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In this episode, Lucas Walsh discusses research into the effect on students of planning for post-school life in an increasingly uncertain future.

• Lucas Walsh – Monash University Profile
• ‘So many things to consider’: how to help school leavers decide what to do next

Ideology in Education – Tom Mahoney considers the imnplications of discourse on ‘novces and experts’ in education practice and policy.

Tom Mahoney’s The Interruption

Education in the News – Cameron discusses recent data from NSW about the casual teacher shortage crisis.

• New survey finds almost every public school is being affected by casual teacher shortage
• Impact of teacher shortages in NSW public schools revealed

Timecodes:
00:00 Opening Credits
01:31 Intro
10:23 Ideology in Education
25:28 Education in the News
35:35 Feature Introduction
38:08 Interview – Lucas Walsh
01:35:45 Patron Shout-Outs

Read More for transcripts.

Feature Interview Transcript (unedited, prepared by Otter.Ai)

Click here for interactive transcript.

Cameron Malcher
Joining me now is Professor Lucas Walsh from the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University. Lucas, welcome back to the podcast.

Lucas Walsh
It’s great to be back again.

Cameron Malcher
Now, the last time we spoke was looking at the way that COVID And some of the disruptions to higher education in high school had really affected young people’s, you know, expectations and engagement with post school education and career pathways. And it feels very much like this topic is very much in that same ballpark. But coming at it from a perspective that really caught my attention regarding the emotional impact that many of these changes were having on young people. And I suppose, you know, I’ll throw the floor open to you. But But what was it you’re actually setting out to particularly research that led to this this topic that we’re talking about today?

Lucas Walsh
Yeah, look, it began with my partner in crime and colleague. Last time we were on this podcast, it’s Joe Gleason. And Joe Gleason was a PhD student of mine. And she was interested in studying and analyzing career decision making by young people in school. She did a frankly, brilliant thesis that involved a very large scale study, very deep study of four schools in Victoria four very different kinds of schools that collected data from around about 2800 students, and it was looking at and it was very novel. In her approach, it was combining sort of psychological measures with the factors such as their access to information, it analyzed it sociologically. And what ended up happening was that when she collected that data, there was so much that we thought are we’ve got to, we’ve got to do something with this beyond completing the PhD in some of the publications of CAP come out of it. So I invited her to join, to do work in the center, then I’m Director of the Center for Youth Policy in education practice. And so what we did was we brought our team in, to analyze all that data. And what we’ve been doing is, we, for example, the first step we took was just look at young women and the data from young women. So we slice that and looked at, you know, in particular, the thing that jumped out when my team read it was their experiences of career anxiety. But we’ve since gone back, and we’ll start working through the whole data from from that was collected by Joe. And this year, we decided to do something about it, which was to develop a very modest, but we think, very effective, validated tool for having discussions about career anxiety, I suppose we’ll come back to that once we’ve worked through some of these other issues.

Cameron Malcher
So this idea of career anxiety, the idea that young people don’t really have a clearer sense of, of where to go next, or what to do. I mean, you know, for a long time, one of the, I suppose one of the great criticisms of the schooling system has just become increasingly more about preparation for higher educational preparation for employable skills. And what really struck me about the conversation article that I saw was the idea that even though schools are so focused on this notion of, you know, further education and employability as an output from high school, that students don’t feel a sense of certainty or purpose or direction coming out of it. I mean, how, how significant is that impact on young people? Yeah,

Lucas Walsh
look, there’s so much going on and what you’re saying there, which talks about multiple dis junctures within the system in a multiple gaps and tensions that emerge, they emerge in a from the very key question of what the purpose of education is. And that speaks to what the purpose of education in this day and age is, which we had seen, as you pointed out, a shift towards skills. And I’d really like to critique that, in spite of the fact that I think it’s really important. We’re going to talk a little bit more about skills. We have this somewhat perverse center of gravity created by the ATAR, created by that final score coming out. That’s I think, unhelpfully shifting the attention of teachers and students and parents and carers towards that all important, seemingly all important stage at the end of schooling. And then there is a third aspect to it, which is this bias towards higher education, higher education is valorized as elevated above other pathways to young people and, you know, higher education I didn’t I work in a university and I can see and understand its importance across a whole range of in a whole range of ways, you know, from the social to the intellectual to building up capacities to deep knowledge. But at the same time, we have this system within Australia that hasn’t been kind to vocational education and training. It’s a very uneven policy throughout the last few decades, there have been sort of attempts to revive a fight. And there’s a great deal of attention in the current government on doing that. But and there’s also this bias that exists against it within the expectations of parents and carers. And I think that’s to the detriment of our young people, and potentially our futures as a nation.

