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For many parents, text books, biros, new school shoes and uniforms are minor expenses compared to the cost of the upper school ball, an event increasingly being scheduled early in the school year.

But there is more to this, according to Dr Martin Forsey, an educational anthropologist at The University of Western Australia, who says that while school balls are fun for many, for others they are traumatic occasions which only emphasise some students' lack of sophistication.

Dr Forsey suggests that with the balls' significance often outweighing that of the TEE in the eyes of some students, schools need to reclaim control, perhaps by taking the ball out of the five-star ballroom and returning it to the school hall.

Dr Forsey is becoming known as an expert on Australian high schools.  He not only taught in secondary school for several years, he has also undertaken extensive fieldwork as an anthropologist and sociologist at a Perth secondary school he dubbed Ravina High.

During his PhD research, Dr Forsey spent time with students in classrooms, recreational areas, formal meetings and informal gatherings, on a Bali study tour, an orientation camp and a sail training course for students deemed at risk of educational failure.  The paper he is currently working on focuses on the Year 12 ‘Dream Ball' that marked the end of his period of ethnographic research at the school.

"The annual school ball for final year students is now almost universal in WA high schools.  It is also widespread in Australia and in other parts of the English-speaking world," he said.

"The ball provides an opportunity for young people to express their taste and sophistication, to symbolically demonstrate their grown-up status and show that they can start taking their place as stylish, urbane adults in the world beyond school.

"However, for some it is a time when their social awkwardness is magnified.  In other words, complex politics and hierarchies of individual status and social class are on display, and ritual humiliations are extended beyond a school's quadrangles and yards," Dr Forsey said.

Media references

Dr Martin Forsey 61 8  6488 3880
0400 757 123
Simone Hewett / Sally-Ann Jones (UWA Public Affairs)  61 8  6488 7977
0420 790 097 / 0420 790 098