Triangulation pinpoints the priority – comment by CEO Craig Robertson

Triangulation involves measurement from two separate points to pinpoint a location. Recent research released by the Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) plus OECD data is enough to pinpoint the challenge facing tertiary education coming out of the COVID hibernation.

At the beginning of forced home schooling DESE commissioned research to get a picture of the distribution of educational impact. While it may have proved useful, albeit short-lived, to bully first ministers to opening schools, it highlights the challenge we face.

Despite the aspirations set in Finn Targets of the early 1990s encouraging students to complete Year 12 and Peter Karmel’s seminal work in 1973 calling out inequities in resourcing of schools recently revived by David Gonski in the Schooling Resources Standard, we still have pockets of appalling school achievement. Inexcusable for a first world economy that has proven in the last three months how to solve wicked problems through collaboration across jurisdictional, political; economic and community divides.

In the first reference point, Professor Stephen Lamb from Victoria University restates data we already know.

Chief among the risk factors associated with poor outcomes is family socioeconomic status (SES), which is consistently associated with negative outcomes. … by Year 7, 36.3 per cent of low SES students are at or below the minimum standard expected at this stage of schooling, a rate ten times that for high SES students (3.4 per cent). School completion is also much lower for children from poorer families with 29.6 per cent not attaining a Year 12 certificate, according to the national census, compared to a national average of 18.4 per cent and a rate for high SES students of 9.7 per cent.

That’s the starting point! Lamb concludes that students from low SES households will suffer a 5.7 per cent decline in reading if one term is spent on-line with numeracy declining by 8.3 per cent.

The second reference is Australia’s results in PISA – the OECD assessment of literacy, numeracy and scientific capabilities of 15 year-olds conducted in 2018. In associated research from ACERs Geoff Masters, he states that 31 percent of students in the lowest SES quartile were low performing in PISA in comparison to 21 per cent in the second SES quartile, 15 per cent in the third SES quartile, and 10 per cent of students in the highest SES quartile.

I commented last year on the costs these results signal in this cohort’s active participation in economic life – that was pre-COVID!

Let’s triangulate further to make sure we nail the point. All commentators confirm that low-skilled young people take the longest coming out of a downturn to secure meaningful work in sufficient quantity. Youth unemployment and underemployment was already poor before COVID and will be catastrophic post-COVID.

The Treasurer predicts that businesses in their recovery phase are likely to invest in digital capabilities, particularly given workers have adapted so readily to stay-at-home measures. Masters adds, though, that low performing students in PISA expressed significantly lower levels of interest in using ICT and had lower levels of confidence using digital devices.

The Economist predicts the global economy will contract by 10 percent. Available jobs will shrink at the same rate, even more if digital investment takes off.

Training for a promise of a job as the way out for this cohort of young people – the COVID generation – will be seen as a con. At best, casual jobs for young people may return soon but as there is a view that this form of work is an adjustment tool for employers at the cost of workers. It does not stand as a robust platform upon which to rebuild opportunity for this generation.

Strong vocational education must be put in place. I said last year in response to the PISA results that major structural reform of vocational education is needed, beyond that proposed by Joyce. By structural I meant across vocational education, top to bottom – breaking down the over-reliance on markets to solve matters of government responsibility, to a new approach to vocational education content and a trust in training providers and the training professional to do the job they are set up to do. The COVID generation deserves nothing less.

Lena Karmel Lodge, named in honour of Peter’s wife, overlooks the federal headquarters of DESE. I hope that hers and Peter’s spirit of education reform breathes through those headquarters when it comes to Australian tertiary education.

It’s needed. The 2018 PISA generation are finishing school this year.