Conclusion

This report has focused on student perspectives on leaving school, anticipated opportunities and barriers, pathway and occupational aspirations, influences and motivations, and notions of “career”. Their perspectives provide important information about the experience of the transition from school and what could be useful for thinking about support provided to students at this time.

A number of initiatives have emerged to try to assist with students’ transition from school. The Secondary-Tertiary Alignment Resource (STAR) and Gateway scheme provide tertiary-level and workplace learning opportunities and experiences for students that are useful in allowing students to explore, (re)adjust, or kick start future plans. The recently launched Schools Plus scheme has the goal that “all young people are in education, skills, or structured learning relevant to their abilities and needs, until the age of 18” and particularly addresses itself to early school leavers with low or no qualifications and “inactive” young people not engaged in work, training, or education after leaving school.⁸ The Creating Pathways and Building Lives (CPaBL) and Better Tertiary and Trades Training Decision Making (BTTTDM) initiatives both recognise the growing complexity involved in young people’s post-school decision making and their support and guidance requirements. CPaBL addresses this by focusing on the structure of careers education in the school. It fosters a school-wide approach that explicitly links the careers advisory team with school management so that information and guidance is better co-ordinated. BTTTDM addresses the information and guidance issue by creating a “one-stop-shop” service for young people, parents, and other influencers, providing information and support for tertiary education and career pathway decisions.

These initiatives take different approaches but they share some common themes in attempting to provide more information and better access to it; a better quality of information; co-ordinate information and guidance within and between institutions; and provide guidance to help students understand the information. Arguably the most significant thing the initiatives do in terms of the “pathways framework” or broader landscape of the transition from school is to continue positioning of students and young people as the key decision makers. Even where Schools Plus is looking to place obligations and conditions on young people, there is an emphasis on having a range of options from which young people can choose. This follows the invocation of choice in the wider context of a (Western) society saturated with (consumer) choice and usually expressed in individualistic terms. It says to young people that no matter what your background or rate of school success, there is a pathway to a good future for you (Vaughan, 2005). What we have to do, then, is to help you, the student or young person, find or create that pathway.

Choice complexity

There are two major issues with this situation that remain unresolved. The first issue is that all this can be very confusing and overwhelming for young people. They are asked to make choices (decisions) about a greater range of choices (options) beyond school, including tertiary study courses and programmes, training within and for different industries, careers, and conditions of employment. They are also asked to make some choices while they are at school (which are likely to affect their later or future choices). School choices include decisions about school subjects and programmes of learning, elements of assessment and credit, school-based qualifications—all of which are becoming increasingly multi faceted as schools attempt to recognise, meet, and shape a wider range of students’ needs.⁹ Not only that, but we expect students and young people to have a hand in identifying their own learning and pathway needs and at the very least be able to discuss them with teachers and advisors. In On the Edge of Adulthood we saw that close to 30 percent of students, and more of those who had left, wished they had had better advice on the subjects they took, and 20 percent were not satisfied with their subject mix. So young people today must deal with a proliferation of choices but also a modern context that demands ever more reflection and justification of those choices (du Bois-Reymond, 1998), leading to a need for teachers and careers advisors to help young people with those choices.

Our data show that students understand themselves to be the key decision makers in their lives, particularly around pathways from school. In response to our question about what would be best about leaving school, students agreed most with statements focused around making decisions and having a greater range of choices, or the means to follow them up. Eighty to 85 percent agreed it would be best to be earning money, choosing how to spend time, being treated as an adult or being an adult, making own decisions about life, choosing what to study, and meeting different people. Sixty-eight to 77 percent agreed it would be best to be in charge of their learning, career, and work: choosing what to study, establishing a career, learning real-life things, learning in a way that suits me, putting school learning into real world practice. Other aspects of leaving school and reorienting relationships, such as getting a job, not having to do school work, establishing new routines, getting away from home town, were not seen quite so positively.

While students saw the decision making aspects of leaving school positively, they also saw them as challenging. This was particularly so for pathway and career decision making. Students picked out establishing a career, working out what they wanted to do, and statements about managing time and money as the things they expected to find hardest when leaving school. In fact many of the things students thought would be best, were the things they also thought would be hardest, suggesting some overall anxiety about the life tasks ahead. This can be understood as part of the impact of a modern society’s emphasis on individual responsibility and choice—apparent for young people in the requirements to make an increasing number of decisions, spanning a greater range of areas, with more far-reaching consequences, throughout school and beyond. While students in our sample are attracted to making their own decisions, they also show some awareness of the gravity and challenge of those decisions.

