Youth Transitions

Identifying Students at Risk

If you have followed the instructions in the Student Mapping Tool Data Extraction Guide (PDF - 1.8Mb) the left-hand side of your spreadsheet will be filled with data.

Now the following should be considered:

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Is the data accurate and complete?

There are a range of reasons why your data might not be accurate or complete. The Tool extracts the latest data you have entered onto CASES21. If you are using electronic roll-marking software and have not transferred the data onto CASES21 recently, your attendance data will not be up to date. If your school has not transferred the latest VELS assessments onto CASES21, your literacy and numeracy data will not be up to date. If your school does not use the correct absence codes to register internal and external suspensions, this data will not appear.

If any of your data is not accurate and complete when you first use the Tool, improving how and when data is entered onto CASES21 should correct this. Do not enter updated or more complete data directly onto the spreadsheet – it will simply be replaced by whatever data is held on CASES21 next time you ‘refresh’ the spreadsheet.

(Please note that some schools in the trial of the Tool found a large number of ‘U’ or ‘Unknown’ entries for Parent’s Occupation Code. This not only limits the possibilities for data analysis, it could be costing your school. For the purposes of calculating your school’s funding allocation, a ‘U’ is interpreted as equivalent to a Group A ‘Professional’ occupation code.

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Which students are at risk of early school leaving?

The first task is to highlight in yellow all instances where a student has exposure to a risk factor associated with early school leaving. Some of these will occur automatically, e.g. the Tool will automatically highlight the ‘Special Flags’ cell if a student is a Koorie, refugee, has a disability, etc.

Your school will have decide what constitutes the minimum level of literacy and numeracy expected for each year level, and highlight all students achieving below that level.

With the highlighted data in front of you, your school will then decide which students you believe are at risk of early school-leaving. Using the ‘Risk Level’ column you can differentiate between students at high risk of early school leaving, who might require a case management approach, and students with exposure to one or two risk factors who require monitoring but no immediate intervention.

Please note that the Tool will not provide a definitive answer to the question, “Which of our students are at risk of early school leaving?” Some students will be engaged and successful despite experiencing several risk factors, others can seem precariously connected to school despite experiencing none of the risk factors displayed in the Tool. Input from key staff should be considered in the process of filling in the ‘Risk Level’ column.

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Should we delete the students who are not at risk of early school leaving?

Not yet. Wait until you have mapped which students are engaged in which support programs first (on the right-hand side).

When you ‘refresh’ the data from CASES21 it will retain the data about each student that you entered on the right-hand side, but if you have deleted some students they will be re-inserted into the spreadsheet. Having a ‘master’ spreadsheet for this date (e.g. April 2007), which contains all students and all data, will prove more effective and will mean less manipulation of the data is required each time the spreadsheet is ‘refreshed’.

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Mapping student participation in the school’s support programs

This should be done next. See the information about mapping support programs. Gathering this information from all staff and registering it on the ‘master spreadsheet’ can take some time.