Student perspectives on leaving school, pathways, and careers Publications
Publication Details
Competent Children, Competent Learners is a longitudinal study which began in 1993 and follows the progress of a sample of around 500 New Zealand young people from early childhood education through schooling and beyond. This report focuses on what students at age 16 thought about leaving school, what their biggest concerns and most anticipated opportunities were, what they saw as the most likely barriers to having the kind of life they wanted, how they envisaged spending their first year out of school, what their occupational aspirations, connections, influences, and motivations were and what the idea of “career” meant to them.
Author(s): Karen Vaughan, New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
Date Published: May 2008
Summary
This is the fourth in a series of reports from the age-16 stage of the longitudinal Competent Children, Competent Learners project, funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE) and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER). The project has been tracking the development of a group of around 540 from just under age five (in 1993) through school, analysing the impact of different experiences and resources on a range of competencies.1
This report tackles a specific subset of the data gathered when students were 16 years old and focuses on the 420 students still at school.2 It answers the questions: What do secondary school students at age 16 think about what leaving school will be like? What are their biggest concerns and their most anticipated opportunities? What do they see as the most likely barriers to having the kind of life they want? How do they envisage spending their first year out of school? What are their occupational aspirations, connections, influences, and motivations? What does the idea of "career" mean to them?
The transition landscape of student choice
These questions are about students' perspectives—perspectives which have come to matter more than ever in the current youth transition landscape. That landscape emphasises student choice amidst an expanded number and complexity of possibilities, within a "pathways framework" built on three system-wide shifts occurring in the past decade (Vaughan, 2004):
- a deregulated tertiary system (though some regulation and the elimination of course duplication is being reintroduced via different funding mechanisms);
- the development of a National Qualifications Framework, designed to be flexible, credible to employers, schools, and tertiary institutions, and use criterion or standards-based assessment; and
- an increase in career development support for a wider range of post-school careers, especially vocational ones, together with an increase in the status of vocational careers, in order to improve labour supply, alleviate skill shortages, and provide meaningful work opportunities for young people.
This framework sustains a number of initiatives that aim to support students and young people by positioning them as the key decision makers. Despite differences in where and how they support young people, the Secondary-Tertiary Alignment Resource (STAR), the Gateway scheme, Creating Pathways and Building Lives (CPaBL), and the recent Better Tertiary and Trades Training Decision Making (BTTTDM) service and new Schools Plus scheme tell young people that their background or rate of school success is no obstacle to their making choices and finding—and creating—an individual and successful pathway from school to career (Vaughan, 2005).
Two major issues arise from this situation. The first is that while young people are required to make decisions about an ever-increasing range of in-school courses and post-school possibilities, they receive no real preparation for doing this well. Schools—the major site of school-to-work transition preparation for most young people—are not yet in step with many knowledge society shifts that have affected labour markets, skills demands, employer–worker relationships, and the very nature of "career". The second issue is that those in-school and post-school possibilities for young people continue to be structured by family and background experiences and resources, and by school experiences and in-school learning systems. Yet the "pathways framework" and its underpinning invocation of "choice for all" means our understanding of young people's transition from school implicitly sidesteps any recognition of the structural constraints around those choices. The danger is that we may miss patterns of inequality, misreading them for individual failure to make a good transition. We will revisit these ideas throughout the report and, in particular, in the conclusion.
Report structure and analysis
The Competent Children, Competent Learners study has consistently shown up differences in patterns of engagement with early childhood education and school and what might be done to reduce the gaps in achievement between different groups of students. This report also shows up patterns in relation to the transition from school and students' aspirations and ideas about career. This report is able to be more comprehensive than many other studies on student career and transition perspectives because we have been able to draw on the full scope of Competent Children, Competent Learners in its collection of data on a range of competencies and its building of rich profiles of students in their lives at, and beyond, school. It means, for example, that we can relate students' careers and transition ideas and experiences to their ideas and experiences of school and to measures of their competencies, as well as measures of their social characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, mother's qualifications and family income, and school–social mix (e.g., school decile).
There is an important caveat about the study's sample in that its original focus in 1993 meant that sampling units were early childhood education centres,3 chosen from one particular region in New Zealand, rather than individual participants' social characteristics. So, although the sample contains fairly even proportions of males and females, there are lower proportions of Māori, Pacific, and Asian young people and higher proportions of young people from high-income families, with mothers who have trade or tertiary-level qualifications, than the New Zealand national average. However, despite not being nationally representative, it does have sufficient numbers to enable comparisons of students with different social characteristics and different experiences. The sample is a useful source of data regarding young people's ideas about leaving school and establishing themselves and their careers in relation to other factors in their backgrounds and lives. Where there are differences related to differences in social characteristics, it also makes for a more positive picture of young people and their perspectives than there might have been with a more nationally representative sample—food for thought when reading the rest of this report.
Social Characteristics of Sample Students | (n = 420) | % |
---|---|---|
Family income (at age 16) | ||
Low income (< $40,000) | 112 | 27 |
Medium/high income ($50–$100,000) | 168 | 40 |
Very high income ($100,000+) | 140 | 33 |
Maternal qualification | ||
None | 49 | 12 |
Trade/Mid-secondary | 209 | 50 |
Senior secondary/Tertiary | 77 | 18 |
University | 82 | 20 |
Not known | 3 | >1 |
Gender | ||
Male | 216 | 51 |
Female | 204 | 49 |
Ethnicity | ||
Pākehā/NZ European | 339 | 81 |
Māori | 38 | 9 |
Pacific | 18 | 4 |
Asian | 13 | 3 |
Other | 12 | 3 |
The report is divided into sections analysing questions or sets of questions asked of students. Some questions were open (e.g., name up to three occupations in which you are interested), some were "tick all that apply", and some used scales (e.g., from agreement to disagreement).
