Author: Melinda Cilento, CEO, CEDA
For those of us looking to the future and determined to drive conversations and policy change that will set Australia and future generations of Australians up for success, our education and training system and outcomes are critically important.
In the face of population ageing and commensurate need for care services, rapid digitisation and technological advance, a decarbonising energy transition and the need to adapt to climate change, ensuring that future generations have the skills and capabilities to fill emerging roles and jobs will be vital to their success and to Australia’s ability to respond to these challenges and seize new opportunities.
While there has been much focus on STEM skills, we also need creative skills to work with technology (not least to keep it human) and managers better able to identify opportunities for innovation and to deal with flexibility and diversity – that is with so called dynamic capabilities.
We will require many thousands of more professional carers with hard and soft skills, and in the face of a declining share of people of ‘typical’ working age, we will need skills to use technology to enable those who want to, to work for longer, and to enable relatively lower-skilled workers to perform additional, higher value adding tasks (for example, using technology to enable health diagnostics and monitoring in a care setting).
It is also important that we do not focus solely on education and skills in terms of the path to future paid work and employment. There is a far broader aspect to the return on our education investment, namely to enable people to connect with one another, to be confident, resilient, persistent, organised, empathetic, curious, and able to get along. These are key characteristics that help individuals engage in all aspects of civic society and to lead engaged and fulfilled lives, whether through family, work, community, sports, and creative pursuits, or ideally a little bit of all of the above.
Our educational system and institutions need to be adaptive and relevant to both students and employers, and they need to deliver well for all Australians. To me this is a vital part of Australia’s social compact – that education is available to all and that enables opportunity for all to participate and engage fully in work and society.
Unfortunately, there are many signs that the fabric of this social compact is seriously fraying. While by no means exhaustive, I would highlight the following.
Recent trends in educational outcomes are concerning:
- Almost one-quarter of Australian four-to-five-year-olds are not meeting all four ‘early years milestones’ when they start school (Victoria University).
- Australian school students are sliding down international performance rankings. Australia’s PISA scores have declined by 5 per cent for reading and 7 per cent for mathematics over the 19 years to 2022 (OECD).
- Tens of thousands of students do not meet NAPLAN minimum standards in reading or numeracy each year (Productivity Commission).
- There are notable gaps in Year 12 completion rates geographically and by gender and for individuals with disabilities.
- Fewer than 50 per cent of male students in Tasmania are completing Year 12 while the share in the NT is just 37.5 per cent and the gap between female and male completion rates in NSW is now 10 percentage points in favour of female students.
- One in four students in government schools who start Year 10 do not complete Year 12, compared with 87.3 per cent of students in non-Government schools who go on to complete Year 12.
The fact that we continue to see significant and persistent gaps in educational outcomes and opportunities in Australia reflecting sociology-economic standing and sustained intergenerational or so-called post-code inequality.
And that our approach to the education of our First Nations children and communities, including education in language, is not delivering what is needed for those individuals and communities to thrive.
- To paraphrase First Nations educators, ‘our way of educating is good for all, your way of educating is very bad for us’.
- The dearth of First Nations leadership positions in the school system, including especially in regions with larger First Nations populations, is also weighing on progress.
All of this is reflected in and by the following:
- Australian schools have some of the highest levels of social segregation and this trend has worsened over time. (Department of Education).
- Non-Indigenous students achieve substantially higher and significantly different NAPLAN results across all measures than Indigenous students.
- Results for reading and numeracy for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, those in outer regional and remote areas, and those whose parents have low educational attainment are consistently below the outcomes of the general student population. By year 9, these differences can be as great as the equivalent of 5 years of learning (Productivity Commission).
Meanwhile, those young people that are finishing school and advancing to tertiary education in an environment of high costs of living, are being expected to place big bets – that is, accumulate significant debt – on their future, often through multi-year courses, when the Federal Government itself acknowledges that information on available courses and potential labour market outcomes are spread across many sources with inconsistent links to careers information. Anecdotally, at my children’s government high school, career advisors seemed unable to provide insights on new career paths, sticking to the well known, accountant path for those good at maths, nursing and the law.
Perhaps not surprisingly, early this year the AFR reported Federal Education Department data showing that 25.4 per cent of students who commenced their studies in 2017 had dropped out by the end of 2022 – the highest rate since records began in 2005 – and 1.3 percentage points higher than the previous corresponding period. We should be deeply concerned by this.
These observations should not be read as, nor do they pretend to represent, a comprehensive analysis of a complex sector and issues, but instead aim to be a provocation around data and information that points to the risk of young people disengaging from a core institution that should be seen as providing a foundation for future prosperity, wellbeing and success.
What sits underneath my observations and thoughts are some very personal reflections as a parent with experience of the system through the eyes of three children over the course of 20+ years and concerns about how the system is faring, in the context of providing an environment and education that is stimulating, relevant, safe and consistent with the mental health, wellbeing and positive engagement of today’s young people. In other words, one that today’s young people buy into.
