Concerns about the poor outcomes from school-based vocational education, which is heavily concentrated in schools serving disadvantaged communities, has led the State Government of Victoria, Australia, to implement major reforms, including abolishing the Victoria Certificate of Applied Learning. Instead, from 2023, learning in vocational education…

Understanding the gender dynamics in educational transitions can help target policies to support equitable access to education as well as its quality and labour-market outcomes. In almost all OECD countries, the gender gap in favour of women is wider in tertiary education than at upper secondary level. Differences in programme orientation and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a measure of soft skills suitable for use in a large survey of Australian adolescents. Design/methodology/approach: A survey was conducted with N = 4,704 Australians aged 15-19 over 2 years. Principal components analysis was performed on 14 self-report items, followed by generalised linear mixed…

This paper contributes to the literature by separately analysing the course enrolment and completion effects of vocational education and training (VET) as well as higher education. Moreover, we investigate the persistence of these wage effects over time while controlling for two potential selection biases. We take advantage of the Longitudinal…

Dropouts have become an international problem, and it is useful to examine the solutions arrived at by other countries. A major difference is in vocational education. The United States, for example, uses vocational education mainly as a means to motivate uninterested students. Countries with low dropout rates have vocational education and training…

This is a report of the first year of a three-year project entitled "Vocations: the link between post-compulsory education and the labour market." The project's aim is to research how pathways can be improved within education, within work, and between education and work. There are three strands in the project; the first strand is…

By definition, youth transitions involve young people moving between school, post-school study and employment. It is a time of flux, as young people try out different school, post-school work and study options. But are those who don't find work immediately likely to make a poor transition? Given that many may well have a spell out of the labour…

"Research Messages 2014" is a collection of summaries of research published by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) in 2014 in the context of changing economic, industrial, social and education conditions, organised under the following broad categories: (1) Productivity: to sustain and build Australia's human…

This paper looks at the factors associated with the decision by school students in Australia to work part-time. I find substantial variation in the probability of working across the eight Australian states and territories, as well as by remoteness. Those who live in households with low income are less likely to work. A person's ancestry is also…

Most other nations have a very different approach to measuring academic achievement at the end of high school and signaling that information to universities and other interested parties. In Australia, Denmark, England, Scotland, Finland, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and many Canadian and German provinces, for example, high school exit…