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Where to for school leavers?
11 October 2008
As the end of the school year approaches for Year 12 students, decisions are being made about what to do in 2009. These decisions will impact on the future of the young people involved, as well as on the region. Our community is concerned about maintaining the Coast lifestyle, sustainability, population growth and the types of services and employment that will be available in the coming years. Education and training are a vital component of finding solutions to these issues, so reviewing past behaviour by school leavers provides a guide to how we’re building the Coast of the future. Data released annually since 2005 by the Queensland Government provide an interesting, if not concerning, insight.
To put things into perspective, in terms of standards of living and educational attainments, Australia often benchmarks itself against the OECD countries (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Here there has been a very substantial increase in the proportion of school leavers going into university based study. It was 35 percent in 1995 and 57 percent in 2006. On the Sunshine Coast, we also had 35 percent of school leavers going to university in 1995, however, by this year the proportion had dropped to only 28 percent. It’s a bit of a worry given 41 percent of Brisbane based school leavers went to university this year. And it doesn’t represent a redistribution to TAFE. Participation here has dropped from 25 percent in 2005 to 22 percent in 2008.
For the region, if we add together the number going to university and the number deferring a university place, that is taking a gap-year or two, the proportion of school leavers indicating they are, or intend going to, university is about 42 percent. This proportion this has remained fairly constant over the last 5 years but is well behind Brisbane where the figure has been consistently over 50 percent. And it is a very long way behind what is happening in other OECD countries.
So the declining trend in university, and for that matter post-secondary, education on the Sunshine Coast is related to taking a break following high school. The deferral rate for the Sunshine Coast has increased from around 8 percent in 2005 to 14 percent for the current year, and this is roughly double the rate for Brisbane based students. The main reasons for taking a break are related to wanting a rest from study, working to have enough money to do further study or get youth allowance, or not having decided what career to follow.
While it is tempting to believe that many of these young people are taking up highly paid employment in the mining sector and elsewhere this isn’t the case. A significant majority are in part-time employment and the major employment categories are sales assistants, food handlers and labourers. Despite the recent economic prosperity and low unemployment rates, it is very difficult for these young people to get fulltime work, especially for females. The total number of fulltime jobs available to school leavers Australia wide has changed little for 10 years.
Many of the gap-year students will return to study at university or TAFE eventually, but by that time many of them will also have left the Sunshine Coast. This is a potential problem for our region because research quite clearly indicates that if people are trained locally they tend to stay and work locally. If they go away to university, the likelihood of them coming back home to begin a career is greatly reduced. To build the type of region the community says it prefers for the future, we need a more highly educated and trained workforce. A key component to achieving this will be ensuring that more of our school leavers do complete post secondary education and training here locally.
Professor Greg Hill is Acting Vice-Chancellor at the University of the Sunshine Coast.