Cameron Malcher
You said that you looked at this data across different demographics that existed within the data set, or some of the effects and some of the uncertainties that you identified? Are they felt evenly across different demographics? Or does it affect one cohort more than another or one in a socio economic group more than another, for example?

Lucas Walsh
Now, there was, I’m gonna give you a boffin answer, which is it was uneven in the data. So it was more, it wasn’t so much in the demographic sense. It was in a sense of, I’ll give you an example to illustrate it. So the way that the the way that the measure was designed, you know, we started at asked young people about their plans, and what are drawing upon to make that decision that carries out school. And we saw within a particular group, which was young women from our higher SES, that they had, they indicated that they had a good understanding of what we can do. They felt reasonably supported, what they were going to do. And yet, there was another question put in there, which is what you’re doing. So it’s a common survey technique, to try to validate or clarify that first question that you made at the start. And essentially, what it boiled down to was, there was still high levels of anxiety. And so what we ended up with was, you know, the overall data was pointing to anxiety that would one would normally expect, as you’re going through towards that all important, you know, year 11 and 12 period, or the completion of school. That there seem to be higher levels of anxiety that are linked to wider macro circumstances, such as the changing labor market, but also to either over information, just just so many choices, and so much information on the one hand, or not enough or poor information on the other. So, I mean, I’ve got some stats here that I’ll just that really give a sense of what we found. So more than a third agree or strongly agree, they did not know what careers best suited them, another 40% felt as though they had no career direction, just under half worried that their studies will not lead to a real career. Third, worried that they would not be employable when they completed their studies, and stand up 30% agreed or strongly agreed, they often felt down or worried about selecting a career, which increased to Stober, 59% of respondents, when not sure responses were included. Those figures are really, really striking. And that’s the overall figure. And then when you drill down into them, you realize that even people who are reasonably well heeled and indicate a sense of where they’re going, still have high levels of anxiety. But one last point I’d make about that is that of course, there were differences that emerged between demographic groups. So the careers education, the resources for careers, education tended to be stronger, with higher and higher SES communities that were in the study. But at the same time, we had, for example, one school, there was in a very, was a well heeled community and, and, you know, well resourced school, and the principal did not feel it necessary to educate their students about the labor market, that the labor market was not something that was on the agenda for that school. Right. And this, this then goes to a deeper that theme that’s emerged in research throughout the OECD, that schools still tend to and teenagers still tend to think about careers within 10, narrow occupational fields, but I’m aware that I’ve just thrown a lot at you then. So I’ll just you can unpack some of it.

Cameron Malcher
Well, it before we do unpack that, because yeah, you know, obviously the the notion that students still have quite a limited view of of what options are available is I think, a big part of it. But as you mentioned before this data set came from Joe Gleason’s PhD thesis. And if I remember correctly, it was the data was all gathered a year or two before COVID even hit. So you know, our last conversation if listeners want to go back and listen to that was very much about the impact of COVID. But this data set, and this research actually predates that at the point of collection. And I suppose the first question I want to ask about that is, is there any indication given that this is sort of a novel? motif? It’s exactly novel. But, you know, the PhD thesis was a particularly new way of looking at that this into this issue. Is there a sense that this represents a significant increase in this issue for young people? Or do you think this is perhaps capturing a picture of the way things are that maybe we just haven’t understood before? Now?

Lucas Walsh
It’s the latter. I think it’s that it’s the level of granular detail that we’ve collected that mean, firstly, her approach was new, the instrument she designed was new and validated. is new. There’s there’s no question about that. But it’s that granular level of detail, I think, I think it’s really important that you’ve raised the fact that the data was collected before COVID, because we can anticipate with reasonable confidence that that anxiety and uncertainty has in fact increased. And the center that I that I direct, annually, does a youth barometer collects data from young people aged 18 to 24, across a nationally representative cross section of Australia, and so they represent the immediate post school journey. And part of the barometer looks back at school, there’s data in there about their feelings, belonging, and so forth. And we’re about to we’re putting together this year’s version of the report, the 2023, and movies barometer. And I’ll be honest with you last year, when lockdown measures were wound down, and we were moving into this particular phase of the pandemic that we’re in now, I had anticipated an uptick in attitudes, because it’s the Bronto. It’s like what it says on the tin, it’s gauging the pressures experienced by young people. I expected this uptick. And quite the opposite happened. In terms of feelings of deep insecurity, anxiety, pessimism, mental health issues. And looking at this year’s data, it’s not only confirmed it, it says there’s a downward tick going on here. doesn’t give me any pleasure to port this. But when we look at that, and then we look at the data we collected just before the pandemic, we can safely assume that there is that those trends will have increased, I think,

Cameron Malcher
is the rate of that indicator going downward at a greater level than it has changed in the past? Like, is it a more rapid decline than you’ve seen raises or declines in the past?

