Jill Ryan

Constructing productive post‐school transitions: an analysis of Australian schooling policies

Not having clear pathways, or the social means and personal capacities to make a productive transition from schooling, can inhibit young people’s participation in social and economic life thereafter. This paper advances an analysis of how policy documents associated with senior schooling from across Australian states address the needs of students who are most at risk of not securing productive transitions. The review identifies that many of the goals emphasised the autonomy of students in taking control of their own transitions. However, such individualistic views downplay the importance of the mediating role that access to cultural, social and economic capital is likely to play in the negotiations involved in making a productive transition. Thus, the needs of ‘at‐risk’ students who may have limited access to the forms of capital offering the best support for these negotiations are not well acknowledged in the policies.

The Impact of Interrupted Schooling: Recent School Leavers’ Accounts of Transitions

Over the last decade, reforms to senior schooling provisions have occurred across most Australian states and territories. The policy reforms have been mandated to enable more young people to make successful transitions through the final years of secondary school and on to the more desirable and widely acceptable post-school options of full-time work or full-time further education. Even so, although many young people are able to make trouble-free transitions, others still seem unable or unlikely to do so. This chapter contributes to understandings about the transition process for this latter group. It does so by drawing on analyses of interviews with nine recent school leavers with various patterns of interrupted schooling. These young people’s accounts of their transition experiences are conceptualised in terms of their motivation to engage with the affordances for transition to be found in the secondary schools they attended and in their wider communities. This framework is then used to problematise the notion of flexible, but well-planned, pathways through schooling and on to work or further education—one of the key features of current senior schooling policy in Queensland. While acknowledging the limitations of this small-scale interview research, we argue that there are implicit assumptions about young people’s capacities and circumstances, which appear to underpin the pathways model. Consequently, when these assumptions do not hold for a particular student, the enactment of the policy, contrary to its intent, may present barriers to a successful post-school transition.

Researching Transition Experiences in Australian Senior Schooling

This chapter provides an introduction to Part III, a set of chapters which draw on focus group and interview data gathered in an Australian study of transitions from senior schooling to post-school life. Specifically, the research sought to investigate what constituted “productive transitions” from a range of perspectives in a number of communities and how different curriculum practices in these communities helped young people to make such transitions. The chapter outlines the projects’ overall aim and research questions, and the approach and method adopted in the project as a whole. It describes the selection of schools for case studies and the common procedures adopted for gathering data at each of these sites.

Pathways and Choice: Transitions at Sunny Beach College

This chapter reports on a case study of one particular secondary school, Sunny Beach College, as it responds to, and enacts, a particular policy on students’ transition from school to post-school life. It does so in a context where current national and international policies stress the importance of providing clear and diverse pathways to facilitate students’ successful transitions. It details how the college used a key element of the policy, the SET planning process, as a catalyst for changing the senior secondary program in order to ensure that multiple pathways, both academic and vocational, were offered to students. Interviews reveal that both students and staff at Sunny Beach College saw successful transitions as a linear process that resulted in students ‘earning or learning’. However, this process did not depend on a single pathway. Rather, it was seen to be the result of a multiplicity of possible pathways, many of which were facilitated by the school. That is, Sunny Beach College offered an educational context that facilitated the making of such linear transitions. Further, the students and teachers at Sunny Beach College recognised and accepted agency for their part in the interplay of individual decisions and pathways, which is inherent in the transition process. The findings of this chapter demonstrate the pervasiveness of discourses on linear transition and on individualism in both education policies and in the everyday lives of students and teachers as they enact transition policy. However, the chapter also provides evidence that such linear transitions are facilitated in institutional contexts such as Sunny Beach College. The findings point to the importance of the social context in the transition process and to the need for a consideration of context for understanding issues impacting on making a successful transition to post-school life.