Cancellation of indigenous Australians from the apprenticeship training contract

Abstract

The vocational education and training (VET) sector is a major pathway to post‐school education for indigenous students, yet questions are being raised about the capacity of the VET system to provide successful outcomes for the indigenous apprentices and trainees it attracts. Within a system plagued by high cancellation rates in general, indigenous apprentices appear to do particularly badly. This paper combines data from an administrative database on apprenticeship with income data from the 2001 Census of Population and Housing to provide an analysis of attrition rates for apprenticeship training contracts in Queensland, asking: Are cancellation rates for indigenous students significantly higher than those for non‐indigenous students, and, if so, what factors are responsible for this?

Keywords:

• indigenous
• vocational education
• pathways
• cancellation rates
• duration analysis

Notes

1. Referred to as Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islanders (ATSI).

2. This compares with 1% of university students.

3. See, Australian Social Trends 2002, ABS Cat 4102.0, Canberra.

4. In this analysis, the K–M estimator is used to estimate S(t) for all training contracts, with the estimator stratified by the highest year of school education at the commencement of the training contract. The log‐rank tests are then applied to compare all S(1). This estimator of S(t) is non‐parametric because a distribution for T, that is f(t), need not be specified. In calculating the K–M estimator, the data are partitioned into time intervals (here, quarters from commencement). If r_j denotes the number of training contracts alive immediately preceding the jth failure time (which contains d deaths or exits), then I – d/r represents the conditional probability of survival within the interval ending at the jth failure, given that the training contract was alive at the beginning of the interval. Multiplying all intervals yields the K–M estimator, which is the unconditional probability of survival up to time t, i.e., for the time interval (t., to,+,).

5. For a description of these tests, see Box‐Steffensmeier and Zorn (2001).

6. The authors note that the robustness of this result must be considered in the light of the small numbers being considered, i.e., there were only 12 non‐English speaking indigenous persons in the sample.