00:00One of the biggest pressures, I think, for Year 12s is really mental health issues.
00:07So in our survey, we asked a sort of standardised set of questions around mental health, and
00:13that was also asked in 2017 as well.
00:17And we can compare back to a cohort, a younger cohort, and what we find is that about one
00:22in three students are reporting significant levels of distress, compared to, you know,
00:28a little bit less than a decade ago when it was about one in five.
00:31So significant levels of mental health distress in the last four weeks is one of the key issues
00:37that students are grappling with in Year 12.
00:40For males in particular, what we are finding is that males are reporting their aspirations
00:46to go to university have declined.
00:49So what we do is we ask the same sorts of questions that we did in 2017.
00:53And what we can see is there's about, compared to 2017, 46% of males are reporting they aspire
01:02to go to university, compared to 54% in 2017.
01:08So a drop there.
01:10And it drops over the course of from Year 11 to Year 12.
01:14And that's not the case for girls.
01:15So the girls is relatively stable.
01:17There's a slight decline, but the differences between girls, say in 2017 compared to 2024,
01:25has remained about the same in terms of their level of aspirations.
01:28We ask a series of questions about their aspirations for post-secondary studies, so university or TAFE.
01:37And we ask, because of costs, have you done the following?
01:41And so students are much more focused around vocational education and training, much more
01:47focused around lower fee courses, much more focused around doing part-time work.
01:53And sometimes they're choosing to postpone study to save money in order to study or not
01:58study at all because of the financial pressures or financial costs of doing post-secondary school
02:04study.
