About Thrive
Thrive is a living learning hub that helps education systems understand what enables young people to finish school well, and how to act on that insight. It brings together advanced causal data analysis with lived experience from schools and communities to move beyond reporting outcomes, toward learning what drives them. Thrive offers a new way to turn complex data and models into earlier, clearer signals for decision‑making and meaningful change across the education system. It positions NSW at the forefront of international practice in evidence-informed education policy.
Why It Matters
Recent data show a sustained decline in apparent retention rates in government schools, while other schooling sectors have remained relatively stable. While this pattern is visible in headline retention figures, it offers limited insight into which students are disengaging, why they struggle to remain through the later years of school, or what can be done to change their trajectories. Policy responses have traditionally focused on visible outcomes such as attendance or academic performance. Thrive's causal analysis of longitudinal data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) enables a different approach—making explicit the underlying drivers of school completion and highlighting students' sense of belonging as a central and earlier influence on pathways through school.
How Thrive Works
Thrive operates through an iterative learning cycle that connects system-level evidence with place-based learning in schools. The cycle ensures that insight is not produced for reporting alone, but is continuously tested, refined, and translated into action as learning unfolds. It relies on our newly developed paradigm for complex system change, integrating advanced quantitative modelling with lived experience and professional judgement rather than treating them as separate forms of insight. Evidence is built iteratively with schools and communities, enabling causal understanding that is both analytically rigorous and grounded in real-world experience.
Read the full report
Learn more about our work and the research team behind the project.