Explore Indicators
Youth access to local education and work opportunities
What is the indicator?
A key concern for many of Australia’s rural communities is loss of young people, who shift to larger towns and cities to pursue education and job opportunities. This indicator examines whether a community is providing sufficient access to education and work opportunities for young people. ‘Youth’ or ‘young people’ is sometimes defined as those aged 15-24, or those aged 18-29, or may involve a different age range definition.
What can this tell us about wellbeing?
A community that isn’t able to maintain a population of young adults is less likely to be able to sustain its population numbers overall, with impacts on the both the wellbeing of young people who feel they do not have the ability to have a good quality of life if they stay living locally, and for the wellbeing of remaining residents. Young people who feel they have no choice but to move elsewhere to access opportunities may also experience wellbeing challenges, whereas those who move by choice will be less likely to.
Advantages and disadvantages of this indicator
Advantages: Understanding local education and job opportunities for youth provides an indicator of whether young people are likely to feel they have to leave communities they have grown up in to seek opportunities elsewhere.
Disadvantages: Care is needed in interpreting some approaches to measuring this indicator. Young people often choose to seek job and education opportunities in new places, with a shift to a new community providing challenges and experiences that are beneficial for their long term wellbeing. This indicator should ideally focus on whether young people have choice in whether to stay or go. If a community provides little to no opportunities for young people, and they feel they have to leave, this is a sign of poor liveability and risk of wellbeing impacts. A sustainable rate of outmigration of young people is not necessarily a sign of low liveability or wellbeing, however.
What measures should I use for this indicator?
This indicator can be measured in three ways:
- Tracking how many young people shift elsewhere rather than staying locally (a retrospective measure)
- Measuring how many young people are attending local education and employed in local jobs
- Asking residents their views about whether youth have sufficient local education and work opportunities as part of community surveys.
The third measure was included in the Regional Wellbeing Survey for the first time in 2025, after residents in Victorian communities highlighted youth opportunities as a key indicator of wellbeing in their local areas.
When measuring this indicator, it is important to clearly define what age ranges are considered to represent ‘youth’. For example, people aged 15-24, 18-29 or other age ranges may be considered youth.
Measures
This measures uses data from the ABS Census of Population and Housing (CPH) to identify what proportion of younger people are shifting away from a community, using data on their usual address at a given point in time compared to one or five years ago. See the Population trends indicator for information on accessing CPH data.
Care is needed in interpreting this approach to measuring youth opportunities. It is normal for some young people to shift away from a community, with a shift to a new community providing challenges and experiences that are beneficial for their long term wellbeing. However, if your community is losing a much larger percentage of its youth population than is typical for regional communities, or there has been an increase in the rate of outmigration, this may indicator young people are finding fewer local education and job opportunities.
Australian Bureau of Statistics Census of Population and Housing
This measure is hard to measure accurately using your own surveys of the community. It is difficult to use a sample survey to accurately estimate what proprtion of youth are staying in the community versus leaving, as in many cases it is hard to sample young people who have moved away.
This measure examines access to education and job opportunities by identifying what proportion of local youth are actively engaged in education or employment, versus how many are unemployed and not engaged in education/training.
This measure provides a useful picture of what is happening amongst youth living in a community, but does not identify whether many others have shifted away from the community. For example, it is possible to have a community where most young people are either in education or work, but where this is only the case because many other young people have left the community to seek work and education elsewhere due to lack of opportunities. In other words, low unemployment rates are not a good indicator if they are the result of many people leaving the community to go elsewhere.
This measure can be examined using data from the ABS Census of Population and Housing, examining the proportion of youth in an area who are in employment or education.
This measure can be examined using your own survey. However, to get an accurate estimate of youth engagement in employment and education, you need to ensure you have a robust and representative sample of young people completing your survey.
The Regional Wellbeing Survey includes a question asking the extent to which people feel their local community provides local education and work opportunities for young people. This question was first included in 2025, at the request of rural Victorian communities who were designing local wellbeing frameworks. Data are available via data tables and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard. Data are published for Australia, states and territories, regional Australia, and a range of geographic regions. The smallest scale at which data are available is the local government area (LGA), although sample sizes are too small to report data for some smaller population LGAs in rural Australia. Where this is the case, findings are published for a larger region that includes that LGA.
You can use data from the Regional Wellbeing Survey in a number of ways:
- Directly source data about your community or region from the results published each year in data tables and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard
- Include the same question in your own survey, and draw on Regional Wellbeing Survey data to provide comparison data that enables you to assess how your community is going compared to others of similar size, or to the average for regional areas in your state/territory, or across regional Australia, urban Australia, or Australia as a whole
- Include additional questions asking residents what is driving their concern about outmigration.
In general, higher local confidence that there are education and job opportunities for youth is a positive sign; however it is important to check that younger people have this higher confidence. In some cases, it is possible older residents of a community may perceive there is opportunity, whereas younger people are finding these opportunities are lacking.
The primary data source available for this indicator is the Regional Wellbeing Survey. Data are updated annually (data for this measure were first collected in 2025), and available in two formats: data tables, and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard. The question included in the Regional Wellbeing Survey is described below. In addition, it is possible to ask residents what types of opportunities for younger residents are present versus lacking in the local area.
| Question/item | Response options |
| Young people have good education and work opportunities that mean they can stay in this community if they want to | 7 point scale from 1 (Not a problem) to 7 (Big problem), with a ‘Don’t know’ option also provided |
This measure can be included in your own survey. You can replicate questions used in the Regional Wellbeing Survey, or design your own that are focused on the specific issues of interest or concern in your community.