University Hall, 29 April 2010, with Dr Kitty te Riele

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Theo van Leeuwen:
...to welcome you to tonight's lecture, the fourth in this year's series of UTSpeaks. My name is Theo van Leeuwen. I am the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences here. But tonight I have the humble role of being the MC of this event. I would like to begin by acknowledging and paying my respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation upon whose lands UTS now stands.

I also have to mention a few practicalities. This lecture is being digitally recorded and also video recorded for ABC2's Big Ideas program. So would you kindly turn off your mobile phones completely so that there will be no electronic interference. Also if you do have to leave the room or return please tip toe and get least of extraneous noises on the soundtrack of the ABC program.

So tonight's talk is by Kitty te Riele. I'm not introducing - I'm not going to say much about it, but I want to mention that we will have opportunity to ask questions at the end. I'm sure that the topic should lead to interesting debates and questions. Now it is a great pleasure for me to introduce Jack Dussledorp who will introduce Kitty, tonight's speaker. You notice the authentic pronunciation of the name, because this happens to be an occasion where the MC and the introductory speaker and the speaker are all Dutch. So that doesn't happen every day at UTS.

Jack is the executive chairman of Dussledorp Skills Forum, which is an organisation that works to help young Australians acquire skills for a sustainable future. He is also president of World Skills International and served as a board member of the NSW TAFE Commission and the Australian Student Traineeship Foundation. So he has worked throughout his career to improve opportunities for young Australians through skills training. For this he received in 2000 the Order of Australia Medal and also an honorary doctorate from RMIT University in Melbourne. So it is really wonderful to have him here tonight. Please welcome Jack Dussledorp.

Jack Dussledorp:
Thanks Theo. So some triple Dutch. I've been warned that if I exceed five minutes I will just disappear in a hole in the floor. So I've prepared remarks, 'cause if I go extemporaneous, forget it. I had a nightmare last night, where I found myself totally unprepared with a day to go before delivering an hour lecture to a distinguished audience of policy makers and practitioners on the Government's Earn or Learn policy, as the key driver to attain the COAG 90 per cent educational participation target by 2015.

Well I woke up with a start and remember with relief that I'd agreed only to introduce the lecturer, Dr Kitty te Riele and promised to stay within the brief time limit. I hope you're looking at your watch. Yet, having only just reviewed the final copy of her presentation, the slides at least, I wondered why Kitty had titled her lecture To Learn Or Earn when there was only an oblique reference to the policy in her presentation. The answer as it turns out is quite simple. She didn't title it. That was the UTS media unit's headline. Undoubtedly, someone saw the merit of linking her lecture to something that had some public recognition and topicality.

But how do you effectively label the pressing need for more collaboration and integration in education policy and practice? Sorry, education revolution is already taken. How do you champion the idea of an approach to learning that meets every young person on his or her terms? It's terrific to see there's some young people here. How do you build an educational structure that has ample bridges between various programs, making shifts of direction possible and without major time loss for the young people in it. Or, develop a comprehensive guidance and mentoring system, able to follow every individual from compulsory education to well after their graduation.

or these are just some of the key lessons that have been learned in the developed world since the collapse of the junior labour market began in the 1960s, about the time I actually entered the labour market. But by the mid '70s it had become evident that youth unemployment was not cyclical, but also closely linked to fundamental changes in the labour market, over time leaving less and less room for the unskilled and the untrained. Our youth at risk.

So that was the defining challenge for the work I've been involved with, particularly through World Skills and the Skills Forum, for the past 30 odd years. Here I'd like to reference the successful introduction of VET in schools with work placements, that now attract over 50 per cent of all secondary students across Australia, achieved in just over a decade and a half. Flash of the eye in educational reform.

But despite the innovations and the financial incentives dangled in front of our educational systems, like other systems in the UK and Canada, we've not yet managed to shift the dominant perception of VET as a pathway for the less able, or overcome university fears - perhaps not so strong here - that too close a relationship - after all TAFE's only just down the road - will lead to the standardisation of academic work and even erode academic freedom.

