success in alternative settings - retention

Every student who enrols in Year 12 deserves to see their name on a jumper, receive an invitation to the end‑of‑year prom, and learn in an environment that suits their needs. They deserve personal support and the chance to develop the skills and knowledge that will allow them real choices in their adult lives (Sidoti 2004).

Yet the reality in South Australia tells a different story. The growth in enrolments in FLO and SAS programs has coincided with a sharp decline in retention from Year 8 to Year 12—falling ten percentage points across all schools, from 97.5% in 2016 to 87.5% in 2024 (with only a slight uptick from 2023 to 2024). In government schools, which educate two‑thirds of the state’s most disadvantaged students, the drop is even more dramatic: a fall of twenty percentage points, from 99.7% to 80%.

In government schools today, only around 70% of students transition from Year 11 to Year 12. Each year, roughly 12,000 students enrol in Year 12 hoping to complete their SACE and celebrate at the prom, but only about 8,000 make it to the end. In 2022–23 alone, government schools lost approximately 7,500 students between the end of Year 111 and the end of Year 12.

This tells us something important: FLO and SAS programs are not improving retention. Instead, we are investing significant time, money, and energy into creating alternative spaces that move students around the system—resources that could be better spent ensuring students remain connected to their original school, or that the right specialised program is available when they genuinely need it. We have known this for a long time but have chosen not to confront it.

A quarter of a century ago, Listen to Me, I’m Leaving documented the voices of more than a hundred young people on the brink of leaving school. Their stories were filled with alienation, bullying, frustration at being treated like children, and the weight of mental health issues, drugs, and abuse—issues that disrupted their schooling but were rarely addressed. Soon after, a progressive government, concerned about low retention and achievement, funded the ICAN/FLO program. But rather than addressing the school‑based issues young people identified, the program reframed these challenges as personal deficits to be managed by a caseworker, often through detachment from school.

Despite its limitations, the FLO program taught us several important:

• Young people who are disengaging can remain enrolled in some form of education, and we can track their progress.

·        They need support and care, not just supervision.

·        Schools and NGOs can collaborate effectively to support students who are detaching from school.

·        Many of these students can achieve highly when given the right conditions.

It also taught us that such programs require strong accountability and oversight. Lynda Graham’s critique highlighted a program that had outgrown the Department for Education’s willingness—or capacity—to hold it to account

We also know that detaching from school is not a single moment. Mackenzie and Chamberlin, in their work on homeless youth, described a “homelessness career path” and found that connection to school was the most powerful intervention along that path. The same is true for education: each young person has their own “career path” of detachment. Some points along that path arise from school issues, others from life outside school. How a school responds determines whether a student stays connected or moves further toward detachment.

Most young people in SAS programs whom we interviewed described moving repeatedly between programs—being “put in FLO,” then ending up in SAS. Many students in non‑mainstream settings transfer from school to school or program to program, creating a long and unsettled journey in search of belonging. For some, a new school brings stability; for others, the search continues.

This is not a problem individual schools or sites can solve alone. They are responding to environments that can be unwelcoming, and while many work hard to become more responsive—or to design new models in response to “demand”—these efforts occur within systems that have spent a decade watching retention and achievement decline while ignoring the inequities they helped create.

Five years ago, we called for a cross‑sector response to school disengagement and detachment. Yet what we continue to see is each sector, each school, and each site tackling its own challenges as though they exist in isolation from the broader, systemic issue of retention and engagement.