Background to the Enabling Spaces project

Young people who do not form reasonable relationships with peers and staff are unlikely to benefit from being at school. They tend to disengage and become excluded from school. Evidence shows that this is a chronic problem in Australia. In 2014, of the people aged 15-19 years 18% were not engaged in formal study (ABS 2014), and nearly a quarter of 23 year olds are not fully engaged in education, training or employment (Foundation for Young Australians 2013: 6). According to the Coalition of Australian Governments’ 2013 education report, 27.3% of young people aged 17-24 were not in full-time work or study (COAG 2013). This group faces significant disadvantage in increasingly precarious labour markets (Foundation for Young Australians, 2013; International Labour Office, 2013) and ongoing challenges to positively engaging in their communities. Young people who leave school early are less likely to find a job. 50% of young people who complete or finish school prior to Year 10 and 40% of young people who complete Year 11 are not fully engaged in study or work compared to 10% of young people who complete Year 12 (ARACY 2008).

Enabling Spaces is a resource for organisations working to improve outcomes for young people at risk of disengaging from learning. It has developed from an ongoing collaboration between organisations and university researchers, with the project team looking at what organisations do and the limitations of internal and external evaluation requirements. It is a public, web-based resource featuring a shared measurement framework for organisations that keep marginalised young people connected to education. The resource consists of a contextual space that documents programs that keep young people connected to learning; an evidence space, that holds the publications and documents the nature of the information created and kept by these programs; and a measurement and evaluation space that holds the shared measurement framework, built around the principles of Connection, Capacity and Meaning.

Acknowledgements

Enabling Spaces has been produced as part of the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage funded project [LP120100220] Building futures for young Australians at risk: a coordinated measurement framework and data archive (2012 – 2014).

The project draws on the previous Future Builders program initiated by Social Ventures Australia (SVA) in 2007. In the first two phases of that project (2007-9) Regina Hill of Effective Consulting worked with SVA Youth Portfolio agencies to gather data, construct detailed program logics and generate the evaluation tools. This involved dedicated work by the following agencies: Activate; Beacon Foundation; Beyond Empathy; Centacare; Ganbina; Hands On Learning Australia; Lead On; Pathways Foundation; SpeakOut; and WhiteLion. WhiteLion made a significant contribution to the initial toolkit design.

The Chief Investigators of the Building futures for young Australians at risk project are Professor Johanna Wyn (Youth Research Centre, The University of Melbourne) and Associate Professor Gavan McCarthy (eScholarship Research Centre, The University of Melbourne), and Partner Investigators Social Ventures Australia (Simon Faivel), and the Foundation for Young Australians (Naomi Berman), in collaboration with Dusseldorp Skills Forum (Jo Taylor), Hands On Learning Australia (Richard O’Donovan) and the Beacon Foundation (Ebeny Wood). In 2013 a new collaborating organisation was added: the Southern Ethnic Advisory and Advocacy Council (Clare Shearman).

Senior project researchers based at the University of Melbourne were: Dr Ani Wierenga, Michael Jones and Dr Antonina Lewis; with additional work by Dr Caitlin Stone in the first year of the project and Dr Jessica Crofts in the final year.

Technology and web design

Enabling Spaces has been created and generated using the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a tool developed by the University of Melbourne's eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors. The OHRM is a contextual information management system that is able to integrate information from a wide range of sources – archival and published material, photographs, audio and video. The system maps and manages highly complex networks of entities and relationships, presenting these as HTML pages.

Output from the OHRM has been created using templates and stylesheets created by Russ Weakley from Max Design, supported by funding from Dusseldorp Skills Forum.