This week the productivity commission released a fairly grim snapshot of the education sector - school refusal is on the rise and high school dropouts are at record highs. 1 in 5 students aren't finishing their full 13 years of school - but is this in itself a huge cause for concern?
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00:00 It may sound problematic for Australia and of course if that would be a real figure in
00:06 the end that would be a problem but these completion rates are very difficult to actually
00:12 calculate because many young people who may leave the school but then they come back and
00:17 the OECD for example that is counting these numbers a little bit later in the young people's
00:21 lives at the age of 24 for example come up with a very different figures.
00:26 But here in Australia I think we need to keep in mind that we are very in many areas very
00:31 much like the OECD on average and in many areas actually doing better than the OECD
00:36 but of course this number is something that is a call for action.
00:40 This is happening not only here in Australia but around the world more and more that young
00:44 people can learn the skills and knowledge they need for what they want to do in their
00:48 lives elsewhere so they don't need really school as they used to do when I was young
00:54 or you were young and that's why I think we should not judge the young people if they
00:59 find their passion in their lives and want to become entrepreneurs or artists or whatever
01:04 they want to do and leave the school.
01:07 Many of the famous entrepreneurs actually have done that and become very successful
01:11 so I think it's more important to make sure that young people really know what they want
01:16 to do and that they can follow their passion and then the school system education system
01:20 should follow you know these passions.
01:23 The lack of engagement is probably the biggest issue here and again if it helps Australians
01:29 it's exactly the same challenge everywhere around the world.
01:32 It's a harder and harder to make the school a place where children young people would
01:38 really feel at home and safe and engaging.
01:41 If we look at the sense of belonging that the OECD again is counting in different countries
01:47 around the world here in Australia we have seen approximately 20 percentage point decline
01:53 since 2003 in students 15 year students sense of belonging which kind of indicates the schools
02:00 are becoming places where young people feel harder and harder to kind of feel that the
02:06 school is the place where they really want to be.
02:08 We still have the sense of belonging or engagement figures here in Australia quite good so they
02:14 stand on average somewhere around 80 percent so four out of five Australian kids feel that
02:20 they like to be in school but I think the alarming thing here is that the longer young
02:25 people spend in school the lower the engagements that tends to be so we really need to look
02:30 at the later years the high school and think about how we can transform that part of education
02:37 in a place where all or most young people really would like to be.
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