Lucas Walsh
Well, okay, so the barometer itself is also a unique instrument, it was we developed it within the center. And so we’ve only got three years, it’s only been going three years. We started during the pandemic, but it’s drawing fine from and it’s relatable to other data sources that we have that researchers collect more broadly. And the figures to things about the figures, the figures, strikingly, so for example, in relation to mental health, the it’s off the charts, compared to what we’ve seen previously, reporting mental health is off the charts. The second thing is, is that we can anticipate something like this happening on the back of economic downturns in general. So, economic downturns and I think we touched on this last time we spoke, but economic downturns affect people, young people immediately and disproportionately compared to most other age groups, you know, when something like the global financial crisis happens, young people first out the door in jobs and are often the last back in. So we’ve got other research during the pandemic, that that affirms that not only do these things happen, and that they affect people in a negative way, but also that there’s what’s called a scarring effect where it takes 10 years to bounce back, typically. And so, all of these other indicators, point to things being more profoundly felt at the moment, but we can anticipate the dog being profoundly felt. Because of these, these other economic downturns. I just have one last thing To that, is that one of the findings that came out last year and this year in the barometer was that young people felt as though because of lockdown measures, particularly affected Australia’s east coast. They felt as though they missed out on being. Anyway, I’m digressing. But it’s all some painting the wider picture of what’s happened since the data was collected. And the President.

Cameron Malcher
Just on that point, you made that it takes about 10 years to bounce back from these kinds of big, disruptive events. Is that does that represent some sort of natural social generational healing cycle? Or is that roughly the time between major events when the data gets thrown out of whack again?

Lucas Walsh
Yeah, no, it’s a range of factors. It’s not that it’s not the time between events, because the equivalent of the GFC, the previous equivalent was in the 90s. And then, you know, well,

Cameron Malcher
well, you know, the 90s were less than 10 years before the GFC. Oh, yeah, that’s

Lucas Walsh
true. Just alright. So yes, you’re you’re you’re right. Actually, it is actually closer. And thought about it, actually. Maybe it is, maybe it is a turning of the wheel. Yeah, it’s a good point, because we’ve reached back to the 70s. And it’s not that much further than the 90s recession in Australia. But there was, I guess, that in a longer history. The postwar years in particular, were a period of extraordinary growth. And extraordinary benefits of that growth flying on to Wall Street, and most Australians, not some, but a lot of Australians. So I mean, another point there is whether those cycles are getting more and more intense. In recent decades, because of the way that the global market in the economy has changed. During that period, they gave me something to think about.

Cameron Malcher
Fair enough. Well, let’s go back to how young people are making their decisions. Because as you mentioned before, in response, whether it’s in response to this anxiety, or whether it’s just a natural tendency people have the one of the things that came out of the data was a tendency to have something of a narrow view of possibilities within the labor market leaving school. So what are you what are you sad about that?

Lucas Walsh
Well, what we found really affirms the large scale data that we’ve got, that’s produced by the OECD, which collects data from dozens dozen countries, and, and they put out a report a few years ago, really, really comprehensive. And I think a good report, which indicated that teenagers throughout much of the world, continue to choose their mate make their career choices, within 10, occupational fields. So for listeners, think, teacher, lawyer, nurse, management executive, something like that. And there are these 10 fields that keep coming up again, and again. This is striking for a couple of reasons. One is that is that those fields aren’t necessarily for everyone. It’s striking, because we’ve had seen enormous changes in the economy. In the last few decades, I think, the rise of the digital economy, for example, or greater demand within the health sectors of aging populations. The point is that things have changed quite a bit. But this century, were still making decisions as we did in the last century. And then there’s a kind of a cliche, which I like that runs through careers education, which is, you can’t be what you can’t see. And so if you’re only imagining these narrow fields as possibilities, then what are all those possibilities that exist out there that you’re not seeing, that you’re not aware of? So that’s the data absolutely affirmed by the OECD was finding two years ago.

Cameron Malcher
Do you have any sense or did the do the data set capture? How much of students expectations for possibilities followed parental trends? You know, often? I mean, look, you know, particularly the English speaking world, the idea of following in your parents footsteps is such a natural part of society that whole family surnames are based on professions from centuries ago, you know, so how much of that limited field of vision might also represent following in parents footsteps or but then the other question I want to add into that is those 10 fields, how much you have a sense of how much they represent of the labor market generally, is that those 10 fields represent a significant percentage of working Australians or they just traditional fields that people think of that actually don’t represent that much of the working population.