Each section title contains the main idea in the question asked of students and begins with a rationale about what we asked students, why, and how. We then report on frequency data and cross-tabulations of that frequency data against a range of different measures that add some contextual data to the patterns of responses. We report only the statistically significant associations, based on cross-tabulations, that had a chi-square value at the p 0.01 level (indicating a one in 100 odds that the association has occurred by chance). The range of measures used in this report, drawn from the wider project, are shown in the following table.
Table 2: Overview of measures used
Family income at 16
Three groups: under $40K annually; $40 –$100K annually; over $100K annually.
Decile:
Deciles 1/2, 3–8, and 9/10.
Ethnicity:
Pākehā/NZ European/Asian or Māori/Pasifika.
Gender:
Female or male.
Mother's Qualifications:
No qualifications; early secondary qualifications; trades/post-secondary qualifications; and university/tertiary qualifications.
Cognitive Composite Competency:
A mean of three scores: literacy, numeracy, and problem solving.
Focused and Responsible:
A scale for teacher ratings of student problem solving, persistence, listening, concentration span, punctuality, finishing class work, learning from mistakes, remembering and carrying out instructions, meeting goals student has set, student choosing work to further own knowledge/skills. The "Thinking and Learning" variable yielded very similar patterns of cross-tabulations and so was not used separately in this report.
Social Skills:
A scale for teacher ratings of student respect for others' points of view or ways of doing things, appropriate presentation of own point of view even where disagreement, support for others in classroom, keeping things smooth, or resolving disputes with peers.
School Attendance:
A scale based on school ratings from excellent to seldom attends.
Social Difficulties:
A scale for teacher ratings of student mixing with other students who are in trouble or anti-social, peer pressure influence to do out-of-character things, hassling/bullying of other students, and being hassled/bullied by other students. We show this scale in reverse throughout the report so that a low rating is shown as having social difficulties.
Enjoyment of Reading:
Parent reports of student's enjoyment at ages 8 and 10 and student's self-report at ages 12 and 14 according to whether they always enjoyed reading, mainly yes or a qualified yes to enjoying reading, or reported not enjoy reading at least twice.
Risky Behaviour:
A scale that includes these items: drinking alcohol, regrettable behaviour when drunk, having sex, trouble with police, physical fighting, romantic relationship troubles, getting behind in school work, lying about something that someone else did. We show this scale in reverse throughout the report so that a low rating is shown as having risky behaviour.
Motivation at 14:
Three groups based on parent reports of student's perceived value of education, and long-term ambition of the student and for the student by their parent. The highest group is university/professional orientation and high faith in gains from school. The middle group refers to students less positive of gains from school and less sure of future goals. The lowest group refers to aiming for skilled/unskilled jobs, low conviction about gains from school.
Subject Cluster:
Clusters based on subject choices for Year 11 and Year 12 students, similar to a cluster analysis first used in the Learning Curves research. The analysis yielded four clusters of subjects. Traditional academic,arts orientation: more likely to take course assessed by Achievement Standards (AS) in maths, visual art, music, economics, accountancy, graphics, one or more languages, geography, history, design or fabric technology, the English Unit Standard (US) that requires reading a range of texts, and at Level 2 more creative options among the English AS, photography. Traditional academic, science orientation: more likely to take course assessed by AS in maths, physical education, economics, science subjects (science in Year 11, and biology, chemistry, physics, etc. in Year 12), geography. Contextually-focused options: more likely to take food technology, outdoor/sport options, physical education, visual art, fabric or other soft technology options, geography, computer oriented options, text information management, a course with a mix of US and AS in maths, life skills, hospitality or tourism. Vocational orientation: more likely to take food technology, physical education, dance and/or drama, music, one or more of the hard technology options, text information management, life skills US, hospitality or tourism, US-assessed courses in maths and English, science (US at Level 2), business studies, other technology options.
Total No. of Level 1 NCEA credits:
Four quartiles, based on overall number of NCEA credits gained at Level 1—i.e., across all subjects.
Footnotes
- The Competent Children, Competent Learners study is a longitudinal study of a sample of New Zealand young people, who have been followed every two years since 1993 from their final early childhood education centres in the Wellington region. The main aim of the project is to chart the development of competencies in the context of home, leisure, and educational experiences that may account for differences in patterns of development and young people's performance. Four other reports from the age-16 phase accompany this one, together with an overall summary. These reports and ones from the earlier phases of the study are available at www.educationcounts.govt.nz, with and associated papers, the NZCER website, www.nzcer.org.nz
- There were 420 students still at school when the data were gathered; 27 had left school and there is a section on those 27 students in the companion report On the Edge of Adulthood (Wylie, Hipkins, & Hodgen, in press).
- The study originally aimed to find out about the development of competencies considered important in becoming and being lifelong learners and, in particular, how early childhood education might contribute to those. It has since expanded to include measures of school engagement and achievement, friendships, and family relationships.
- The numbers of Māori and Pacific young people left in the study at age 16 are lower than desirable. However, our caveats about this low number are tempered by the fact that our findings for this sample are consistent with other studies of Māori and Pacific students' performance. At age 16, we had participation from 45 Māori, 18 Pacific, 13 Asian, and 360 Pākehā young people. Because we did not have sufficient numbers of Māori, Pacific, and Asian young people to analyse separately, we brought together the ethnic categories whose age-14 competency levels were most similar, so that we had groups of sufficient size for comparison. These groups are Māori/Pacific, and Pākehā/Asian.
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