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On Track is a Victorian Government initiative which surveys school leavers who have left school in the last six months to find out if they are on track to a bright future. On Track ensures school leavers are contacted within six months of leaving school to see if they are on a path to further education, training or employment. This report presents results from the 2010 interviews with 4299 young Victorians, as part of the longitudinal component of the On Track program. These young people either completed a Year 12 or equivalent certificate in 2007 or left school before receiving a Year 12 certificate during 2007. All of those interviewed in 2010 had been interviewed in 2008 as part of the regular On Track program and in 2009 as part of the longitudinal program. This cohort of young people will be interviewed again in 2011, and a final report on their post-school pathways will be released in late 2011.

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This project set out to conduct research around the non-technical capabilities needed by secondary school graduates to successfully participate in work or further study. There are many terms used to describe non-technical capabilities, such as general capabilities, generic skills or competencies, employability skills, core skills etc. However, for the purposes of this research the term 'non-technical capabilities' has been used and includes both literacy and numeracy skills and other generic skills, knowledge and understandings that are covered by the following four national frameworks: (1) the Australian Core Skills Framework (ACSF); (2) the Core Skills for Work Developmental Framework (CSfW); (3) the General Capabilities from the Australian national curriculum; and (4) the Australian Blueprint for Career Development (ABCD).

The project examined which capabilities are most appropriately developed in a school setting, as well as what might be realistically done in schools to develop, assess and/or recognise these capabilities and how employers can support and/or add to this. It also examined what secondary schools are currently doing to support students to develop these capabilities and identified where processes are already in place to assess and/or recognise them.

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Only about half of Latino, Black and Native American students graduate from high school. Much of the research explains school dropout using statistical relationships between dropout rates and a variety of 'risk factors' attributed to students, like income, race/ethnicity, academic achievement and behaviors and attitudes. In contrast, this study examines two Latino adolescents' everyday experiences of dropping out in the context of cultural and structural aspects of school and consciously works against the common view of poor students of color as inherently 'at risk' for school dropout. We illuminate how, through educational neglect and social and intellectual alienation, schools and school adults contributed to these two students' progressive disengagement from school. Implications for practice and further research are explored.

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Over the last few decades, investment in education has steadily increased in most industrialised countries. Parallel to this evolution have been growing concerns about overeducation, typically defined as a situation in which individuals have more education than their job requires for one to perform adequately. The purpose of this paper is to assess the sensitivity of the estimated determinants of overeducation to the used overeducation measure. [The authors] analysed the determinants of overeducation among Flemish school leavers in their first job by means of probit regression analysis. Overeducation is measured on the basis of job analysis, self-assessments and realised matches. The results demonstrated that the application of different overeducation measures sometimes leads to different outcomes. Only a few variables – for instance the student's academic grade in the final year – are consistently found to be important for the explanation of overeducation. Some outcomes are consistent with the supposition that some indicators actually measure other concepts.

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This paper investigates to what extent self-rated job-specific and generic skills and different types of educational signals are positively related to the labor market integration process of Dutch graduates, 18 months after finishing upper secondary vocational education. Our contributions to the current literature are that of simultaneously investigating these different types of skills and (a more extensive concept of) educational signals, and moreover examining to what extent the impact of self-rated specific skills and educational signals differ between the four labor market outcomes under investigation. We analyzed secondary survey data from the [vocational education and training] VET survey collected in the Netherlands in 2015. Results indicate that (1) self-rated specific skills - acquired either in education or on the job - are more positively related to favorable labor market outcomes than self-rated generic skills in the first 18 months of graduates' integration process, (2) only certain educational signals positively impact labor market integration, and (3) the positive impact of self-rated specific skills and signals varies between different labor market outcomes.

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Education Links is an independent magazine that provides a radical critique of Australian education. For more than two decades it has been a voice for students, educators and community members working to bring about democratic and socially progressive educational change. The magazine presents a socialist analysis of a wide range of educational issues and is not affiliated with any political party. Education Links is produced by an editorial group of teachers, students and university staff.