Lucas Walsh
So it’s the ladder, it’s the traditional fields that they tend to. And, and what’s remarkable is we’ve seen, for example, significant rises and falls and rises and falls in job opportunities in the legal fraternity, for example. But those choices have remained consistent across time, despite these really significant ebbs and flows in job opportunities post school. So it’s, it’s about, it’s very much about what’s what those jobs are associated with. And the jobs are, are understandable. You know, and when I’m talking my academic colleagues, like Joe and I were just presenting in, in Birmingham in the UK just a few weeks ago. And, you know, we said to our, our academic colleagues, you know, did you know what it meant to become an academic? Did you know what you needed to do when you left school? And nobody, almost nobody knows what it is to become an academic. It’s this kind of arcane bias. And to me, is a Tarik root, you know, fee, but some build the plane as you fly, you know, you work right through? So the other aspect of that question is that, yes, the data really highlighted the very strong influence of parents and carers and peer support networks around young people. But a couple of things were going on in that that were really interesting one was, and what we’re thinking where we’ve kind of got to with the work is that a lot of the time that advice is poor, or outdated. But also, because of the psychological aspect of Joe’s instrument that went in, we saw that, you know, people, and then again, it won’t come as a surprise, I think, to listeners, because I think we’ve all seen or experienced a version of this, which is where the expectations of parents and carers are at odds with how the young person is feeling at the time. They want them, you know, to back to your question, you know, they want them to follow in fields, or equally, they’ll say, as my father said, to me, don’t become a veterinarian, you know, hope that and we’re doing in a completely other set of research at the moment, we’re looking into the emotional labor of school principals, and, and, you know, what, what kind of challenges they face in terms of trying to maintain socially cohesive communities within their schools. And they were started getting their testimonials and the test motif in the early testimonials coming out was my advice to my kids is not to go into the not to become a school leader, it’s come up three or four times in the initial testimonies coming back. So anyway, you get these, you get this advice, that’s, that’s often biased, that’s often outdated, or that is at odds with how the young person is feeling at the time of what they what they might be interested in. And, you know, Joe tells a cracker of a story, because she is, um, she’s a senior researcher within the Faculty of Education, which is also a careers Council, which gives her unique insight into, into what’s going on in the data. And she tells a story about a parent and a young person seeking advice from her. The young person wants to go into a direction that is not necessarily within those 10 occupational fields, that say, you know, maintaining the privacy, that personal insights within the arts. And then the father said, don’t even consider that because this is the phrase that he used as his thing. It’s stuck with me, is in no, we’re not even considering that pathway because I want to return on my investment. Right. Okay. Parent had invested in funding the education and they expected a very specific outcome out of that education. That indicates that’s a vivid illustration of the tensions that emerge between what the young person might be thinking about and the types of advice they’re getting and why they’re getting that advice from parents and carers.

Cameron Malcher
Well, I think this feels like a good place to go back to a topic that we flagged earlier in the conversation, which was a you know, that small philosophical question of the whole purpose of public education or mandatory education, but more importantly, that issue of skills and exactly how we prepare people For an uncertain job market or for their own uncertainty of understanding of the job market, you said you had some thoughts on on that particular issue. How does that fit in here?

