Informing key influencers of low SES regional, rural and remote students' education and career pathway choices: A whole community approach

Education and career pathway decision making in rural, regional and remote (RRR) areas is crucial for building strong societies and economies across RRR Australia, a point made by recent reviews of RRR education (Napthine et al., 2019; Halsey, 2018). Rather than targeting school students in their education and career pathway decision making, this project developed and piloted a model focussed on working alongside communities to build community capacity to support education and career pathway decisions of school students and adults. Schools currently have limited support from outside the education sector in providing career information and education. There is a need to embed knowledge within communities about careers of today and the future, and the pathways to them, so that this knowledge is readily accessible to those making pathway decisions. This project aimed to establish a model to fill gaps in community knowledge and give confidence to the community members who are key influencers of young people’s and others’ career and education pathway decisions. The project adopted a placed-based, whole of RRR community approach to targeting and building the capacity of these key influencers.