EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This report investigates the character and consequences of part-time work by school students. Between one quarter and one third of 17 year-old students are employed during the school year and spend on average nine hours per week in their jobs. Over half of all these 17 year-old student-workers in 1992 were found to be employed in sales jobs, and a third were labourers, with a marked gender difference – twice as many females as males were sales workers, while many more males than females did labouring jobs. Data on which the report is based come from the 1975 birth cohort of the Youth in Transition project that forms part of the Longitudinal Surveys of
Australian Youth program.
Students’ Motivation for Working, and Perceptions of their Jobs
œ Most students indicated that they worked not simply for financial reasons; they liked the independence their job gave them, they generally enjoyed the work, and believed that the experience of part-time work would help them obtain employment in later life. These benefits were perceived to be true more often by females, and by middle and lower achieving students, the latter fact highlighting the importance of a part-time job for students whom may not be as well served by the school system as those who are higher achievers.
œ For a small proportion of student-workers - perhaps as many as one in ten - there was some evidence of a financial imperative in their decision to work while at school; these were more often students from poorer families, especially those from such families who were receiving the means-tested Austudy allowance.
œ Those who were employed were more likely to be happy with many aspects of their lives - especially the money they got, their social life, and their independence
- than those who did not have a part-time job. There are gender differences in the relative importance of these positive effects, with part-time employment having a greater influence on the social life and personal relations of males, and on the sense of independence, including financial independence, of females.
œ Students as a whole did not perceive their part-time jobs to have had a significant negative impact on their school performance. However there was some evidence that females were more likely than males to say that their schoolwork was effected in this way. For the students who could perhaps be considered most at risk in this respect - that is, those who had been the lowest achievers during their earlier years of secondary school - there was no strong indication that working part-time was seen by them to be any more of a problem than it was for other students. However those working more than 10 hours per week were relatively more concerned about juggling the competing demands on their time, and were more likely to feel that their schoolwork suffered as a result.