Lucas Walsh
Okay. And again, there are there are tensions within this and and they’re interesting tensions I think to explore. So let’s start with the fundamental question, what is the purpose of schooling? We can agree, I think that schooling serves a variety of purposes. You know, it’s, it’s about the development of the child. It’s about understanding their world and navigating their world, it’s about hopefully being able to actively participate in shaping that world. It’s about deep knowledge. And that, hopefully, that passionate in engagement with the world around them or things that interesting. It’s also, you know, there are also other more nefarious aspects to schooling, which is about regulating young people and containing young people. So there’s that side, the discussion as well. But what’s an interesting provocation, I think, is that we can safely assume that most people who leave school, whether they complete or otherwise will work, they will, they will go into some form of employment. So this is something that most of them will have in common. And yet, the degree to which we talk about preparing young people for work, continues to sit at the periphery of the curriculum. And in, in schools case is often at the periphery of the school, it’s still as it was, when I was a kid, it still is the case, when you go into schools that the Career Education starts relatively late. In the game, you know, you 1011 12 Although governments such as Victoria are trying to push it early, which I think is a good thing, we can talk about that circle, if necessary. But so it sits in the periphery, both in terms of temporarily in terms of the stage of schooling, but also it’s often located within those areas of bus school. And so if you’re, if you’re a younger kid in the school, and you want to find out about something, you’ve kind of got to go into the scary part of the school with the big kids. And you have to actively seek that information, which I think can be intimidating, but it’s it illustrates where we position careers education. And, you know, it continues to be the case, it’s not always the case there. Obviously, a lot of schools doing really interesting work. But it’s often the case that the focus is on that endpoint. It’s on that you 12 are equivalent. And, and that that unhelpful center of gravity that I was talking about at the start. And so what that does is that sucks attention and energy away from exploring. What am I interested in? What am I, one of my passions? What can I what am I good at? What can I do but importantly, to to have exposure to Pathways post school, and I’m not talking about some formal careers preparation, I’m talking about I like animals, I, I would like to be a doctor of animals or veterinarian going back to the Father example. I’d like to be a veterinarian. You can in a very entertaining way explain what the steps a person goes through in order to become a veterinarian? Or is it? Well, it just sort of happened up, you know, how I how does this table made, what goes into it? What’s needed for it. So these things get get also squeezed to the periphery, in spite of the fact that most people will work to the second part of your question. skills. It’s another tension emerges. Because wit, we’ve seen a breakdown in this. There’s this idea that was built into particularly mass education, that what’s called the opportunity bargain, which is where if you achieve a certain level of qualification, it will lead to desirable work in fields of your choice. The bonds between education qualifications and work is breaking down. And universities like the University of Melbourne provide very significant research on this breakdown, I think, significant research. But also we’re seeing a breakdown of the bonds between career identities. And this goes back to one of Joe’s core key questions. You know, the idea that we’re going to have one career one job across time is increasingly unlikely very unlikely that you’ll have multiple careers and jobs that the idea of the vocation being deeply attached to your own identity is less so and there are good and bad reasons why this is the case and what what where it might lead to. And at the same time that we’ve got this focus on skills and And you know, the OECD, I think problematically says the contemporary economy doesn’t pay for what you know, but what you can do with what you know. Underneath that statement is, you know, you need to get skills that are portable, so that you’re ready for adaptability across time. Now, on the surface, yeah, okay, that seems reasonable. You want to be adaptive, you want to be able to change, you need to develop these core skills that can move across different occupations. If that’s the case. The tension for me is, to what extent are we really preparing young people as lifelong learners, that can bring deep knowledge and understanding into a situation. Because this emphasis on skills is shifting it away from other core purposes of education. And these types of knowledges are really very important for everything from that which certain occupations might be looking for. So it’s no coincidence that a lot of executives and ASX companies have arts degrees, because Arts degrees are all about a wider preparation of skills. Sure, problem solving. But also this kind of deep knowledge, as well as this other deep knowledge and other kinds of knowledge is really important for things like environmental conservation, not emanating from certain particular areas, comes from a very deep, long held knowledge about how to how to look after the planet. So that the whole skills discourse, in closing is, is problematic, because it gets it again shifts the center of gravity in our discussions about the purposes of education, towards something very important, but also away from other things that are very important.

Cameron Malcher
Yeah, that idea, which I think you mentioned, the last time we spoke as well about the opportunity bargain. Breaking down, I think last time, you went so far as to say that the opportunity bargain was effectively broken, because education and qualifications were no longer a guarantee of employment, income lifestyle. And that seems to me to be a key link back to one of the key to one of the main points that came out of this particular paper, which is the cause of anxiety in young people, you know, the sense of the sense of not having any control or, or not actually, being able to take steps to secure your own future would be quite a significant driver of have this feeling of anxiety. But I’m wondering, you know, obviously, you identified that this is a source of all the anxiety for young people around making decisions and around preparing for the future. Do you have a sense of how much of a driver it is? I mean, we we hear a lot in the current public discourse about education that there is a rising issue of anxiety and other mental health problems around among young people. Do we have an idea of how much these particular issues are contributing to that?

