ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe two of these Council of Australian Governments (COAG) goals that relate to education and qualification levels, and will assess the impact of reaching one of these goals by 2020 on a measure of social inclusion. However, it is clear that the third wave of reform, under the National Reform Agenda (NRA), has a strong emphasis on education. The argument is that it has important social benefits as well as economic benefits by enabling Australia to compete better in a competitive global market. The data used for the analysis come from the ten waves of the Household, Income and Labour Market Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Throughout, the terms 'inclusion' and 'exclusion' are used interchangeably, since much of the analytical literature uses 'exclusion' whereas the policy literature uses 'inclusion'. The analysis summarised here uncovered two main insights with respect to formal education and social inclusion.
