News
School age to be standardised
Australia’s Education Minister has announced plans to introduce a national school starting age of four which, if adopted, would become the compulsory age for all children to enter education
Currently each Australian state or territory is responsible for governing its own school starting, and leaving, age, with the minimum ranging from four-and-a-half to six-and-a-half, depending on the state in which you live. By federal law all Oz children must start compulsory schooling at six years of age.
However, Julie Bishop believes that having different starting ages across the country can be problematic, especially if a family move from, say, Western Australia where the minimum starting age is four-and-a-half to Queensland where it is five.
It is estimated that some 80,000 children are affected by moving from a state where they can start school to one where they can't each year. However, Bishop's proposal to standardise the school starting age to four has not been warmly welcomed by all states. Tasmania's teaching union, for example, has called for more research and consultation before the age is lowered and has said that it would need extra funding of AUS$12 million a year to cope with the demand of having more children in schools for longer.
At the other end end of the school age spectrum South Australia's government announced in May that it plans to raise the leaving age to 17 by 1st January 2009. The state, which only raised the leaving age from 15 to 16 three years ago, sees keeping children in school for longer an integral part of a long-term plan to ensure the future of the state's skilled workforce base – South Australia currently has one of the highest youth unemployment rates in the country.
If the proposed legislation is passed South Australia would become only the second Australian state to have a compulsory leaving age as high as 17 – Tasmania is the other. The minimum school drop-out age in Victoria and Queensland is currently also 16, while in the Northern Territory, ACT, Western Australia and New South Wales it is 15.
Read another Australian news story:
Back to basics for schools
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20 December 2006