grounds--is a menu (row) or sidebar (column) of hyperlinks. What typifies these hyperlinks, for the most part, is that they are located towards the top, left or top-left segments of the website to make them highly accessible (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006). These hyperlinks link to other pages on the elite school website, which provide further information about the school. Interestingly, the hyperlinks placed closest to the top-left link to value-laden internal webpages that continue to promote the school's exclusivity and elite ethos to prospective clients. This reveals the importance the schools place on the promotional aspects of the website--practical and banal administrative functions such as links to absentee forms and excursion details are buried deeper in the websites. In the neoliberal marketised educational climate where attracting clientele is central to the school's economic success, the websites must maximise their promotional functions by placing them in the most accessible location. These accessible links have titles such as "Values and Attitudes," "School History" and "Principal's Message." By placing the most important hyperlinks in the idealistic top-left segment of the screen (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006), the schools subtly recommend the order in which content should be read, with the most important value-laden webpages first. In so doing, schools attempt to resist the capability of digital texts to be read in a non-chronological order (Cranny-Francis, 2005) and attempt to control the viewer's experience. On the School A homepage, for example, beneath the school crest, school name and image of the Harbour Bridge, is a row of drop-down hyperlinks. Towards the left of the row of drop-down hyperlinks is a drop-down heading titled "About." It reveals numerous hyperlinks, among which are the titles: "Headmaster's welcome," "[School A]'s Beginnings" and "A Christian School." Significantly, the placement of a principal's message hyperlink as one of the most prominent hyperlinks reflects the authoritative importance of the principal (Symes, 1998). Likewise, the placement of a values and attitudes hyperlink (i.e. "A Christian School") as one of the most prominent hyperlinks indicates the high importance of promotion of school values and attitudes on the school websites. Whilst not all religious schools are elite, Christian ethos can function as a typological (Gaztambide-Fernandez, 2009) symbol of elitism that demarcates the elite school as more exclusive and discerning than non-elite public schools that are characteristically secular and accessible to a broader working and lower middle-class market segment.

Many of the elite school websites also offer drop-down menus for newsletters and current affairs for present school clients to keep in touch with the school. Archives of school newsletters and links to calendars of upcoming events allow schools to continue to manage their elite image to current clients throughout their affiliation with the school. "Events" pages list upcoming school events such as musical concerts, school holiday camps and parent-teacher meetings. "Publications" pages provide school newsletters downloadable in PDF form. These publications are updated on a regular basis, while archived publications are made available on many of the websites for download. Remaining consistent with the conservative-traditional theme of the School A website, the downloadable forms are sorted by terms of the school year (1 to 4) written in the historical roman numerals format, i.e. "Term IV." Furthermore, again for current clients, crested uniform and goods can be purchased from the many school websites through hyperlinks. Crested goods identified included crested towels, umbrellas, golf balls, stress balls, teaspoons, playing cards, dog leads and wall plaques among other assorted goods. These goods not only bring money into the school upon purchase but also continue to promote the elite school in the marketplace when the buyers wear the crested goods in public. This reiterates the elite schools' engagement in the neoliberal consumerist agenda. With this array of communicative and promotional resources, the elite school websites examined here do not merely reflect their print counterparts--that is, function as "buttoned-up" prospectuses but are rather dynamic promotional and administrative hubs for communication of elite ethos between potential, present and future clientele. While the administrative functions are buried further into the websites than promotional functions, administrative functions are representative of the new capacities that an online presence makes available to schools.

Conclusion

Neoliberal rationalities that have governed educational policy in Australia have posited schools as products in an education market. This competitive market climate has encouraged the production of school advertising texts. While these texts traditionally took the form of print prospectuses (Symes, 1998), schools are increasingly using school websites to appeal to potential clientele. With a focus on elite school websites, this paper has examined how elite schools use interactive, animated and sonic functions in the self-promotion of the schools' elite ethos in the education marketplace. These functions provide schools with more dynamic and interactive marketing capabilities than are available on the print format. Furthermore, whereas print prospectuses are exclusively targeted at potential future clientele, websites can be used by schools to communicate with and manage their elite image not only to potential clients but also current and past school patrons.

This paper has explored the capabilities of elite school websites--both promotional and administrative--and argued that the current political context of neoliberalism has facilitated the promotion of elitist and exclusionary school imaginaries. The placement of the images and hyperlinks promoting the schools' elitism in the most salient and accessible locations shows the necessary importance schools place on image management on websites in a climate where they must compete for prospective clientele. The websites frequently construct narratives of geographical, historical, religious and gendered exclusivity in order to position the schools as locations where elite cultural capital can be attained. Alongside promotional capabilities, school websites have the capacity to conduct administrative functions such as provide newsletters and purchasing of crested school goods. This represents a significant advancement in the communication capacities of schools. These administrative functions, however, were found to be secondary to the promotional and image management functions of the elite school websites.

Declaration of conflicting interests

None declared.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

DOI: 10.1177/0004944113485838

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Christopher Drew

PhD candidate, School of Education, Australian Catholic University (Strathfield), Australia

Corresponding author:

Christopher Drew, School of Education, Australian Catholic University, Locked Bag 4115 DC, Fitzroy VIC 3065, Australia.

Email: christopher.drew@acu.edu.au