Year 12s in limbo as forgotten losers of the pandemic

Victorian year 12s will soon face the biggest test of their lives but bumbling and dithering from the Andrews government means they have no certainty about VCE exams.

Victoria’s senior school kids are the forgotten losers of the pandemic. They have been overlooked in the bigger saga of social, emotional and economic turmoil.

Quietly, while no one was looking, it seems the Education State has morphed into the Equivocation State.

Year 12s should be out gallivanting, chasing romance, and dabbling in the pleasures (and evils) of adult vices.

In other moments, they should also be surging towards end-of-year exams, making plans for university and contriving contingencies in the uncertainty of the results ahead.

Victoria’s senior school kids have been overlooked in the bigger saga.

Victorian year 12s soon face the biggest test of their lives. But they have been disarmed of all the usual coping mechanisms.

They can’t see friends or get driver’s licences. Even the reward of schoolies seems unlikely. They don’t know what they’ll be doing next week, next month or next year.

They sit in their bedrooms, stultified by hours of online learning, which feels like six hours of homework before they do homework – when they aren’t zoning out, that is, dislocated by the lack of external outlets.

They are not seeking out teacherly advice, in part because they cannot see their teachers, but also because their motivation levels – like everyone else’s – have been sapped in the inexorable sameness of lockdown.

High school students have been left stultified by hours of online learning.

Their existential limbo need not have been so entrenched. Education authorities appear to have been caught out by the crisis, as if waiting for a moment of case numbers clarity which may never arrive.

You need not be across the nonsensical jargon of education in Victoria to grasp the obvious. Melbourne year 12s need certainty in what is always an uncertain year.

Yet they don’t know when they can return to school.

They don’t know how many of their last few days at school will be catching up on requisite tests which have backed up in their absence.

VCAA, which looks after year 12 exam curriculums, hasn’t yet reduced the scope of content for exams, as it did last year.

The Andrews government has lacked urgency in locking in plans for VCE exams. Picture: Nicole Cleary

Many expect it will. But until it’s official, many kids fret that they are learning stuff they will not be tested on.

There has been no official push for a return to the classroom for senior kids living in non-hotspot areas. The window for vaccinating year 12s and teachers – which is being applied in parts of Sydney – has probably closed. It was an opportunity missed.

The students are preoccupied with criteria of “special consideration”, but special consideration for all, as a year 12 student says, becomes special consideration for none.

The Andrews government has promised to address some of these issues — but it has lacked urgency. It has bumbled and dithered. Education plays like the chronic afterthought to more pressing matters.

Year 12 plans need to be locked in, then firewalled from the changing currents of case numbers and restrictions.

The lack of a guiding voice, much less a game plan, conjures images of long meetings where it’s agreed at the end to have another meeting.

There ought to be some accumulated wisdom here. We faced the same crises last year, when these year 12s, it should be noted, missed so much of year 11 and its experiences.

As far as we can tell, education authorities learnt nothing.