Yet the further we travel into the twenty first century, the more pressing will become the need for higher order skills to apply to such complex problems of water, food supply, capturing carbon - which we're postponing - and recycling materials, which all call for a new way of understanding the relationship between practical skills and knowledge formation.

Kitty is a senior academic in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science here at UTS. In 2009 she edited a book, Making School Different. That examined how schooling can better serve so called marginalised young people in terms of their identity, pedagogy and also place and time for learning. Reading her introduction in that book, I discovered she's a self-declared possibilist. Something between an optimist and a pessimist. Who Max Lerner - quoted in that book - describes as someone who recognises the degree to which education is inevitably enmeshed in history, the history of where it came from and the contemporary and future prospects of the society of which it is a part.

Kitty immigrated to Australia from Holland in 1993 and completed her PhD at the University of Sydney. She's a lecturer in the philosophy of education, professional ethics and a supervisor to honours and doctoral students in education. Please welcome Dr Kitty te Riele. Thank you.

Kitty te Riele:
Thanks Jack. Thank you. In this presentation I want to address four different items. I'm going to start just with a bit of an overview and background to the COAG target for raising educational attainment. Then I'm going to talk about two different kinds of complexities. Parallel complexity and sequential complexity in young people's lives. Finally I'm going to argue for closer collaboration and integration in policy and practice.

Now the COAG target is for young people up to age 25. Parallel complexity really focuses more on young people while they're at school. So it's more for teenagers, say 15 to 19 roughly. Sequential complexity will be talking about the whole age range of young people, from roughly 15 to 25.

But first a bit of history. In the 1950s, a report was published that worried would the advantage to the community or providing more education for adolescents offset the economic consequences of their withdrawal from the labour market. Well clearly things have changed. From the 1980s onwards, it's become a consensus in policy and in public opinion that there was a need to increase retention to Year 12. So a series of targets have been set, as you can see. The targets keep on shifting in terms of exactly how they measure from basic retention to Year 12, through to more complex measures.

The current target agreed to by the Council of Australian Governments last year measures the attainment in terms of both the enrolment of fulltime equivalent students in Year 11 and 12 or in a VET equivalent. Or they look at the proportion of young people in the 20 to 25 year old age group who have attained Year 12 or Certificate II or above.

Now focusing on that 20 to 24 year old age group it's a real improvement compared to how attainment has been measured in the past. Because it recognises that while young people might not achieve that Year 12 or equivalent by the time they're 18 or 19, but by the time they're 22, 23, 24 they may well have achieved it. So that's a real improvement. It's also a real improvement to be recognising that VET is an equivalent to Year 12. That it isn't just about keeping kids at school, but that there might be the possibility of VET as an alternative.

What I'm not so happy about is that the equivalent is being measured as AQF Certificate II. Most people would agree that Certificate II is equivalent to a Year 10 level. To have equivalent to a Year 12 level, you really need to start talking about Certificate III or more.

Now just a couple of quick slides for a little bit of background. The main point here is that there's quite a lot of variety in terms of both where the various states and territories are up to at the moment. Also in terms of what then the specific target is for those various states and territories. But the other point to notice is that we're talking about very large numbers of young people here. So over 90,000 young people across Australia. But in NSW we're looking at over 30,000 young people who will be affected by this new policy and by the associated policies that have been enacted within this states. So lots and lots of young people who are affected by this target.

Similarly, just a quick look to see that there's plenty of funding attached to this COAG target. States and territories do not have to do this for free. There is specific funding for particular items such as youth connections facilitation, brokering facilitation. But there's also reward funding, $100 million of rewarding funding to be spread across the states and territories if they meet their targets. So a lot of money.

People do make one objection to the idea of raising educational attainment. People ask well what about the inflation of the Year 12 credential. People worry whether the Year 12 certificate won't be worth as much if lots of people get it. So when only 35 per cent of young people in 1980 completed Year 12, that certificate was worth a lot more than when 75 per cent get it now or up to 90 per cent. But the flipside is that not having a Year 12 certificate is also much more of a disadvantage.

