Improving school to work transition : former students' opinions on school programs

This case study is based on what is possibly the first, large-scale, systematic analysis of student opinion of the relevance of their postcompulsory schooling to their workforce experiences. As part of a wider study, over 500 former secondary students from across Australia, having successfully completed Year 12 and spent two years in the workforce, reflected on the linkages between school and work, as they have experienced them, and on how these linkages could have been improved. The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) was commissioned in 1990, by the Commonwealth Department of Employment, Education and Training, to undertake a study to consider the ways in which, and how well, schooling was accommodating the needs of those students who did not take the more traditional path (for successful Year 12 students) to higher education but instead went into the labour force and/or into technical and further education (TAFE) colleges.