A new report paints a bleak picture: 70 per cent of young people say they’ve experienced high levels of anxiety, depression and fear in Year 12 due to confusion and uncertainty about their future career paths.

Produced by HEDx and Year13, the report also found just 27 per cent of young people surveyed say their high school has helped them feel prepared for their post-school future.

It’s a sad indictment of a yawning systemic career counselling gap for Australian students, but perhaps no surprise given the lack of incentive for schools to provide guidance and advice for students moving beyond the security of their campus gates.

There’s precious little funding allocated to it, it's not assessed or measured, there’s no quantifiable benefit to schools to be offering anything in this area and many might see it as being beyond their scope of responsibility.

Put simply it’s a fringe priority – which is staggering, given its importance.

Year13 co-founder and co-CEO Will Stubley says the school-to-work transition is one of the most pivotal phases in a young person’s life, yet research shows for many, particularly in low socio-economic settings, almost all of their aspirational careers information comes from Google searches or family members

“It’s a global problem, almost everyone has a story,” Stubley tells EducationHQ.

“Whether it’s yourself, your kids, your brother, sister, your friend – it’s an age-old problem of what are you prepared for versus what is the reality when you leave school. And I think it’s getting worse.”

From humble beginnings as a blog providing post-school advice to school leavers, Year13 is now Australia’s largest school-to-work transition platform, with 150 industry partners helping more than 1.6 million young people annually find what it is they’re passionate about and how they can turn that passion into an actionable plan for their future.

The study has been done each year for the last eight years, with 80,000 respondents surveyed to date, and Stubley says the idea has really been to give young people a voice.

If the main objective of schools is to prepare young people for life post-school – whether that be jobs-related, socialisation, how to function in society and be a good citizen etc – why are we not making this school-to-work transition more of a priority?

“I’m really sensitive to teachers and career practitioners – it’s such a hard job, and they’re under resourced, and things are changing all the time,” Stubley is keen to emphasise.

“It’s actually more of a question of the system than individual schools and teachers.”

“Every student in Australia should have access to high-quality career education and support, regardless of geographic location, background or school type,” Year13 co-founder Will Stubley says.

Stubley says the point of school is, in his mind, to produce young people who are independent, contributing members of society.

“But there’s just this huge gap in what the curriculum has versus what life after school expects,” he explains.

“And I think that’s actually a government-level, industry-level, ecosystem-level responsibility to say, ‘this is what’s important’.

“One of the really good quotes about this (from the study) came from a teacher, and that was, ‘what’s measured is what matters’. And that’s what schools are focusing on...”

Currently, the national student-to-career counsellor ratio is 560:1.

With so few careers counsellors in schools and already exhausted teachers struggling under the weight of shortages and admin challenges, along with restrictive economics, Stubley says advances in technology mean solutions are at hand.

He strongly believes tech can at least help solve the economics problem, which, he says, has two main aspects.

“On one side you have the students – so their individual interests, goals, aspirations, academic transcripts, so, who is the student? That’s where it becomes hard at scale, because not only is that complex at the individual level, but you times that by 560.

“If you think about that as a data set, you’ve got that as one big data set, then on the other side, you’ve got the pathways after school and the labour market data set, so Jobs and Skills Australia, you’ve got all the government resources, you’ve got all of these amazing resources of what you can do after school, whether that’s occupations, courses, or even travel-related stuff.”

Linking the two has been the perennial problem, Stubley laments.

“You’ve got this big student data set on one side and this big labour market data set on the other, it’s the perfect use case to run large language models in between – because, finally, you can actually provide that personalised information tailored to the individual profile, and specific to what pathways that they’re interested in.”

“Are you going to replace a human touch? Of course not. But do you think 50, 60, 70 per cent of students might actually be able to be self-sufficient? I think so. And so that means that the 30, 40 per cent of students, that really need the human touch, get it.”

Stubley says this type of transformation or restructuring doesn’t happen without an adoption curve.  

“We need the innovators to come forward and test this stuff to then give evidence and confidence to the rest of the schools,” he says.

“I know this can be a scary concept for schools, but the reality is two million students are coming to us because there are gaps. It’s a student-led requirement.”

Stubley wants schools to reach out to Year13 because they’re looking for trailblazers to test this.

“Does it work? Is it a viable solution? If it is, then, say you’ve got 100 kids, and imagine 70 of them are completely self-sufficient through technology?”

Stubley sees the school/post-school environment as an ecosystem.

“The concept of ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, in this case it actually takes an ecosystem to support the transition,” he offers.

“So for us, we don’t want to be the only player, we want to be the connector.

“It requires the school, tertiary, industry and government all coming to a cohesive solution and a cohesive effort towards that solution.

“And it helps the school have better outcomes, it helps tertiary have lower dropout rates, it means industry has better skills pipelines, and that means government has better productivity.”