The Re-engagement in Education of Early School Leavers

By OECD standards, the share of the Australian labour force with at least a secondary school qualification is low. One way to rectify this shortfall is to improve rates of re-engagement in education among early school leavers. This paper examines the patterns of re-engagement among early school leavers in the HILDA sample. A key finding is that the early years after leaving school are crucially important, with rates of re-engagement dropping dramatically in the first three years out from school. For those who enter the labour market after school, results suggest that finding work, especially satisfying work, is an important driver for returning to study.Early school leavers, vocational education and training, re-engaging in education

Is Temporary Employment a Stepping Stone for Unemployed School Leavers?

Many school-leavers enter the labour market via temporary employment. In this paper we investigate the impact of a temporary employment spell at the start of the career on the transition rate into permanent employment. We compare the case of temporary employment to the hypothetical case of a direct transition from unemployment to permanent employment. In order to control for selective participation in temporary employment we include a large set of explanatory variables which have been especially collected to study school-leavers. We apply the AIC-information criterion to select the appropriate specification for unobserved heterogeneity. Based on the information criteria we conclude that given our data, there is no support for a model with selection in unobserved characteristics. Simulation exercises provide insights into the development of the effect of temporary employment over time. For a sample of unemployed Flemish school-leavers we find that in the short run temporary employment delays the school leaver's transition to permanent employment. However, in the long run temporary employment acts as a stepping stone and decreases the duration until permanent employment. --temporary employment,school leavers,labour market policy

The relationship between geographical mobility and education-job mismatches

In this paper we investigate the relationship between geographical mobility and education-job mismatches. School-leavers might adjust to local labour market frictions by accepting some education-job mismatch combined with a mobility decision. We focus on the relationship between the mobility decision and the following education-job mismatches: a job below the educational level, outside the educational field, part-time or flexible jobs at the beginning of the career. For this purpose we use data about school-leavers from secondary education and higher vocational education in the period 1996-2001. The analysis is conducted at a disaggregated spatial level to incorporate differences in behaviour of school-leavers at the regional level. We find that school-leavers who are more mobile have a lower probability to have a job below the acquired educational level compared with school-leavers who are less mobile. Moreover, school-leavers who are more mobile experience especially a lower probability of a part-time or a flexible job. This result suggests that school-leavers not only try to prevent a job below the acquired educational level, but also other education-job mismatches in their mobility decision.

The Scottish school leavers cohort: linkage of education data to routinely collected records for mortality, hospital discharge and offspring birth characteristics

Purpose: The Scottish school leavers cohort provides population-wide prospective follow-up of local authority secondary school leavers in Scotland through linkage of comprehensive education data with hospital and mortality records. It considers educational attainment as a proxy for socioeconomic position in young adulthood and enables the study of associations and causal relationships between educational attainment and health outcomes in young adulthood. Participants: Education data for 284 621 individuals who left a local authority secondary school during 2006/2007–2010/2011 were linked with birth, death and hospital records, including general/acute and mental health inpatient and day case records. Individuals were followed up from date of school leaving until September 2012. Age range during follow-up was 15 years to 24 years. Findings: to date Education data included all formal school qualifications attained by date of school leaving; sociodemographic information; indicators of student needs, educational or non-educational support received and special school unit attendance; attendance, absence and exclusions over time and school leaver destination. Area-based measures of school and home deprivation were provided. Health data included dates of admission/discharge from hospital; principal/secondary diagnoses; maternal-related, birth-related and baby-related variables and, where relevant, date and cause of death. This paper presents crude rates for all-cause and cause-specific deaths and general/acute and psychiatric hospital admissions as well as birth outcomes for children of female cohort members. Future plans: This study is the first in Scotland to link education and health data for the population of local authority secondary school leavers and provides access to a large, representative cohort with the ability to study rare health outcomes. There is the potential to study health outcomes over the life course through linkage with future hospital and death records for cohort members. The cohort may also be expanded by adding data from future school leavers. There is scope for linkage to the Prescribing Information System and the Scottish Primary Care Information Resource

Are Short-Lived Jobs Stepping Stones to Long-Lasting Jobs?