For a Year 12 completer in the first year out of school, only three per cent are looking for work. But if you've left school with Year 10 or less then in the first year out of school 15 per cent are looking for work. So the unemployment alone gives you an indication of the disadvantage of not completing Year 12. So in this presentation I'm not going to argue against a COAG target. I'm not going to argue that we shouldn't try to get more young people to complete Year 12 or an equivalent. What I'm going to say however is that we need to do things differently to try and achieve that target.

A bit of an overview of the trend. The green bars show the traditional measurement of apparent retention to Year 12. So that's comparing the number of young people in the first year of high school with the number of people who then end up finishing high school five or six years later, depending on the state. You can see how that went up dramatically during the '80s and the early '90s. The yellow bar shows indigenous young people. You can see that we're beginning to get an increase in retention to Year 12 for indigenous young people as well.

I should say that I recognise the particular disadvantages faced by indigenous young people. COAG also aims to halve the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous youth in terms of that educational attainment. But I'm not an expert on indigenous issues so I'm not going to be particularly addressing indigenous issues as part of this presentation. But I do hope that some of the issues I raise and the suggestions I make apply to indigenous youth as well as to other youth.

The red columns show not just Year 12 but also Certificate II. So that's the actual COAG target. So you can see once we include Certificate II, that we already have a slightly higher level of attainment. Nevertheless, you've got to wonder whether Australia has achieved some kind of feeling effect in terms of educational attainment. Because it's really levelled off since the mid 1990s. So if we want to raise attainment further, then it's not enough to just polish our old ways of doing things. We actually need some new approaches.

So those new approaches are related to what I see as two types of complexities. The parallel complexities meaning that teenagers juggle many different roles at the same time. In parallel, they are not just a school student but they're also a part-time worker, they may be a musician or a sportsperson. They may have family responsibilities. The metaphor for this parallel complexity is the idea of a jigsaw.

Sequential complexity is when young people can experience a sequence of various roles that add complexity to their lives. This particularly applies to young people who leave school before Year 12. That is still a quarter of young people in Australia. So it still is a large minority. The metaphor for sequential complexity is the idea of a detour.

So I'm moving into the second part of the presentation here. Focusing a bit more on parallel complexity. So the focus here is on young people of school age. Now the rapid rise in Year 12 retention during the 1980s and '90s has created an expectation by governments, media and the general public that being a teenager equals being a school student. But most young people as I've said are much more than just a school student. They experience parallel complexity. This complexity focuses on the multiple roles that young people juggle.

So Spierings has pointed out this metaphor of the jigsaw and says young people are faced with having to put together the jigsaw of their life every day. But the ways in which school, work, leisure and family life are structured often only make this harder.

Now part-time work alongside school are two particularly relevant pieces of this jigsaw puzzle. Both for young people themselves and for what they mean for school completion or raising educational attainment. So despite the title of this presentation, it's not learn or earn, for about half of young people it's learn and earn.

As Margaret Vickers explains, the result is that in the practical experience of young people's lives, the boundaries between school and work are often blurred. Many young people explore new combinations of education and work. This has been recognised by the NSW Department of Education and Training on their website, that young people have to fit in part-time work with everything else that they do.

But despite this recognition, the NSW DEET website then goes on to place responsibility for juggling work and school squarely on the young person, him or herself. But from the point of view of young people who were interviewed as part of the life patterns project at the University of Melbourne, stress and the need to achieve balance were really major challenges and priorities during their final years of school. So what can we do to support young people to find this balance and juggle this jigsaw?

Both the education side and the employment side of that difficult balance can do things to help young people. Now I'm going to point out three particular aspects that are really important. The first is simply the juggling. How can a young person fit all of this into their week. So this is regardless of the kind of job they've got or the kind of study that they're undertaking. It's simply about the logistics of it all.