Students reported their own pathway interests and needs in response to our questions. Nearly three-quarters of the students expected to undertake some form of tertiary study in the first year of leaving school and half expected to do some travel in that time. Between a quarter and a half of the students chose more than one likely or very likely study, travel, or employment option for the first year of leaving school, suggesting some were considering different ways of pursuing particular interests and were factoring in possible changes of direction (losing interest or discovering a new interest) or disappointments (not gaining entry to a study programme). More than half recognise a need to study towards qualifications more than once in their lifetime, usually in order to deepen their expertise in a particular area.

Students were also able to identify useful connections and activities for helping them think about careers. A wide variety of activities were useful but not necessarily very useful. But of the activities that were useful, most involved relationships—with family, friends, and teachers or careers advisors at school—or learning through a classroom-based subject. More thought could be given to supporting families, as BTTTDM is currently exploring (Career Services, 2007a).

A surprisingly high proportion of students had not taken part in career-specific activities. However, given that careers education tends to be regarded as an intervention rather than an integrated activity for all students (Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007), our particular dataset of students with an over-representation of more affluent and advantaged backgrounds means they are less likely to fall into a category seen to require careers education as an intervention.

Certainly there is some recognition in recent government initiatives of the challenges inherent in choice proliferation. It is precisely why so much effort is going into providing better access, quality, and co-ordination of information. However, there is less recognition that young people make their choices within, and as they pass out of, an environment (i.e., school) that has not necessarily prepared them for being able to make choices well. This is because schools have not tended to move with the paradigm shift to a knowledge society, including its related concepts of post-Fordist society and fast capitalism (Gilbert, 2005). In a world of “accelerated flows” between nations (of people, ideas, and money) (Appadurai, 1996), fragmenting structures and institutions (e.g., family, moral leadership) (Beck, 1999), and rapid technological development, labour markets now demand different skills of workers and therefore also different kinds of employer–worker relationships.

These things make forging a career a fundamentally trickier proposition than it used to be because people must now take account of movement and shift throughout their careers and lives—hitting the spot where career used to define lives in a more reliable and fixed sort of way, including one where balancing work and other aspects of life was not the issue it is today. But, as Gilbert (2005) argues, despite all the talk about knowledge society and new employer–worker relationships, people do not necessarily understand these things well and so schools still teach 20th century skill-sets to students, operating as though the shift was not happening and the relationship between school and the world of work was not being called into question (again) in new ways.

Throughout this report there is evidence that students recognise some kind of shift and distinction between careers and jobs, but are unclear as to what the shifts might really look like for their further studies, working lives, and careers. Students’ responses indicate that while careers and jobs are both important, they are different things and come with different sets of demands and satisfactions. Students saw “finding a job” as easier than “establishing a career”. A labour market favouring employees may have helped persuade them that finding a job is not necessarily difficult. However, students are also possibly distinguishing between a job as a way to earn money and career(s) in terms of work and lifestyle choices and personal identity. Students may have a sense of career shifting away from being a fixed structure to being a process (Wijers & Meijers, 1996) and involving a series of decisions, particularly where it involves further studies before (and also even after) finding a job. It may also be that finding jobs throughout life now depends more on figuring out what you want, rather than following a set path. Students rated “working out what I want to do” as harder than “finding a job”, but easier than “establishing a career”. When students responded to statements about what a career is, although 67 percent of students were in agreement that a career means “having a job” and just 18 percent in disagreement with that, only 13 percent could strongly agree, suggesting that students recognised having a job is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for having a career.

When we examined students’ responses to different ideas about careers, we found that they tended to agree most with the more traditional ideas about career associated with having a job that you can do well, that offers promotion within the same workplace, that pays over $35K, that has high status, that requires a university degree. Students showed more uncertainty of agreement about the more recent and uncertain ideas about “career”—qualifications that enable you to travel and work, different jobs in different workplaces using similar skills, several jobs at one time relating to one career area. This is not surprising. These ideas are themselves about addressing future uncertainty in terms of the individual’s career portfolio, the workplace in a global and skill-evolving context, and within broader technological, social, and economic changes. In addition, students are likely to be experiencing the kind of school-based careers guidance that privileges the provision of career information over the development of the kind of self-management and career management skills needed to flourish beyond simple entry to a course of study or the labour market (Vaughan, 2007; Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007).

