In this report the authors seek to answer the question of whether combining school and work is detrimental or beneficial to a student's school educational performance and labour market outcomes. They find that young people who combine school and work are distributed right across the school population. Results show that individuals can combine school and work with minimal impact on their study if the hours are modest and those working longer hours show a stronger orientation towards work than study. The authors used data from the 2003 cohort (Y03) of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth.
This briefing paper considers how young people fared in previous downturns, and discusses how structural labour market changes over the past 20 years have affected the three million young Australians aged between 15 and 24 in the first 12 months of the most recent economic downturn. It also looks at the qualitative evidence from respondents in the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) on how they perceived the economic downturn to have affected their work and study intentions in 2009, and explores the themes arising.