Pathways to Progress: Supporting Education in Vulnerable Regions

Team Name

DataFrontiers

Team Members

Project Description

To quantify heterogeneity of post-school education seekers across Australian local government areas, allowing for the development of more efficient and targeted strategies that address multiple regions simultaneously.

Data Story

We integrated 7 datasets from 2021 from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to identify trends in post-school uptake relative to those who did not undergo any schooling in all local government areas (LGAs) within Australia.

Using our own metric, the Study Progress Index (SPI), we identified regions within Australia that had high, medium, and low proportions of people pursuing post-school studies relative to those who did not pursue any schooling. Interestingly, these regions had their own unique characteristics and we identified areas of support required for the low SPI regions, including better housing infrastructure. We identified that for low SPI regions, better living conditions were more highly correlated with post-school education pursuit.

This provided evidence that while soft strategies for encouraging the uptake of post-school studies is beneficial, hard strategies, such as to providing better housing infrastructure would do better for low SPI regions. In other words, soft strategies are unlikely effective in these regions given their basic economic and social needs have not been met.

Nationally, we found that having access was associated with an increase in post-school education participation, irrespective of the SPI category an LGA was grouped to.

In summary, the SPI can be used to identify population level heterogeneity, allowing for the identification of regions that require targeted strategies to promote post-school education, including the factors that drive people to take advantage of these opportunities.