Girls on the margins of education and work
Teenage
girls who leave school as young as 15 years of age are significantly more
disadvantaged in the labour market than young men who leave school early, a
University of South Australia study shows.
The young women represent a large and often overlooked proportion of the 8.3 per cent of young people up to the age of 24 years who experience serious economic disadvantage relative to other young people because of limited education, no post-school qualification and lack of employment opportunities, according to Professor Alison Mackinnon, Foundation Director of UniSA’s Hawke Research Institute.
The findings are part of a three-year research project aimed at understanding the social, employment and biographical factors that influence decisions by teenage girls to stay on or leave school early and to investigate strategies that will support them.
Funded by the Australian Research Council, the research involves project teams in South Australia led by chief investigators Professor Mackinnon and Professor Jane Kenway (who has since moved to Monash), and in Victoria led by Dr Julie McLeod and Dr Andrea Allard from Deakin university.
Teenage girls considered by their teachers to be at risk of leaving school early were the major focus of the research. They came from suburbs marginalised not only from a socio economic perspective but also because of their position on the outer fringes or margins of the cities.
“We also interviewed their mothers to look at factors that might have impacted on their daughters’ lives, and older girls aged between 18 and 24 years who left school early, to see if we could find patterns of behaviour and survival strategies over time,” Professor Mackinnon said.
“Our aim was to find out what sets the young girls apart from others to make them more at risk of cutting short their education, and the ‘turning points’ in their lives that lead them to make the decision to leave school early, because many of them know that they should stay at school.
“A major threat to the girls’ education is the high level of violence, sexual abuse, disturbed family relationships and loss in the lives of both the girls and their mothers, which was much worse than we expected. Understandably, for many of the girls school might be low on their list of priorities as their ability to concentrate on study might be very much compromised,” Professor Mackinnon said.
The research shows that friendships at school are crucial for the girls, even though they can have fairly difficult trajectories. The girls often have to walk a very fine line, being careful not to offend or upset their friends, otherwise they risk being rejected by tight, quite emotional friendship groups that readily burst into conflict. This can result in physical violence, which is enormously disruptive and causes girls to leave school or go to other schools.
While the mothers are conscious of the disadvantages of leaving school early and want their daughters to stay, they will not push them against overwhelming odds if their daughters are unhappy at school. Their happiness is of the utmost importance to their mothers, according to Professor Mackinnon.
“Many of the girls come from families in which their mothers also left school at a young age, however, their mothers had access to more permanent positions in clerical and other areas that could lead to career opportunities. The girls leaving now are coming into a tougher world that offers very few unskilled career paths.
“Like their mothers, most of the teenage daughters surveyed anticipate having children early and see that as very desirable, whereas many young professional women are putting off having children until their thirties, highlighting two quite diverging cultures of childbearing.
“While counselling may encourage some ‘at risk’ girls to stay at school, there will always be a group of girls for whom school, as it is currently set, is not going to meet their needs. We also need to accept that not everyone takes linear pathways through school,” Professor Mackinnon said.
“Many of the girls surveyed prefer vocationally oriented courses such as hairdressing and, while they often have a notion that they would like to go to university, they rarely have an understanding of what is involved and are quite vague about what they need to do to get there.
“Avenues should be kept open to allow women to return to study at adult entry schools offering relevant, vocational and traditional courses in comfortable surroundings with facilities such as crèches for women with young children.
“One exciting program being trialed at adult entry schools since 2002 in some of Adelaide’s more disadvantaged outer suburban areas is University PAL (Pathways to Adult Learning), which presents a fantastic opportunity for people of different ages who have not finished their formal schooling to do preliminary work for university in their own schools and gradually move into a university setting. The outcomes from this pilot year were evaluated by Adjunct Professor Eleanor Ramsay from UniSA’s Hawke Research Institute and were very positive. The students’ subsequent rates of entry into and success in a wide range of undergraduate degrees were also astoundingly good.
“In summary, what is very interesting in this study is the resilience of the mothers and some of the strategies they use to deal with the most difficult of life’s circumstances, yet still manage to bring themselves back into education and employment, often with a sense of serving their communities,” Professor Mackinnon said.