One example is more and better inter-sectoral cooperation. Pam Ryan, who's been looking after the introduction of the new school leaving age for the NSW DEET pointed out that it's not just about students going from one sector to the next in a chronological order. But rather, it's about having an education which is a mix of provisions which ultimately lead to a well educated human being. So inter-sectoral cooperation amongst education sectors.

But clearly also, better school and employer cooperation. Research by Marie Brennan and colleagues in South Australia looked at the introduction of part-time study in the South Australian senior high school certificate. Now part-time completion of the senior school certificate is theoretically possible in most states. For example in NSW, you can accumulate the HSC over a rolling period of five years. But genuinely enabling that to happen varies a lot from state to state and from school to school.

The example that Marie Brennan and her colleagues gave was of Mount Gambier High School, where they saw that their students were struggling trying to achieve a balance in their life with long hours of part-time work alongside school. They decided that to respond to that, they really needed to look at this option of part-time senior secondary school. So at Mount Gambier High School, students work with teachers and with subject counsellors to consider the pie of their commitments and then the slice of that pie that they can realistically set aside for school.

A particularly significant upshot of that part-time focus was a much better dialogue between the school and local employers. I quote from what the deputy principal had to say. She said:

"... often the employers don't realise what goes on for these kids at school and vice versa. So we had the conversation and gave them a calendar of the school's peak times in terms of assessment, exams et cetera. And it meant that we could get a sense of their peak times as well and what that means for our students."

So collaboration between employers and schools can be another really important contribution. So that's all about the juggling.

But there are also things we can do in terms of more specifically the content of what young people study and the kind of jobs that they do on a part-time basis. Research by Helen Stokes from the Youth Research Centre found that schools don't always recognise the independence, the responsibility, the skills that young people learn on the job, in their part-time work. So young people can end up feeling treated like kids at school even though they're being given great responsibilities in their part-time work.

On the other hand, the research showed that there were also young people who were honest enough to acknowledge that they were far more punctual, motivated and even hardworking in their part-time job than they were at school. So they recognised that perhaps teachers would give them a bit more respect and treat them less like kids if they behaved at school the way they behave in their part-time job.

Finally she found employers don't always value the learning that young people experience at school and that they can bring back into their part-time job. For example, issues around occupational health and safety. So it means again, collaboration between schools, employers and young people. All three of them working together to recognise the skills and the knowledge that they pick up at school and on the job.

The third point I want to make is that young people who live in disadvantaged areas have the least access to part-time jobs, but also have statistically the lowest educational attainment. So in other words, young people in disadvantaged areas, need the benefits of part-time work the most, but they have the least access to part-time jobs. So people like the Australian National Schools Network and the NSW Commission for Children and Young People have recommended that we need to make sure that we generate jobs for young people in those most disadvantaged areas.

Now acting on all these various suggestions to support young people with this school work jigsaw puzzle isn't altruism on the part of educators, employers and government. It has not just personal benefits for young people, but it also has very clear, instrumental and economic benefits for young people individually and for society at large. So it's worth acting on these kind of suggestions for parallel complexity.

I'm going to move onto the third part of the presentation. Looking at sequential complexity. An underlying assumption in much discussion in policy and in the media about youth transition, is that there is a linear trajectory through school into further or higher education and into work, then on into adulthood. Johanna Wynn and Worldwide have critiqued that conventional perception of a linear transition. Because markers of adulthood are reversible and impermanent, there is no simple arrival at adulthood.

Anyone who knows a young person in their 20s has probably experienced or seen how they might move out of home and become independent and then move back home for a while when maybe a relationship breaks up, and then move out again for a while. So these transitions to adulthood are reversible, they're impermanent. A European research group ended up using the metaphor of a yo-yo to refer those fragile and reversible transitions.

So sequential transition complexity highlights that around a quarter or so of young people do not move through schooling in a similar, simple linear fashion. Their trajectories are far more complex. If I can use that kind of metaphor, they go along side roads, around roundabouts, doing u-turns and needing detours. But too often they end up experiencing dead end streets.

