Review of 2021 Census Topics

The high-level aim of the feedback is to collect more detailed educational factors that improve student outcomes, program and policy development, and performance monitoring.

The following two topics are listed to support policy development, planning and program monitoring.

Intent of Education Qualifications

The Census currently includes questions on highest year of primary or secondary education completed and highest non-school qualification. However, while this information remains valuable, legislation and regulations governing the kinds of education and training and the legal entities that can provide education and training is changing.

As this change takes place the applicability of questions such as ‘highest’ qualifications obtained is somewhat diminished.

Our organisation is wishing to move to having access to data that looks at recent engagement in an educational setting, and the intent of the population to undertake further education and training in the future. This is to collect recent data on the gap between the population's access to formal education services, and informal education settings. For example say a person who obtained a PhD 20 years ago, but no longer works in that field of expertise, but has obtained more recent lower level qualifications.

Further, data covering access to education and training outside the ASCED, including forms of education defined as ‘cultural transmission’, is becoming more relevant to policy.

We also recommend that data about educational aspiration, motivation and intent to participate in learning in the next 12 months would be valuable for universal services planning and to increase the policy makers understanding of unmet demand for educational services to support lifelong learning aspirations of the community

Wellbeing

It would be valuable for program design and policy development in the education context to collect data on children’s and parental wellbeing.
https://www.education.tas.gov.au/about-us/projects/child-student-wellbeing-strategy/

A robust measure of population-wide wellbeing in the census or surveys would be valuable to support and inform evidence-based decision making.

It would be valuable to determine population engagement with allied health support service/s eg social worker, Occupational Therapist etc in previous 12 months. This would then assist with supply and demand research, and also support systemic delivery of required services.

The additional education and wellbeing data would be valuable at national and local levels to enable national policy development and performance monitoring, but to support local program implementation..

We suspect the demand for services is unevenly distributed across regions, and therefore whole of population data would assist in meeting both local and national needs.

The data would then be beneficial when combined with all the other demographic datasets from household characteristics data sets.

Our organisation believes these additional datasets can fit these criteria for inclusion future census.

Furthermore, in preparation for preparing this submission, we understand the ABS can provide expert advise on these questions relating to our proposals, due to their survey design, and work with international colleagues considering similar topics.

In particular we offer the following information relating to our proposal.

Intent of Education Qualifications

We recommend that Census 2021 include questions that produce data on the most recent education and training attempted and completed, and on household members’ intention to participate in an education program outside of any requirement to meet the conditions of the workplace or a statutory commitment.

The formulation and placement of simple questions that can elicit this data, we suggest, should be developed in light of contemporary education policy that aims to maintain an education system that promotes lifelong learning and which can identify the mode of delivery of an education or training program, the extent to which it is self-directed, and give coverage of forms of education and training that fall outside the ASCED.

Education engagement and attainment questions are currently collected, so the population is used to questions on this topic.

Wellbeing would need to be carefully researched, trialled and likely need a communication strategy to build confidence with the public.

Census Online opportunities.

Can we be advised if additional questions can be asked for households with educational-aged (Education and Care, School, VET and University) people?
If so, could investigate family/child intentions, well-being and some other risk and protective factor questions (maternal mental health, literacy levels, education value judgements, participation barriers). (As outlined in the submission specifically)

How long is a reasonable expectation for households to complete the survey (completing the census seems quick and short when completed online, and hence are people happy to answer more questions?)

As more lifelong learning and risk and protective factors of wellbeing are understood, these topics are likely to increase in public interest.

Time series data would be valuable to determine the success of population-wide initiatives and other competing changes at national and local levels for research purposes and program monitoring.

The data might be collected in ABS surveys, but would be subject to very large error rates when matched to small geographies and other population demographics, for example Tasmanian Indigenous cohorts.