By Allon Lee
THE number of government school students in the West who make it into university is falling, a new report has found.
Inadequate government funding in lower socioeconomic areas is forcing schools to encourage students towards vocational training once they complete their schooling, according to the report Unequal Access to University Places.
Coauthored by Daniel Edwards, Bob Birrell and T. Fred Smith at the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, the paper revealed the numbers of students applying for universities, TAFE and private colleges between 1993 and 2003.
The survey found that in 2003 only one in four of the 855 Year 12 students in Brimbank who applied for university courses were offered places.
The average VCE mark for Year 12 students in Brimbank was 43.75.
Figures for Melton students reflected a similar lack of opportunity, with only 26 per cent of students offered university placements.
By comparison, 94.5 per cent of 328 year 12 students in the innereast City of Stonnington who applied for a university place were offered a spot.
The Stonnington students had an average mark of 93.88.
“The schools in the West are serving socioeconomically disadvantaged families,” Mr Edwards told Star.
“As numerous studies have shown, students from such backgrounds do struggle academically to compete,” he said.
Over the past five years the ability of western suburbs schools to compete for university positions has declined at the same time as the number of university offers has dropped and the number of applicants has increased, the report found.
“Competition has become more fierce and it’s the kids who are on the margins and at the bottom who are missing out,” Mr Edwards said.
The decline in funding of government schools was a major cause of the decline in university enrolment offers, he said.
“In general it’s the government school kids who are missing out. and socioeconomically deprived and educationally disadvantaged.
“The West and outer suburbs are copping the brunt of the decline,” Mr Edwards said.
He said schools had responded to the competition for university spots by focusing on a vocational curriculum rather than an academic one.
“There is a big cluster of schools in the West that have had a decrease in the propensity of students to be going to university and an increase in going to TAFE,” he said.
But TAFE students are not studying trades where skills shortages are currently being experienced, he said.
Rather they are doing middle and lower management type courses, such as basic accounting, business management, tourism, hospitality.
“They are the lower skilled basic managementtype commerce subjects,” Mr Edwards said.
He said the State Government should encourage one or two schools in the West to focus on a program that prepares students for an academic pathway after leaving school. “At the moment most of the government schools in the east, innereast and south are academically focused but pretty much everywhere else the schools are vocationally focused.”
Mr Edwards said the State Government could start by providing funding for an extra 3000 university spots over three years to boost Western Suburbs students’ opportunities to attend university.
Although university funding is a Federal Government responsibility there was little hope extra money would come from it, Mr Edwards said.
“These places should be funded on the basis of equity.
“We are not arguing that every student who wants to go to university should because you do need to maintain a certain standard.
“But a lot of the scores coming out of these schools are not necessarily an indication of the intelligence of the students but an indication of the resources available.
“Kids who do have an academic inclination do not have an opportunity to flourish.”“If nothing changes there will be no improvement in the western suburbs,” he said.
and the opportunity these students have had throughout their lives in terms of being able to excel academically,” he said.
As a government that promotes itself as being educationfocused, the Bracks government has a responsibility to provide the funding, Mr Edwards said.
“For a lot of schools that are underresourced and where schools struggle to motivate students academically, they will turn to vocational subjects.
