Education

Information on children aged 0-12 years and their families, including use of formal and informal care

Educational attendance

• 484,185 people were attending preschool. 
• 2,075,224 people were attending primary school. 
• 1,629,624 people were attending secondary school. 
• 1,185,450 people were attending university or other higher education. 
• 601,901 people were attending vocational education (including TAFE and private training providers).

Qualifications

• Over 11 million (11,511,655) people in Australia reported having a non-school (vocational or tertiary) qualification, a 19.8 per cent increase since 2016.
• 5.5 million people (5,464,631) reported having a bachelor degree or higher, a 30.7 per cent increase since 2016.
• 4 million people (3,962,732) reported having certificate I to IV, a 10.6 per cent increase since 2016.
• The most common field of study for non-school qualifications was Business and Management (1,144,084 people), followed by Teacher Education (836,410), and Nursing (608,276).
• The fastest growing qualifications were Security Science, now 5,805 people qualified (up 460 per cent since 2016), followed by Artificial Intelligence, now 630 people (up 204 per cent), and Southern Asian Languages, now 670 people (up 123 per cent).

Of people aged 15-74 years:

• 63% had a non-school qualification
• 79% with a non-school qualification, and 58% without, were employed
• 84% who finished a non-school qualification in 2023 were employed in 2024.

Of people aged 15-24 years:

• 62% were currently studying
• 9% were not engaged in any work or study.

In 2024, there were a total of 287,494 children attending preschool. Of these there were: 

• 19,547 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
• 52,862 children residing in the most disadvantaged areas (Index of Relative Socio-economic Disadvantage (IRSD) quintile 1).

In 2024:

• the number of children aged 4 or 5 years old enrolled in a preschool program was 341,568, a 1.3% increase compared with 2023.
• the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children aged 4 or 5 years old enrolled in a preschool program was 23,206, which was 2.2% higher than in 2023.
• more than three-quarters (78%) of children enrolled in a preschool program paid $4 or less per hour for preschool programs after subsidies were deducted.

In 2022-23:

• 12.7 million people aged 15-74 years had one or more non-school qualifications
• 4.6 million people had multiple non-school qualifications
• 48% of people with one or more non-school qualifications, had all qualifications below a bachelor degree level
• 79% of employed people with a non-school qualification reported their highest qualification was relevant to their current job.

In Australia in 2024:

• 4,132,006 students were enrolled in 9,653 schools.
• the Year 7/8 to 12 full-time apparent retention rate was 79.9%.
• the average student to teaching staff ratio for all schools was 12.9 students to one teacher. 

• 42% of Australians aged 15-74 years had participated in learning in the last 12 months (7.8 million people).
• One in five (21%) were studying for a formal qualification.
• Just under a quarter (23%) did work-related training.
• Online learning was the most common way work-related training was delivered: rates more than doubled from 19% in 2016-17 to 55% in 2020-21.