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Contents: Editorial: education and social action; What's missing?: popular education and new discourses / Rick Flowers; Social Action Learning and Work, which contains: Why can't TAFE appreciate us?: resisting cuts in education: one story / Derek Waddell, Resisting cuts in education: using both industrial and political strategies / Keiko Yasukawa, Politicising learning in the workplace: context and method / Griff Foley, and Analysing workers' history through a 'learning lens' / Linda Cooper; Teachers Work, Students Lives and Access, which contains: The politics of education 'reform' / Richard Walsham, A facade for union bashing?: the Ramsey Report on teacher education in [New South Wales] NSW / Kelvin McQueen, 'Listen to me I'm leaving' / Robert Hattam and John Smyth, Scales of injustice: working with young people / Debra Hayes, Collaborating for social justice? / Lyn Tett, and Knowledge creation: a challenge for higher education in Ireland / Anne Ryan and Ann O'Brien; Cultural Action, which contains: From Freire to Boal / Hernan Flores, Risk and play: group devised theatre creation / Paul Murray, Theatre: art or action / Bridget Mary Aitchison, The anti-racism radio show / Ben Zion Weiss, and Kids locked up / Peter Slattery; Viewpoint: behind the rhetoric / Rowan Cahill; Loose links. Show less

This pamphlet compares school leavers’ vocational interests (preferred job areas) with their actual destinations (the occupations in which school leavers are employed directly from school) in an attempt to determine how realistic their job preferences are in terms of labour market demand. The evidence shows that there are considerable discrepancies between vocational aspirations of school leavers (particularly those intending to move directly into the youth labour market) and the types of jobs in which they are likely to become employed. Show less

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather information on school leavers’ and graduates’ pathways after compulsory education. Using documentary data collected systematically the paper describes the main focus, the research design and the sampling frame of the school leavers’ and graduates’ information systems (SLGIS) arriving at several different typologies. This paper gives an overall picture of what sort of research is conducted within the area of school leaving and graduation and points out the advantages and disadvantages of the different approaches. Beyond these, the paper gives an indication of how the school leavers’ and graduates’ data are used within the different European contexts and points towards the next steps of this meta-research: case-studies on how the school leavers’ and graduates’ data are applied at the national and the institutional level.

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This paper recounts the development of the Pathways to Education Program from its origins in the Regent Park community of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The program was conceived in 2000 as a response to the seeming intractable and longstanding problem of high school dropouts in one of Canada's most economically disadvantaged and culturally diverse communities. In the first section, the authors recount the development of the Program. Section Two documents the program's remarkable success in significantly reducing the dropout rate and increasing post-secondary participation through the provision of comprehensive community based supports. The final section offers lessons about the program itself and about possible implications for other social innovations. The program's success has led to its replication in other low-income communities across Canada.

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There are significant lacunae in the otherwise highly progressive documents on early school leaving prevention from the European Commission and Council in 2011, as part of the [European Union 2020] EU2020 headline target of 10 per cent early school leavers across the EU. These documents offer no explicit account or analysis of the voices of children and young people, nor vision of systemic accountability of schools to students' needs. This article argues that key problems of early school leaving can be interpreted as system level blockages in communication, including blockage in communication of children's voices. It seeks to develop a conceptual framework for understanding relational systems by reinterpreting a particular dimension of the structuralist anthropology of Levi-Strauss' cross-cultural examination of systems of relation, namely, the interplay between diametric oppositional and concentric relational spaces. The theoretical framework proposed in this article will also seek to translate structural features of system change into structural indicators for system scrutiny and accountability. Identification of key structural indicators is to facilitate change beyond blocked, diametric school space and towards concentric relational spaces in the school system - based on diverse accounts of students' voices and needs in specific European contexts, as part of a potential strategy at European level to prevent early school leaving. Emerging issues highlighted as an agenda for reform include authoritarian teaching, alternatives to suspension, splits in communication, emotional supports, teacher conflict resolution skills and substantive structures and processes for active student voices in school.

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