Lucas Walsh
No, we don’t, because they are. Because, in part because they’re bound up the anxieties are bound up with other things. So So what, in the that that other piece of data refer to the news barometer, we deliberately designed the barometer so that you can look at the connections because because the barometer has these ask questions across different domains. So last bit young people’s education, employment, civic participation, relationships, and so on. And the way we designed it was that you could look at the interconnectedness between the opinions and views on things, right. So a significant, reasonably significant proportion, Think, for example, that education is not preparing them for future life. And so then you can go okay, well, maybe there’s a relationship between that and their feelings of pessimism about the future. So it almost kind of forms a mosaic, rather than a photographic snapshot, what the causes, but where that the where the thinking behind that design of the instrument was was that they are in fact, bound up with the anxiety is bound up with other things. So, you know, we we can see that, for example, anxiety about the future immediately post school has another layer of anxiety about the future in general, you know, climate change being the number one concern and topic that the idea of and when we look at the wider data around young people, I think I touched on the slide As long as well, is there an ability to plan planning for things, it’s harder, it’s harder, because it’s harder to get a mortgage and therefore, you can’t get into secure property, it’s harder to access to secure property in the first place, because the housing and rental markets are so you know, crazily inflated and height a moment. So then, you know, plans become disrupted. And as you’re going into forms of employment that are more casual that not necessarily secure that are less secure, you’re then juggling multiple jobs, which is now kind of the standard picture of young people, particularly post school. So then planning from day to day and week to week becomes all the more difficult. These can all collectively, so we’re talking about very large scale factors such as the housing market, the rental market, very micro factors, such as and ones that have persisted across time. Oh, my God, what, what’s what’s good, what’s going to happen to me post school? These factors are all intertwined. And I think, too, if we look at it, we I can’t actually say it off the top of my head here. But I think there will be relationships between anxiety in certain demographic groups. But the overall point I wanted to make there was one thing that comes out in the research is this kind of tempered optimism, a tempered or dark optimism is what we call but we’re releasing paper in the next two weeks about the gig economy, young people in the economy. And we speculate, and we’ve noticed, and in my previous research with Rosalind, black, as I learned this as well, that there is this there’s this resilience and hope evident in what young people are saying, but at the same time, it is very, very tempered. And it’s very, because you get this kind of they’re not conflicting, they’re almost like a, like a picture of DNA helix there that, you know, there’s a kind of a hope and, and optimism, there’s bound up with a, you know, very dark sense of where the world’s going or where their immediate worlds are going. And the two can coexist. Another another researcher in youth studies, Cynthia girl talks about this dish, this young people being able to hold two twin thoughts at the same time, you know, the world’s in trouble because of the climate, but it won’t affect me, or I’m just gonna get on with my daily life, in spite of this big macro issue in attitude is not confined to young people, by the way, I can personally relate to that directly in relation to climate change, for example.

Cameron Malcher
Yeah, I mean, that that was actually the question I was going to ask you about that idea of the dark optimism, whether it was whether you had a sense if it was predominantly a recognition that things were heading in a not great direction, but I hope that they would get better, or just a hope that individuals might stay on top of the pile.

Lucas Walsh
It’s a good question. I have not extended the answer that question. Yeah. I’d speculate that how humans make sense of the world. You know, sometimes you have to order things. In order to stay sane and to not be anxious, you organize the way that you perceive the world in a way that makes it less dangerous, less threatening. But that’s just me talking. I’d be I think, I think, I think the the unsatisfying response to that is, it would probably vary across people is, or I’d probably guess, yeah,

Cameron Malcher
well, I’d like to go back to that anecdote you told before about the parent who indicated that they viewed education as an investment to be repaid or to achieve a return. And, you know, I spent a good part of my teaching career as a high school drama teacher and I’ve certainly had conversations with students and parents where they said things like, I’ve got to make my my subject selections for year 11. And Mum and Dad have said, I can’t do drama, you know, it’s okay to do it. It’s a bit of fun in us nine and 10. But I gotta get serious now for year 11 and 12. And, you know, certainly, I bring that up just to, you know, indicate a different perspective from which I’ve also experienced parent expectations or parent paradigms of the purpose of education affecting children’s pursuit of their interests and their, their passions. And I’m wondering, does this data set provide an insight into into the extent of parental input on these issues, and particularly the ones that are leading to that anxiety? I’ve talked a fair bit about careers education and the both the limits and the benefits of careers education in school can During, but what about the messaging coming from home family and life outside of school that’s influencing that. It’s profoundly

Lucas Walsh
influential, profoundly influential. And it becomes a, it’s become a bit of a holy grail for me. And in terms of thinking about responses to what the data and what the data is telling us is this key touch point happens at home, that can undo serious good work done at school. And this is not a domain of careers education, as your listeners would know, you can, you can make a profound difference within a classroom on, you know, educate a young person, and that can all be undone as soon as they get in the car and go home. It’s not just in relation to careers education, but at the Holy Grail is about well, how do you how do you reach parents and carers and those those family networks to give education both consciously and unconsciously, to young people? How, because because in a sense, the education has to has to be intergenerational has to go or history across generations. You know, it’s very, very difficult to keep up with what’s I think it’s very difficult. And I’m a researcher in this field in that field, actively looking at it very difficult to keep up. And to make sense of what emergent trends are important, which ones are unimportant. And I can’t remember if I brought this up last time we spoke but and I promise, this is the last time I’d be revisiting this, because I do have more things to say than just the one things that I’m talking about anyway, getting your subconscious give me the things. So we had these Chatham House discussions with employers, Chatham House means you, you have you can trust that what sit in the room won’t leave the room in. And we presented data about young people’s transitions from school to work and further study to a bunch of very, very large employers, young people. And we put it to them, you know, that these pathways becoming uncertain and so on. And so the key question we put to them was, Do you know what your workforce will look like in 10 years? And the bulk of the room honestly said, No, we don’t. And then the next question was, we didn’t know what’s going to look like in five years. And still a significant number of said, No, we’re not entirely sure. Now, to give a flavor to that is that one of the employers was involved in retail, big employers of young people that were automating just stone to automate their retail outlets, Ill go and pay for it yourself, which now become far more widespread and commonplace, but back then it was still coming in. But they knew that that was going to significantly change the nature of the world’s workforce. Here’s my point. If employers themselves are not entirely sure about, you know, where their work, what their workforce is going to look like, how on earth do you convey that to parents and carers? One way you can do it going back to early discussion is you can start to say, well, it’s not about the career, it’s about the skills to be, you know, to keep bringing in an income across your life. But I don’t think I don’t think that’s enough. It’s not, it’s unset after?

