Negotiating pathways through secondary school: do humanitarian entrants and refugees risk disengagement

Although the majority of immigrants enter Australia via the skilled migration program, a sizeable minority enter as refugees and humanitarian immigrants and thus have varying levels of education and skills. Refugees and humanitarian immigrants experience a range of challenges in adapting to Australian society. Young people in humanitarian need may face an increased likelihood of becoming disengaged from school. Therefore, this particular group of young people are likely to need additional support to successfully negotiate the complex pathways from secondary school into employment. Improving the transitions of young people from school into further education, training and employment is one of the key objectives of the National Partnership on Youth Attainment and Transitions. Hence, an examination of whether country of origin plays any role in education and employment outcomes is timely. Previous research shows that, overall, young immigrants, and the children of immigrants, have both higher rates of engagement in post-school study, and higher rates of unemployment. In this paper, [the authors] analyse the first five waves of data collected by the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth from the 2003 cohort (LSAY03) to examine whether young people from refugee source countries are disadvantaged in terms of their education and employment outcomes compared to their peers born in Australia or in non-refugee source countries.

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