Being different and the same? The paradoxes of 'tailoring' in education quasi-markets

In Australia, market-based education policies promote the notion that government schools should flexibly tailor secondary education to the needs of young people and their local communities. Far from offering a "one size fits all" system, policies seek to enable clients (parents, students) to exercise freedom of choice in quasi-markets that offer different educational products to different individuals. The intended effect is a kind of bespoke education tailoring, whereby schools operate as flexible service providers, adapting to the needs and desires of local markets. In this paper, I analyse the policy turn towards market tailoring as part of broader shifts towards advanced liberal governance in education. Following this, I feature interviews with educators in two socially disparate government secondary schools in the Australian city of Melbourne. In doing so, I analyse the extent to which each school tailors its marketing practices to its local community. These interviews suggest inherent contradictions emerge when tailoring is attempted in a hierarchical market with normative and rigid indicators of 'brand value'. Schools are caught, I argue, between paradoxical demands, requiring them to be simultaneously different and the same.