Success in alternative sites ; achievement

The SACE is valuable in that it is the community recognition of young person’s learning journey has come to a transition point where they are ready to negotiate their next steps into further education, work or training.  It is something schools celebrate with signs touting 100% SACE completion.  Every SAS and TL/FLO program encourages young people to believe that their program is a pathway to SACE:

“Through nurturing and development, young people are empowered to re-engage in learning, which can include progressing towards completion of the SACE” NGO preferred provider

In Practical terms you might complete your SACE, through a combination of Individual and Personal Projects SAS adult entry school 

It is the reason why alternative sites are called schools – the combination of caring and learning that amounts to an articulated pathway to accreditation and further work education and training is what differentiates a school from a community health centre, youth drop-in centre or therapeutic facility.

The great majority of young people aspire to complete their year 12 and those who drop out of school after year 11 say that they intended to stay on.  To this end The SACE was designed to be “within the reach of all,” and a SACE review was commissioned when the progressive government elected at the turn of the century realised it wasn’t meeting the needs of young people in outer metropolitan and remote and rural settings.  We have now returned to the same patterns of non‑completion among students experiencing poverty, disability, or disengagement. Although SACE includes flexibilities such as community learning recognition and tailored subjects, these mechanisms have not translated into equitable outcomes for students in disadvantaged schools and in particular young people in alternative settings, FLO/TL and SAS students.

The achievement of year 12 in TL/FLO programs and SAS cannot be detached from the achievement in the system as a whole – the problem is that the statistics of overall achievement remain opaque and outdated and trying to delve deeper into the individual private business of SAS and the opaque enrolment of TL make it hard to have an accurate picture of achievement.

The FLO Redesign Report, accessed under FOI, regarding student engagement remain vague had a SACE completion rates at 17% for the year 12 cohort, coupled with low subject enrolment and achievement levels, highlight significant challenges in the program.

Accessing completion for SAS is more difficult, all the schools are independent, some of the schools are adult entry, some cater for 8-12, most of the schools are less than a decade old, with some being only one or two years.  We don’t know how many of the students brought credits from previous schooling.  All of SAS are working to develop curriculum frameworks that respond to the changing cohort of students and then try to retrofit that into existing SACE, but by and large we have no view of the combinations of subjects students are enrolled in.   It is very difficult to define the “year 12 cohort” for the schools. The best we can say is that the attainment of the SACE in SAS schools is low to negligible.  The schools rightly celebrate the students who achieve their SACE and those, even fewer, that complete Cert 3 VET programs, but there is no articulated pathway to SACE or further work for the majority of young people who sought that “second chance at school.

The important thing to note is that for all the caring and wrap around support that these sites offer students they are not offering, at scale, articulated pathways for accreditation or to work or training. 

While SAS sites and FLO/TL enrolments provide intensive relational support and personalised learning, they lack formalised pathways to recognised qualifications.  This is an issue at a school level but more so at a policy level. 

At a school level not enough is being done to construct innovative meaningful pathways that will lead to young people being able to get their SACE in a timely manner.  This by and large can be simply stated that young people in senior schooling alternative sites are not enrolled in or engaged in learning that will allow them to meet the SACE requirements.

At a policy level it is an unwillingness to consider that the learning in alternative sites does not fit neatly into the boxes that students need to tick or the hurdles they need to jump to meet those SACE requirements.

As part of a research project teachers we interviewed reported that:

• SACE requirements felt rigid, prescriptive, and disconnected from SAS learning

• students found SACE “irrelevant, boring and stressful”

• switching between relational, project‑based learning and “schoolwork” undermined engagement

• the administrative burden of retrofitting SAS learning into SACE structures was substantial

One teacher described the process as “tick boxes,” while another noted that SACE seemed to be “telling them what to do” rather than listening to their context.

The growth of TL/FLO and SAS enrolments show that  though there is a cohort of young people who are looking for an education where in a style that suits them, with the personal support they might need and the prospect of being equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary for them to exercise genuine options in their adult lives. (Sidoti). We are have more work to do in this space in designing new ways of looking at schools and education.