Vocational Voices: Season 1, Episode 9
Educating oneself out of social exclusion
Steve Davis (00:00)
Hello I'm Steve Davis. Welcome to this podcast for Australia's National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
Education seems to be one of the hottest topics on the public agenda at the moment. But is there more to education than just education? In the paper Educating oneself out of social exclusion, researchers at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research have identified that the biggest impact on social inclusion through education and training is expected to come from efforts to increase year 12 completion rates and or completion of certificate level three qualifications, rather than from efforts to increase the proportion of people with even higher levels of qualifications.
One of the paper's co-authors is Dr Hielke Buddelmeyer, and I began by asking him how social inclusion was defined or measured in this research.
Hielke Buddelmeyer (00:57)
Social inclusion is measured in a way where you say, well, look, it used to be all about income poverty. And we talked about people who are excluded if they didn't have income. And then in the 90s they said, well, look, it's much more than that. It's not just income, it's education, it's health, it's interacting with your neighbours, it's feeling safe in the community. So we went out and we built on previous research efforts by the Brotherhood of Saint Lawrence and the Melbourne Institute, who set out to compose a measure of social exclusion.
They identified seven domains that are material resources. They are employment outcomes, education and skills, health and disability. There's a social domain and there's a community domain. And there's also a personal safety domain. And those seven domains are then packaged together just using statistical tricks to come up with a new single index, which then measures social exclusion.
Steve Davis (02:09)
When we hear those factors listed off, as you just did, education is just one of them. So what's the significance of education among those others? Does it have greater bearing than some of the others, or is it actually just one narrow strand in the overall picture?
Hielke Buddelmeyer (02:26)
It is one of seven. So you can say, well, you know, education is only one of seven if it's not more important than community safety or personal safety. Why's that? That's also one of the seven. Why don't we focus heavily on that?
What we found in our research is that, yes, education is one of seven, but was kind of a sleeper factor. And what I mean by that is that education operates on many different levels, and it also affects all the other six, so to say. So we also find that people with higher education levels are healthier and less often have a disability. They also live in nicer neighbourhoods, so there's less crime and they interact with their neighbours more. And of course have more material resources because they have jobs with higher incomes. They're also more likely to have jobs.
So when you say education is one of seven, yes, that's true, but it also operates through the other six in a way that's not immediately obvious. And that was one thing that came out of the work that we did for NCVER, that if you work on education as a channel, you can really make a big inroad in reducing rates of social exclusion in Australia.
Steve Davis (03:49)
One of the statements that came out of the research is that if government is looking to levers to increase social inclusion, helping people who are already holding higher qualifications, helping them go further up the ladder is not going to have anywhere near the effect as helping people who at perhaps the bottom rungs of the level of education and qualifications. Is that fair?
Hielke Buddelmeyer (04:14)
That's absolutely correct. That's something that we discovered in doing this. There's not that much to improve on if you give them an even better education, say if you give somebody who has a bachelor's or master's or somebody who has year 12 and you give them a bachelor's.
The big gains you can make at the lower end, because if you work on the education channel at the lower end, then you can really make some gains in terms of reducing inclusion or reducing exclusion. Because you work on all these things that there's still that much space to improve on. And that's why you get such a big impact if you work on the lower end, rather than giving people who are already reasonably well-off an even better employment or a better education outcome.
Steve Davis (05:06)
Hielke, many aspects of social wellbeing are inextricably linked to the economy, and that means that changes in the economy might well be expected to favour some sectors and professions more than others from time to time. And there's been a lot of talk about the Australian economy transforming towards what we call a service and knowledge economy. Now, if that's true, does that help increase the significance of education as a domain in this measure of social inclusion?
Hielke Buddelmeyer (05:34)
I think it will. There's always this talk about the new economy, the new economy. And I don't think the economy tomorrow is that different from the economy today. But over time there's definitely a pronounced switch. And for most rich Western nations like Australia, we have seen a tremendous change in our economy. This world, this economy where things are changing rapidly, you need to be adaptable. And in order to do that, you need to have like a broad set of skills and a relatively high level of education and training in order to do that.
So I think education will become even more important in the future than it is today, because we need to be able to adapt to these economic challenges. And Australia is an open economy. We're very much engaged with the global economy. And other countries are coming on board and competition is set to increase. And the only way to keep up is to be able to be adaptable and to have a workforce that can handle those changes. And that's why I think education will become even more important in the future.
Steve Davis (06:48)
In the lead up to this interview, you placed your work in the context of waves of reforms within Australia. Can you expand on that for us?
Hielke Buddelmeyer (06:57)
There have been three major waves of reforms in Australia. The first wave of reforms were the reforms by the Hawke and Keating government, and that include the floating of the dollar, the reserve Bank of Australia becoming independent, etc.. Those were these reforms of the Hawke Keating area. That was the first wave.
The second wave of reforms went through COAG. And that's when COAG, the Council of Australian Government, really became quite important as a coordinating entity. That's the wave of the regulatory reforms in Australia and the efficiency dividends that were created and that the states would be compensated for.
And now we're in the third wave of reforms, and that's the national reform agenda. And that's really what you can describe as a human capital agenda. And this is the national reform agenda that wants to reform, say, health and education. That's why I think this work that we did on social inclusion really fits with the third wave of reforms, promoting social inclusion.
Steve Davis (08:21)
And picking up on that historical context, one of the things that I found fascinating in your paper was showing social inclusion rates over time, and even highlights the impact of the global financial crisis. Can you just talk to that for a second?
Hielke Buddelmeyer (08:36)
We used the HILDA survey for panel survey. And so we get really good data on a lot of people over time. And it starts in 2001 and we can follow them all the way up to 2010. So we also witnessed what's happened during the global financial crisis or the Great Recession, as it's known overseas.
You see that if you start in 2001 and you look at the social exclusion rates, the way we define them, you see them drop over time. And then when the GFC hits you really see an uptick again in the exclusion rate. It's kind of nice to follow people over time.
The other thing that we can do, because we have panel data, and we do that in the report as well, is to say ok well in every year you can see how many people are excluded. Just as you could see, say, how many people are in income poverty and every single year.
But what's really interesting when you have panel data or longitudinal data as it's called, you can also see how many people are persistently excluded. So how many people are in, say, a period of over five years, excluded in all five years? So how much of it is a one off transitory event and in what proportion is persistently excluded? And I think that's also one of the interesting parts of the report that we were able to do with the good quality data that we had available.
Steve Davis (10:07)
Thanks for listening to this podcast produced by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. If you'd like to download the paper Educating oneself out of social exclusion, visit our website at www.ncver.edu.au.