Cameron Malcher
Well, not only that, and this is a question that has come up in a couple of the industries specifically, but even thinking about it in a field, like a major employer, you know, and I think back to my high school years in I worked for, as a teenager, I worked for McDonald’s, like many do. If they’re if they are significantly reducing the particularly the young people they employ in their workforce, or these big companies that have been traditional employers of teenagers and young people. Where do they do they even have a sense of where they see themselves? Getting people who have the skills and knowledge necessary to fill those middle management ranks or store manager ranks like the it seems to a degree like there’s almost a jeopardizing of the entire work supply chain by reducing the employment of young people by not then training up enough people to be able to identify or select the ones who are good enough to fill higher roles in their in their system is that something has ever come up in aspects of research.

Lucas Walsh
Rianne Yes, it has. Okay, so where I go to immediately was, there was some data collected from the US while back but recent enough to still be salient. That was showing that Businesses were investing less in training their staff and upskilling their staff across time. It wasn’t all sectors, but so the idea that you might start out at the bottom level, and then be skilled up, as you made your way up, you know, which is one of the CEOs of McDonald’s did exactly that and went in entry level job and became a senior management within a very successful global franchise. That idea is decreasingly the case. And instead, what you do is it’s, it’s looked to other providers to provide the skills so it’s rather than we will do up, you go out and get, get your great diploma or certificate or whatever it is, and upskill. So that’s the first thing that businesses seem to be investing less. I’m not entirely sure about the data within Australia, but it’s definitely the case in some places overseas. That the thing that you’re referring to, if I understand it correctly, is is that if you were not building up, and we’re not developing young people now, are we going to end up with a skills deficit tomorrow? It will that thinking through that problem highlights a major challenge, right, which is, we’ve had a steady drumbeat for decades that, for example, university providers need to provide more real life experience and need to be more aligned to what the labor market is saying. This is very complicated, but very problematic. Because a universities aren’t the exclusive provider of that. And it would have been great if we’d had other kinds of credible providers, which we’ve had. But as I said earlier, for example, the funding and policy around vocational education and training has been very, very spotty, and uneven. So and then, and then we’ve got other kinds of providers like microcredentials, and things emerging at the moment. We’ve also finding in our barometer research about this century, large proportions of young people doing informal education in order to upskill and expose themselves. Right. Here’s the point. The point is that that the the idea that there should be that there is a disconnect between providers and employers underestimates the power of different forms of education to build young people more broadly in and thinking beyond what employers require. Because if employers remits are changing, as the labor market changing, then following them isn’t necessarily I think a good bit, because they themselves, as I’ve indicated to listeners often don’t know what their workforce is going to be like, in 10 years. So therefore, you’ve got to think differently and go or so one of the core things that are available here. And and I’m coming back to your question, and that few quick things I’d say would be that the core things are here is that, you know, we should be still thinking about what the moral purpose of education is, that deeper purpose, and how that might relate to a whole bunch of different things, both personally about the individual, but also about their participation in society, their contribution to the world, and their communities, etc, etc. The purposes should also be not just to feed employment, although most people are going to get jobs that should be involved more than that. So then, rather than saying that as as a kind of a disconnect between providers and what employers want, we have to be thinking above that thinking and being clear about, well, what does everyone want out of this? And I think our societies are currently having a reckoning about where we’re going as a planet, because of this, these kinds of disconnects ill. But the point also is, is the profound question of who should be responsible for who should be responsible for developing young people and upskill them across time? While I think it means that all of these different actors need to rethink their role and that’s what that’s where the radical part of this is, it is because it’s going to require some radical thinking what is are the roles of universities and touts what are the roles of parents and carers? What where should careers education sit within the curriculum of schools what role did not careers just careers educators teachers Kumbaya, what did they need to know? And so it’s this way we’ve got to is this thing that goes across the system and across the life course, because we are going to get I think you put your finger on something, we’re gonna get these, these capability gaps emerging. But maybe they’re not capability gaps, because as we’ve seen parts of Manufacturing and others being almost completely automated, it means the nature of work itself has to be rethought. And the role of work in society has to be rethought. And not just the kind of the more utopian ideas that will have more leisure and, and, you know, and, and works more smartly. It’s about the deepening inequities that are emerging in the floor effects of the automation of labor. You know, we can you and I can sit here on a Monday morning and talk about this. But there are people that have no choices, and are at the whim of where that labor markets going.