Young people may have very good reasons why leaving school can be necessary or the best option for them at the time. For example, one in four young people aged between 16 and 24 live with a mental disorder. One in three experience moderate to high levels of psychological distress. Almost one in 100 young people report being homeless. Just over one in 10 young people report having a disability or a long term condition that interferes with their daily lives and their study. Of course young people who grow up in poverty find that really restricts their ability to stick it out at school as well.

So a whole range of reasons why it might be better for young people to leave school rather than to stay. Now two decades ago a Commonwealth senate committee recognised that staying on in school for some in this group can be counterproductive if it changes neutral feelings about learning into negative ones and leaves the young person with the wish never to re-enter the education system at a future time.

Non-linearity is too often seen as a problem to be prevented. Instead, detours are not just inevitable for some young people, but they can be beneficial, they can be productive. The most optimal route from A to B is not always in a straight line. Now the COAG target offers some hope for recognition of this, because they measure attainment of Year 12 or equivalent between the ages of 20 to 24, rather than at eight, 18 or 19 when a linear pathway might be expected to be completed.

So to support these detours, given that the goal of near universal completion of senior secondary education has been widely accepted by all sides of politics, it will be logical for a strategy of encouraging as many young people as possible to stay at school, to be complimented by a strategy of providing routes back into school or other forms of education.

More than 100,000 young adults between 20 and 24 don't have Year 12 or Certificate III and aren't studying, are unemployed or under employed. A hundred thousand young people. These young people should be offered a second chance to complete Year 12 or a vocational equivalent. There are examples of some great initiatives around Australia. The Dussledorp Skills Forum website - you click on their learning choices item, have some really great programs that offer this kind of re-entry and second chance.

But those kind of programs need support. Too often they disappear when the funding dries up or when a champion leaves. To make them sustainable, they need not just reliable funding, but they need a network of collaboration to share knowledge and ideas. So we need a range of trajectories, but we also need navigation support. Research on early school leavers found that once they left school, their lives became chaotic and their options shortened or foreclosed. So we need to provide them with navigation support to find those alternative programs that are out there, that are available to them to be able to access them.

So that means mentoring support, transition support of the type that Jack referred to. COAG has made funding available for careers and transition services as part of the national partnership for raising educational attainment. So that's certainly a very welcome start for a more comprehensive navigation support system.

Now again, this is worth doing. This is not altruism. Dick Dussledorp, Jack's father, pointed out that caring is not just of itself desirable, it also pays. So again it is not just about the personal benefits to young people. They are substantial. Young people who I've worked with in second chance schools who say I was always told there's no way I could ever do Year 12. Well here I am, I've done it, I've graduated I've proven I can do it. So the benefits personally are huge. But also, substantial economic and social benefits for society at large.

The Business Council of Australia, a fairly hard-nosed bunch of people, estimated that if we invest in encouraging young people to complete school at a later stage, to be able to return back to schooling in some way and raise that attainment from about 80 to about 90 per cent, they say that there is an internal rate of return of between eight and 10 per cent on that investment in young people returning to school. Now in this day and age, an investment return of eight to 10 per cent isn't bad. Without this kind of support, without these kind of initiatives, it really is unlikely that the COAG target for raising attainment to Year 12 or equivalent would be successful.

Okay so here I am in my fourth and final section of the presentation. All of us can act on these various suggestions to support both parallel and sequential complexity. In fact, a lot of you as I've been talking have probably been thinking about programs you're aware of, maybe programs you're working in, that already do great things for young people. If you have thought of a program like that I'd love to hear from you. My email address will pop up again on the last slide. I'd love to hear about any initiatives out there that do great things to support parallel and sequential complexity for young people.

So I don't in any way want to downplay those kind of many great initiatives that are out there already. All the hard work that many people already do for young people. But so far, a lot of this excellent effort continues to be fragmented. For young people it can still seem like a jungle out there if they leave school before Year 12.

Peter Kellogg in his evaluation of the National Youth Commitment said the patchwork of legislative and funding arrangements in our federal system to assist young people has not helped. In fact, it has hindered the development of a truly modern youth transition system. Almost a decade ago, the Youth Pathways Action Plan Taskforce recommended an integrated and comprehensive transition support system. That's what I want to argue for in this final part of the presentation.

