2008.0 - Census of Population and Housing: Nature and Content, Australia, 2016  
ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 20/08/2015   
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ATTENDANCE AT AN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

This topic provides information about whether the person is attending an educational institution as a full-time or part-time student, and on the type of institution attended. Information from this topic is used for education planning at federal, state and community levels and in decisions on the allocation of funds for schools and for labour market planning.

BACKGROUND

A question covering school attendance has been included in most Australian Censuses and since 1976 the question has been broadened to cover attendance at school or other institutions. Questions enabling the identification of full-time and part-time students have been included since 1981. Since 1986 questions on the type of educational institution being attended by students have been included which enable comprehensive statistics to be produced on the characteristics of people attending the various types of educational institutions.

Due to structural changes in the higher education system, some changes in terminology were made in 1996 to the question about the type of educational institution. In 1996, Catholic and other non-government primary and secondary schools were also separately identified. These changes have been retained for subsequent Censuses.

A small change was made to a dot point instruction for the 2016 Census to clarify that external and correspondence students should indicate the institution in which they are currently enrolled, regardless of attendance.

QUESTIONS

The following questions are from the paper 2016 Census Household Form.

Image: questions 24 and 25 from the paper 2016 Census Household Form.