This paper assesses whether short-lived jobs (lasting one quarter or less and involuntarily ending in unemployment) are stepping stones to long-lasting jobs (enduring one year or more) for Belgian long-term unemployed school-leavers. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate labour market trajectories in a multi-spell duration model that incorporates lagged duration and lagged occurrence dependence. Second, in a simulation we find that (fe)male school-leavers accepting a short-lived job are, within two years, 13.4 (9.5) percentage points more likely to find a long-lasting job than in the counterfactual in which they reject short-lived jobs.event history model, transition data, state dependence, short-lived jobs, stepping stone effect, long-lasting jobs

Scottish young people's post-school destinations 1977-83

In this Thesis data from The Scottish Education Data Archive, relating to the 1977, 1979, 1981 and 1983 Scottish School Leavers Surveys, are used in order to examine Scottish young people's post-school destinations. The major change, over the period 1977-83, was a dramatic decline in the proportion entering employment. Most of the material in the Thesis is directly concerned with school leavers' employment.In the introductory chapter, the scene is set for the rest of the Thesis and three proposed explanations of the decline in youth employment are critically reviewed; they are: the real wage, the demand deficiency and the structural hypotheses. The introductory chapter concludes with a discussion of the Scottish Education Data Archive. The second and third chapters contain an examination of the changes in Scottish school leavers' industrial and occupational distributions of employment, respectively. The fourth chapter examines the role played by changes in the industrial distribution of school leavers' employment in determining the changes in their occupational distribution of employment. The fifth chapter examines the extent to which the decline in school leavers' employment was disproportionately large, compared to the decline in all ages' employment, and the extent to which this resulted from either structural change or school leavers' particularly vulnerable labour market position. The sixth chapter examines the question of whether the bottom has dropped out of the market for school leavers' labour. The seventh chapter contains an econometric examination of the role played by a measure of school leaver's employment prospects, amongst other factors, in influencing their decisions as to whether to continue into full-time tertiary education

Are Short-Lived Jobs Stepping Stones to Long-Lasting Jobs?

This paper assesses whether short-lived jobs (lasting one quarter or less and involuntarily ending in unemployment) are stepping stones to long-lasting jobs (enduring one year or more) for Belgian long-term unemployed school-leavers. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate labour market trajectories in a multi-spell duration model that incorporates lagged duration and lagged occurrence dependence. Second, in a simulation we find that (fe)male school-leavers accepting a short-lived job are, within two years, 13.4 (9.5) percentage points more likely to find a long-lasting job than in the counterfactual in which they reject short-lived jobs.event history model, transition data, state dependence, short-lived jobs, stepping stone effect, long-lasting jobs

Are Short-Lived Jobs Stepping Stones to Long-Lasting Jobs?

This paper assesses whether short-lived jobs (lasting one quarter or less and involuntarily ending in unemployment) are stepping stones to long-lasting jobs (enduring one year or more) for Belgian long-term unemployed school-leavers. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate labour market trajectories in a multi-spell duration model that incorporates lagged duration and lagged occurrence dependence. Second, in a simulation we find that (fe)male school-leavers accepting a short-lived job are, within two years, 13.4 (9.5) percentage points more likely to find a long-lasting job than in the counterfactual in which they reject short-lived jobs.event history model;transition data;state dependence;short-lived jobs;stepping stone effect;long-lasting jobs

Are Short-Lived Jobs Stepping Stones to Long-Lasting Jobs ?

This paper assesses whether short-lived jobs (lasting one quarter or less and involuntarily ending in unemployment) are stepping stones to long-lastinc jobs (enduring one year or more) for Belgian long-term unemployed school-leavers. We proceed in two steps. First, we estimate labour market trajectories in a multi-spell duration model that incorporates lagged duration and occurrence dependence. Second, we simulate them to find that (fe)male school-leavers accepting a short-lived job are, within two years, 13.4 (9.5) percentage points more likely to find a long-lastng job than in the counterfactual in which they reject short-lived jobs to search longer for more stable positionsEvent history model; transition data; state dependence; short-lived jobs; stepping stone effect; long-lasting jobs

Opportunities for school leavers outside the major towns of Kenya?

In this paper the employment opportunities available to Kenyan secondary school leavers are discussed in the light of national statistics and data from the Tracer Project which has followed up the employment history of 1965 - 1969 school leavers. It is pointed out that most secondary school leavers are attracted to Nairobi and the other major towns not merely because of an alleged white-collar mentality, but because that is where most of the opportunities for wage employment exist. In addition, urban life styles and disproportionately high urban salaries exercise a much more powerful influence on secondary school students than the exhortations of school teachers and politicians. School leavers who are working in rural areas either have the same kinds of jobs they would have in towns, largely in the public sector, or have been forced to fall back on their families' resources in farming and other types of self-employment