Providing Education and Training for At Risk ... - Victoria University

In this we look at labour market skill acquisition as much as lifelong learning skills, at accreditedand non-accredited programs, and at institutional and non-institutionalised programs - and atvarious admixtures of these polarities.Perhaps the place to start is the school. Ryan herself is keen to identify schools as ‘sites forholistic service delivery’. What does this mean? Some broadening of the traditional role of theschool is required, namely: the location of health care and family support professionals (eg.social worker, psychologist, drugs counsellor) in the school; the introduction or extension ofschool/work programs; the development of welfare support for the school community; and theprovision of vacation programs providing support in literacy/numeracy, social skills, sportand the arts (1996:4).Ryan advocates these as the elements of flexible models of schooling - Life Learning Projects,as she calls them - which represent ‘one-stop’ (integrated) provisions for students experiencingeducational disadvantage. Such integrative provision grows, for Ryan, out of the evolution ofcommunity schooling (at Kensington since 1975) and of homelessness (via the Wespac Youthproject since 1990).Something similar is reported from the same area of Melbourne. Sercombe (1996) describesthe Extra Edge program at Maribyrnong Secondary College, where alienation has a multiculturaldimension: 94% of the student population is from a non-English speaking background. Whilethis is not in itself disadvantageous, at Maribyrnong, most are refugees from Bosnia, the Hornof Africa, East Timor, and Vietnam. There is a track record here, too. Since 1988, the schoolhas been heavily involved in youth support services in the inner Western suburbs, with healthprofessionals, emergency relief for its independent students (people ‘returning to study’), andclothing and furniture supplies all coordinated through the school. Referrals and casemanagement in this context have now been enveloped in curriculum change and staffprofessional development across the school. In particular, the Extra Edge program, one of fiveStudent-At-Risk (STAR) projects in Victoria, has, since 1994, ‘employed teacher-trainedcoordinators…for government and non-government youth support services in the local area’(1996:1). Sercombe goes on to discuss a key point in the provision of such services:While it was part of my brief to develop STAR programs, I quickly realised it wasimperative that I did not single this group out. Alternative programs for ‘at-risk’ youngpeople send very clear, emotionally-loaded messages to an already vulnerable group. Itunequivocally points the finger, yet again, to somehow being different and not ‘fittingin’ to the mainstream….By developing program after program, ‘the system’ is off thehook, with the unspoken expectation that ‘a program’ will rectify a young person’sissue within a ‘funded’ time frame…. To be labelled ‘at risk’ or ‘disadvantaged’ alsocreates a prison of expectation, If you are from the West, of a non-English speakingbackground, and experiencing generational unemployment, the assumptions can bedeadly. (2)Yet the same point can be validly made across Victoria. Rural youth are isolated and face theirversion of generational unemployment now that globalised commodity markets have guttedprices for Australian primary produce - or at least the labour costs traditionally required towork the land and to upgrade technology to work the land. Provincial cities and towns, oftenheavily reliant on a few large employers in, say, printing, textiles and clothing, or agricultural22