The blonde girls are in focus, studious kids are Asian and only white boys get a kick, a study of the images used in promotional material for Victorian schools has found.

Deakin University's Trevor McCandless analysed the marketing materials in government, Catholic and independent schools for his PhD thesis to see how these represented "the schools' best guess at what parents find attractive for their children".

Schools uniformly use photos of white children in their promotional material, according to Trevor McCandless. Credit:File image

"The darker a student's skin, the less likely they are to be the centre of attention in the image or even in focus," he said.

While schools rarely mentioned ethnicity in written text, Dr McCandless' PhD thesis found they uniformly picked images in their prospectuses and videos that suggested unconscious stereotypes, resulting in a "colour-coded hierarchy [that] is repeated to the point of tedium".