Young People: Insiders or Outsiders? How Young People are Faring 2005 report

By John Spierings

Young people share the national optimism and concern about economic prospects is generally tempered by anxiety about levels of household debt and concerns about terrorism.

Rising levels of clinical depression, popular longing for a personal sea-change, and a profound incidence of family breakdown also tend to counter-balance the sense of economic good times.

Recent longitudinal research shows that in general young people have high levels of life satisfaction consistent with previous generations of young Australians. But their satisfaction in life is intimately related to what they are doing as students or workers, to whether they have a full-time job or not, or a course or a career plan that provides direction. To whether they are part of Australia's economic 'insiders' or 'outsiders'.

It may surprise but there are currently more than 560,000 young Australians not in full-time work or study, people who are predominantly on the 'outside' of the Australian economic success story. Most of them - about 330,000 - are women.

It's a curious thing that there has been such a passionate focus in recent times on boys participation in schooling - and rightly so - but relative indifference to the labour market opportunities for teenage girls and young adult women.

While full-time jobs for young men are gradually recovering and trade apprenticeships have grown, little attention has been focused on the predominance of casual, part-time and often low-skilled jobs for young women who have left education. It is true that young women have lower levels of absolute unemployment than young men and they participate in education more readily and for longer, but they are also considerably more prone to precarious employment and to underemployment.

Highlights in the 2005 report include:

• In May 2005, 85.1 percent of Australian teenagers were in full-time study or fulltime work, while 14.9 percent or 208,400 teenagers were not. These proportions have varied only slightly since the recession of the early 1990s

• Educational attainment is improving: in 2004, 80 percent of teenagers had completed secondary school or a Certificate II or higher compared with 75 percent in 2002

• 84,400 (29 percent of) teenagers who left school in 2003 were not in study and were either working part-time, unemployed, or not in the labour force in May 2004

• Females are more likely to experience a troubled transition from school than male school leavers despite a higher rate of completing Year 12 and higher participation rates in post-school education

• In May 2005, unemployment rates for teenagers were three and a half times higher than for adults aged 25 to 64 years; and unemployment rates for 20 to 24 year olds were twice those of older adults

• The proportion of teenage apprentices taking up trade apprenticeships increased markedly from 2003 to 2004.

(Dusseldorp Skills Forum. How Young People are Faring 2005 by Mike Long)