To make things really work well for young people, all of us in all these different sectors need to collaborate. We can draw inspiration from a whole lot of initiatives out there. If we look to the past, the full service schools program during 1999 and 2000 worked with over 20,000 young people to help them to complete Year 12 or return to schooling. But then despite a very positive evaluation, that pilot program was stopped. The National Youth Commitment, also a fantastic example of bringing people together for collaboration in various regions. The Macarthur region, Tumut, the NSW Central Coast, the northern, Sunshine and Gold Coasts and the most famous, the Whittlesea Youth Commitment in Victoria.

Now the logic underpinning that National Youth Commitment was that young people who leave school before Year 12 and who don't go on to study or full time work, should be entitled to the same level of resources, support and assistance as young people who stay on at school. So those regional partnerships were a way of trying to bring together all the ingredients and all the various stakeholders to make that entitlement possible at a local level. It wasn't perfect, but it's an example that we can look at. Again, that was carefully evaluated to see how we can make this work.

The NSW DEET commissioned a report to do with the raising of the school leaving age in this state. In their model, they said a key aspect of innovation and continuous improvement is to have supportive stakeholders. They point to the community, parents, TAFE, universities and industry to work together.

In Victoria, they've implemented local earning and employment networks. They were introduced particularly to improve the education and employment outcomes amongst 15 to 19 year olds at a local area level. Bringing together various stakeholders to support young people.

Outside the education sector, Regional Development Australia. They bring together industry, local government. Some core principles for them include a commitment to collaboration, a sharing of information, cross membership, across committees, joint funding of activities and co-location to facilitate better communication and minimise duplication of facilities. So again, an example that we can look at.

Finally, the Australian National Schools Network has recommended the idea of an inter-generational youth compact. While that's not something that's happened yet, we can look to them as well for ideas on how we can make this collaboration actually work. So none of them are perfect but we can certainly learn from all these various examples.

So, the idea of a one stop shop. The National Strategy for Young Australians that was released only a week and a half ago by Kate Ellis, noticed that the one thing young people called for was a single point of access for support services. Instead of not knowing where to go and having millions of different agencies and services that look after young people, having a single point of access. The idea of a one stop shop is not a one size fits all. That would be contradictory. It's about having a single access point for young people, perhaps with some co-location of services, certainly with a sharing of knowledge and ideas. Certainly with collaboration between sectors and people.

It's important that young people themselves are seen as being part of the solution. Young people can sometimes feel excluded and misunderstood and have a sense that government is doing things to them, not working with them. So young people themselves should be part of this one stop shop.

We can't continue to count on individual people. Some of you here, individual teachers, individual employers, police officers, youth workers, parents, we can't count on those individuals to somehow knit together tighter arrangements for young people so that they don't fall though the gaps. We actually need to put that collaboration in place.

But these are promising times. We have the COAG National Partnership. Federal, state and territory governments all working together. We also have the social inclusion agenda and we have the national strategy for young Australians, that was released on 14 April. Now this national strategy itself is aimed at guiding policy making rather than at guiding young people. But nevertheless, it contains some really good ideas. Some of those I've drawn on in this presentation. Importantly, they have set eight priorities. Four of those are particularly relevant to the kind of issues I've raised tonight.

But most importantly, they have heard young people say that they want that single point of access. While Kate Ellis in this national strategy hasn't yet promised a single point of access, she has suggested that as a starting point at least, we should implement a no wrong door approach. So regardless of the door a young person knocks on, they won't just be turned away. They will be given support and advice on where to go.

Also, I think these are promising times because even in this room we have representatives of many of the sectors that will be part of this one stop shop. So let's use the interest, the energy, the goodwill in policy and in our community and put it to good use to ensure that we get a truly integrated, collaborative, comprehensive approach to support all young people to achieve happy, healthy and productive lives. You can't read that, but there's my sources.

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