Education Participation Rates, decade to 2002

The aim of these education participation rates data is to present the extent to which Australians have been participating in each of the sectors of education. The main advantage of participation rates as a measure of the extent to which Australians have been participating in education is that it provides a sense of the proportions involved by age cohorts relative to the whole population. Moreover, participation rates are additive across education sectors, and can be compared to labour force data. In particular, the compiling of the data presented here enables the comparison of participation rates across education sectors within the same calendar year and for the same age groups.

Sectors covered in this collection of data include the Schools, Vocational Education and Training, and Higher Education. The data cover the decade or more leading up to 2002. The data are shown by State / Territory and Australia, single year of age, gender, full and part time participation, and for the VET sector by whether students were still at school. The population data were drawn from the Estimated Residential Population publication, June 2003 edition, of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The age census date for age purposes was 30 June for each year.

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Schools sector participation rates data for the years from 1980 to 2002

Vocational Education and Training sector participation rates data for the years 1994 to 2002

Higher Education sector participation rates data for the years 1989 to 2002

Schools sector participation rates data for the years from 1980 to 2002

The Schools sector participation rates data are for years from 1980 to 2002, and the data cover establishments whose major activity is the administration and/or provision of full-time day secondary or special education, or secondary distance education. The data do not include courses conducted by Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions, though the data include overseas students but exclude home schooled students. There were changes to data scope in the early 1980’s and in 1996, and therefore the data are not strictly comparable across those dates. Users should also be aware that the data are also not entirely comparable between States/Territories and between government and non-government schools in any one State/Territory, as the data are affected by differences in the organisation of grades, policy on student intake and advancement, and flows from secondary to vocational education.

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Vocational Education and Training sector participation rates data for the years 1994 to 2002

The Vocational Education and Training sector participation rates data are for the years 1994 to 2002 for students still at school, and 1997 to 2002 for students not still at school. Data include all programs delivered by VET providers including publicly funded ‘VET in Schools’ programs, except programs included within this department’s higher education and schools collections. The data includes overseas students, though excludes recreational courses, ie it only includes courses with a vocational focus. Improvements in eliminating multiple enrolments by individuals may reduce the number of net students from one year to the next.

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Higher Education sector participation rates data for the years 1989 to 2002

The Higher Education sector participation rates data are for years 1989 to 2002. The data exclude overseas students. i.e. the dataset contains data on students who are Australian Citizens, New Zealand Citizens, Australian Permanent Residents and those students whose citizenship status is unknown. The data include students doing enabling and non-award courses. There was a change in scope of the data in 2002, covering unduplicated counts of students admitted to a higher education institution, enrolled in a higher education award, enabling or non-award course that was to be undertaken in a semester between 1 September the previous year to 31 August in the year of data collection, and had not formally withdrawn, deferred or discontinued.

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