After a 112 day statewide lockdown in Victoria last year, everyone was feeling the stress. However for high-school kids, especially those in their senior years, online school took a toll on their motivation to continue.
Untitled Visualisation
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According to the Herald Sun, Victorian students missed out on 21 weeks of face-to-face learning in 2020, due to COVID-19 enforced lockdowns. Classrooms were transformed to bedrooms and teachers became only accessible via Zoom meetings through your computer.
So the question must be raised as to how many students contemplated dropping out, or did in fact defer their learning due to the inconvenience and unmotivating ever presence of online learning. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics the 2020 retention rate of full time students from year 7-12 was 83.6 percent only a slight difference to the 84 percent rate in 2019 and the 84.5 percent in 2018. Considering this data, COVID-19 hasn’t seemed to have had a significant impact on the drop-out rate.
Untitled Visualisation
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Conversely however, the expulsion rate has decreased. According to Education Victoria in 2019 174 highschool students were expelled from government schools, with 184 in 2018 and 285 in 2017. However in 2020, where students spent half of their school year at home, the expulsion rate decreased significantly to only 61 high school students being expelled from Victorian government schools. That is a massive 65 percent decrease, which can be assumed to be due to the fact students were not at school to be expelled in the first place.
Number of Students Expelled from Government Schools in Victoria
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Ultimately COVID-19 can be seen to have not significantly impacted retention rates in Victoria. Speculation would lead to the conclusion that it may have only affected motivation, however we can clearly see that due to COVID-19 keeping students at home, it has had a positive impact on expulsion rates.
(Featured Image: “Online school days…” by rodc is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