Students did show a high level of agreement with two emergent career ideas. Students’ agreement with a career being about qualifications for building on with more qualifications may reflect (some) students beginning to understand themselves as a kind of ongoing enterprise (Vaughan et al., 2006). However, it may also simply be that students are thinking of building on qualifications in order to deepen expertise in one very specific career area rather than to span or link different areas in new ways. Students’ agreement with career being about being in paid work with enough time for family, friends, and leisure activities suggests there is a high level of interest in work-in-life balance and is consistent with other New Zealand research showing some school leavers taking an integrated approach to “work”, “career”, and “life”, although the ways they do this vary (Vaughan et al., 2006). However, the lack of consistency across students’ formal careers education experiences and careers staff ability to provide careers education consistent with career development and management (Vaughan & Gardiner, 2007) means that students are likely to struggle to get to grips with shifts between traditional and emergent ideas about career and the workplace.

If the teacher’s tricky job is to prepare students to be successful in existing social structures and be active agents in changing those social structures (Skilton-Sylvester, 2003), then we probably need to support teachers (and especially, but not only, careers advisors) to do something differently in preparing young people to think about their lives beyond school. And “doing something differently” is likely to need to be something beyond providing more, better, and better-accessed information. It is likely to need to be about changing what we think knowledge, learning, and teaching is (Gilbert, 2005; Pink, 2005). The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007b) potentially moves school curriculum this way but only if the opportunities are seen and taken up. Specifically, in terms of the transition from school, a useful change could be helping students construct their careers in relation to their lives—which means understanding that this career construction is not the entirety of personal identity (paid work is important but its role may change over time), does not happen just at the point of leaving school (it is lifelong), and does not necessarily happen in linear ways (there are predictable and unpredictable changes) (Vaughan et al., 2006).

Structured choices

This leads into the second issue of how we understand and account for choices facing, and made by, young people. These choices are structured, even though the pathways and choice narratives within which people operate rarely recognise this–as other research has shown by drawing attention to the social and institutional structures that constrain or enable choices for individuals or groups (Furlong & Cartmel, 1997; Raffe, 2001; te Riele, 2005). Research has shown, for example, that there is a differential distribution of the nature of transition risk for different young people (Furlong, Cartmel, Biggart, Sweeting, & West, 2003) and that schools structure the subject choices of students, which in turn structure the in-school and post-school pathways available to students (Hipkins et al., 2005). It has also shown that participants’ own silence about structural constraints does not mean this is unimportant but rather it is taken for granted and constituted in terms of individual choices (Brannen & Nilsen, 2005, p. 426). Moreover, young people may have a particular investment in explaining their transition “choices” in particular ways that avoid recognition of structural constraints (Vaughan et al., 2006).

In this report, indicators of structural constraints around pathway and career-related choices appear in particular around maternal qualifications, family income at age 16, ethnicity, and subject cluster. For example, Päkehä/NZ European and Asian students are more likely to expect to enter full-time study, aspire to professional careers, and take academic subjects. Mäori and Pacific students are more likely to expect to work full-time on leaving school and take contextual and vocational subjects. Students taking contextual and vocational subjects are also more likely to think the best thing about leaving school is not having teachers hassle them and not having to do school work. They are also more likely to be interested in earning-while-learning options. Students with mothers who have low qualifications are less likely to aspire to professional occupations. Students with a high family income are more likely to see their families as a particularly useful support in talking about careers. Students whose mothers have low qualifications and a low income are less likely to aspire to tertiary study.

Throughout the report, students who do well in the areas most valued by teachers and school (e.g., enjoyment of reading, being focused and responsible, high cognitive competency) are consistently more likely to see themselves undertaking tertiary study, often university, having professional occupations, and fewer barriers to the life they desire. In short, they are more likely to have a learning identity that predisposes them to undertake tertiary study in the first year of leaving school and possibly undertake more formal learning later in life too.

Our report shows that the importance of research that looks into the structured nature of transition choices cannot be underestimated because the key transition-from-school focus on young people as decision makers comes with the risk of missing the patterns of young people’s engagement with school and how their learning identities, transition perspectives, and choices come to be structured. In some cases this structuring manifests as pathways from school which are already being closed down. Building on research which has questioned what a “proper” transition from school might actually be (Vaughan et al., 2006), our report suggests that students who do not successfully negotiate the transition are not necessarily individually at fault. By examining how students come to see themselves as learners, now and into their work and study future, and their aspirations for career and work-in-life balance, alongside social and school-mix characteristics, we are better able to understand and address inequalities to help all students to successfully negotiate the transition from school.

Footnotes

8. This was foreshadowed in 2003 by the Education and Training Leaving Age Package and a focus on co-ordinating the youth transition services through a cross-departmental Youth Transitions Steering Group which aimed to have “all 15¬–19-year-olds in appropriate education, training and work by 2007” (New Zealand Treasury, 2003, p. 9).
   
9. For a detailed research project on school subject choice systems and its impact on young people and their in-school and post-school pathways, see Hipkins et al. (2005).