School completion is viewed as a major policy issue in Australia. Early school leavers are more likely to become unemployed, stay unemployed for longer, have lower earnings, and accumulate less wealth over their lifetime. Policy makers are particularly concerned with the role of schools in early school leaving, with a view to policy intervention. If individual schools have important effects on school leaving, then policies could be introduced in particular schools to reduce early school leaving. However, such policy interventions would be less appropriate if schools or school factors do not make substantive independent contributions to school leaving.

School completion in Australia has increased substantially from around one third of secondary school students in 1980 to about three quarters in 2005. More recently, policies implemented to increase participation include broadening the curriculum, restricting unemployment assistance for school leavers, expanding vocational education in secondary schools and increasing the minimum school leaving age. However, despite these policy interventions, school retention has increased only marginally by about 3 percentage points since the mid 1990s. One explanation is that non-academically inclined students are choosing to enter the labour market or participate in post-school education rather than complete school.

A recent study by Dr Gary Marks, Principal Research Fellow at ACER, concluded that schools do not have a strong independent influence on school leaving. Some schools do have substantially higher or lower levels of school leaving than expected given their students’ characteristics, but there are relatively few such schools and they do not vary in an identifiable, systematic way from other schools.

The study demonstrates how important student achievement is, with effects about four times stronger than that for students’ socioeconomic, social, and cultural background. This effect of student achievement on leaving school cannot be attributed to socioeconomic background. Therefore, it is the academically weaker students who are far more likely not to complete school. Socioeconomic background does have a weaker effect, with lower socioeconomic background students more likely to not complete school even when taking into account student achievement. Boys, students from non-metropolitan areas, and students living in non-traditional families are more likely to leave school than comparison groups, regardless of achievement.

The study has implications for policies on school completion which assume that school leavers would be better off if they completed school. Since school leavers are predominately low achievers, it is unlikely that an extra year or two in the academic environment of upper secondary school would be beneficial to their labour market prospects. Resources may be better directed by providing appropriate post-school education and training once they have entered the labour market.

This research is based on a longitudinal study of 10 000 students first contacted in 2003 for the PISA study. By 2005 there were more than 8600 respondents in 315 schools. Early school leavers were defined as those who left before beginning Year 12, or before September of Year 12.

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Reference:

Marks, Gary N. (2007) ‘Do Schools Matter for Early School Leaving? Individual and School Influences in Australia’, School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 18:4, 429 – 450.

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