Junior and senior secondary school students have different needs

The Age, 11 August 2008

Professor Richard Sweet, a former senior education analyst at the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, believes that Australia could potentially improve its early school leavers, student retention and teenage unemployment rates if it considered creating separate junior and secondary high schools.

‘Each year the education system continues to pump far too many poorly qualified and inadequately skilled young people into a labour market that has little need for them. This is simply not good enough,’ Professor Sweet said.

Professor Sweet believes that a ‘clear divide’ exists between the education that junior and secondary school students receive. He further believes that 11 to 14-year olds have different learning needs to 15 to 17-year old students, and that those differences should be reflected in the way in which they are taught and treated.

According to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 74 per cent of students complete Year 12 nationwide, and 30 per cent of school-leavers are neither in full-time study nor in full-time work. ABS data shows that these figures have ‘changed little since the early 1990s’.

The ACT and Tasmania, who have reported an increase in Year 12 student retention rates, are the only two Australian states that have a junior and senior secondary school system. Yet there are some Victorian independent schools that separate their students by having junior and senior secondary campuses.

A study conducted in 2005 by the University of Melbourne for the Victorian Department of Education and Training found that schools that separated their junior and senior students were ‘cost-effective, could offer a wider curriculum and had high levels of student satisfaction’.

Professor Sweet addressed these issues at the Australian Council for Educational Research’s 2008 national conference.

 

 

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