Abstract:
In Year 11 there are students who have always been fairly clear in their intentions to stay on to the postcompulsory school years and other students who have been less consistent and who may not have planned to return to school in Year 11. This paper examines the relationship between students' plans and students' destinations at the beginning of Year 11. It uses data from a longitudinal study of a cohort of students from a sample of New South Wales government schools to examine the consistency between plans and destinations and to explore the characteristics of those students who changed their plans. This paper is based on a project concerned with Senior Secondary Schooling commissioned by the NSW Department of Education. A major long term aim of this project is to use the natural variance amongst a sample of schools to seek an understanding of school and student factors which influence student responses to school. Twenty-two government high schools, representing a spread of retentivity, social environment, size, and location were selected as the sample for the study. Within those schools the progress of the 1987 Year 9 cohort is being monitored. Information has been gathered from this cohort in 1987, 1988, and 1989. In addition information is also being gathered from the schools, from teachers in those schools, and from subsamples of parents. An outline of the data gathering for the project is shown in Figure 1.