Safer in School
Compulsory schooling for 16-year-olds boosts attendance and reduces their risk of maltreatment and need for emergency healthcare.
An extension to the school-leaving age in South Australia has reduced child harm, made first-time child maltreatment reports drop by 38 per cent and emergency department visits drop by 19 per cent, mainly due to fewer injuries particularly among children with past involvement with Child Protection Services (CPS).
Research led by Monash University and the University of South Australia found estimates that the policy reform led to, on average, an extra 412 children enrolled in public school annually. Additionally, 92 fewer children experienced first-time maltreatment, and 157 fewer children attended the emergency department each year following the reform.
The benefits from additional schooling appear to be driven primarily by staying within the education environment itself.
Dr Adam Dzulkipli, a research fellow at the Monash University Centre for Health Economics in the Monash Business School, said abused and neglected children were at high risk of school dropout and poor health. To his knowledge, this was the first study to examine how extending schooling impacts the likelihood of maltreatment or maltreatment-related harm in Australia.
“From a policy perspective, our results suggest that policy interventions aimed at increasing student retention and encouraging children to remain engaged with school can have a powerful impact on their safety,” Dr Dzulkipli said. “While these policies are typically introduced to enhance educational outcomes, our study suggests other potential benefits.
“Using previously established costs of maltreatment in the Australian context, we also found that the reduction in first-time child maltreatment translated to an annual saving of $46 million in lifetime costs associated with maltreatment, for example government services use, productivity losses, and premature mortality.”
Co-author and Centre for Health Economics Associate Professor Nicole Black said child maltreatment rates were unacceptably high globally*, and those who experienced it were at high risk of severe adverse outcomes throughout their lives.
Associate Professor Black said governments had an economic incentive and a moral obligation to help these children, and more work was needed to uncover effective interventions in the long term.
“Our findings suggest that the adverse outcomes suffered by maltreated children can potentially be reduced by appropriately designed policy interventions,” Associate Professor Black said. “Given the large individual and social costs of child maltreatment, more investment in such policies is important and would be worthwhile.”
Read the paper in The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Impact of Compulsory Schooling on Maltreatment and Associated Harms, here
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.a.280
*In the United States and Australia, roughly 5 per cent of all children were reported to Child Protection Services (CPS) for maltreatment during 2020-21 (Productivity Commission, 2022; U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, 2023).