Cameron Malcher
It reminds me of something I read, probably close to 10 years ago, now, back when, back when Tony Abbott was prime minister, and he was doing a big push on getting businesses and industry more involved in influencing school curriculum and pushing skills that big employers might want in schools. And I’m sure I’m gonna mangle this half remembered metaphor, but I just remember reading one piece that said, you know, there’s this eternal tension of the tail wagging the dog, where the, you know, the, in the tail of the economy and employment needs is sort of wagging the wagging the dog of society. But then they said, I think the big this writer said, I think the bigger problem is that there are some people who are not clear on what is the tail, and what is the dog, whether the economy is serving the needs of society, or whether the dog itself is the economy and society is just seen as the tail hanging off the end of it. And what you’re saying now reminds me very much of that.

Lucas Walsh
Yeah, it’s very apt. And that really is that that, again, is the purpose of education. That image captures that well, who’s leading who here? What, what’s and, and that other deep question about what can we talk about? What’s the purpose of schooling? What’s the purpose of our economy, some can’t be endless growth for its own sake, it can’t be favoring the distribution of wealth to certain groups, which is just now starkly apparent. It’s not to the absolute detriment of the planet, we can also cross next to that, you know, that’s not good destroying the planet. So then, so then, you know, we have to come to that the tail wagging the dog, which is which it’s all bound up. It’s all related cameras.

Cameron Malcher
Well, to bring this back to this particular body of research and the effect it has on school. So, you know, we’ve been hearing in schools for a long time now that we don’t even know what jobs and careers will be available to young people in the future. And, and the end result of that all that uncertainties, as you’re describing here, a recognized anxiety amongst a significant percentage of students in their final years of high school. And you mentioned that some schools are doing some some effective work. To respond to this to address to it, what do you see as the best ways for schools to respond and engage not only to students, but I suppose also to parents who are facing this uncertainty going forward.

Lucas Walsh
So organizations like the Smith family doing interesting work. in disadvantaged communities where you know, the biggest challenges emerge, and they’re trying to count them, they’re developing resources that are having some good results. disclaimer here or disclosure here is that Joe Gleason, I’ve done a little bit of work for them, but I’m not referring to our work, I’m referring to other Smith family work on but they’re doing interesting work. And it is very community based. It is very much centered in the community. It’s about bringing parents and carers along the careers journey. So when we see really good examples taking place, at some point there is that, that inclusion of and subtle education of parents and carers about their expectations about having a realistic sense of their, their, where their kids are at and the you know, by realistic I mean, understanding their needs and challenges as well as what their future possibilities might look like. Having hands on experience is really, really shown to be really helpful and beneficial. You don’t have to package it as careers education, it can be primary school kids going to visit a veterinarian and the veterinarian explaining how she became a veterinarian. You know, it’s, it’s going to a building site and looking at a building site and seeing the interesting things that builders are doing and connecting that back. I did training here and apprenticeship there and, and, you know, and so, providing those experiences and thinking beyond the scope We’ll oil war, bringing it into the school through incursions. and linking it to other aspects of their learning can be really valuable. You can you can do careers education in virtually every single discipline that’s been taught within a school. It can be interwoven into into everything, so that they can be what they can see, the more exposure to that, even just understanding the challenges, and what it takes to succeed in the contemporary workforce puts people at a greater advantage.

Cameron Malcher
And Lucas, you mentioned earlier that coming out of that research, you developed a very accessible survey, is that something that schools can use themselves.

Lucas Walsh
It’s something that schools can use, but also parents and carers, basically, anyone wanting to engage with an important young person in their lives, about their careers, can actually use this. And we deliberately designed it this way, it’s freely available. And it’s a series of questions that are attempting to understand where career uncertainty and possibly anxiety might be coming from, you know, it’s designed to be done in a very constructive way. But we think that parents carers, and as Geopoint, teachers could find this very valuable. So it’s asking them about why they’re choosing their careers, whether they have enough information, whether they’re unsure about what careers suit them, the degrees of concerns about getting a real Korea, whether they’ll be employable when they finished studying, it can tease this stuff out. So I encourage listeners to take a look, you might find it useful.

Cameron Malcher
Okay, well, I will make sure there’s a link to both your profile and the conversation article that I think has an embedded version of that survey. We’ll have a look at as well. Lucas, thanks very much for your time. It is a fascinating side, not side effect, but a fascinating part of school life that I think doesn’t get all that much attention with talking about broader curriculum issues. So thank you for for helping shine a light on that.

Lucas Walsh
Thank you for having me camera and I love this podcast and I love being involved.