VCAL Giving students another chance

The Age, Caroline Milburn, 3 March 2008

A recent study conducted by researchers from The University of Melbourne has found that, since the inception of the Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL), student retention rates have grown from 76 percent in 1999 to 80
percent in 2006.

The study focused on teenagers’ ability to ‘learn to navigate stress associated with school, peers and family’. According
to Dr Erica Frydenberg, the study found that VCAL gave students a ‘rewarding, enjoyable and supportive’ senior secondary education alternative to the more traditional VCE option.

Dr Frydenberg said that most of the students enrolled in VCAL are the ‘very kids in other settings and in the previous school system, who would have been stressed, would have dropped out or were failing’. Furthermore, Dr Frydenberg believes that the results of the study, which looked at 157 students enrolled in VCAL courses, offers ‘quantifiable data
that something good is happening; that a programme has been designed to cater for their needs and they’re responding positively to it’.

VCAL was introduced in 2003 as a government initiative to stem the flow of 11,000 students leaving school before completing Year 12. VCAL is a wide-ranging certificate for senior secondary students interested in trade jobs and be paired up with Vocational Education and Training courses such as: engineering, hospitality, hairdressing, horticulture
and sport recreation.

For further information, visit the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority

 

 

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