Until year 8, May Higgins felt really good about going to school. But, as learning became more technology-focused, and also more expensive, that began to change.
The school had laptops you could borrow, but you couldn’t take them home. Assignments and communication from teachers were on the school intranet. There was a homework centre but she couldn’t always stay late after school.
“Teachers would ask me in class why I hadn’t done the homework and I’d have to explain in front of people, ‘I don’t have internet at home’,” Higgins, now 16, said.
“As soon as you say things like that you’re branded as very different. ‘How do you not have internet, everybody has internet. Don’t your parents have jobs and stuff like that?’”
A report by Mission Australia, released on Wednesday, examines the attitudes and experiences of about 1,000 15- to 19-year-olds living in economically disadvantaged households.
Using data from its annual survey of about 20,000 teenagers, the study found teenagers who lived in jobless homes were twice as likely to feel “sad or very sad” about their lives (19%) compared with those whose parents were in paid work (9%).
Nearly one in five (19.4%) felt they did not have someone they could turn to if they were in trouble or facing a crisis. For those with parents in paid work, the figure was 8.4%.
Asked about the report’s findings, May’s mother, Tammy Headon, said: “Me and my daughter have fought over that. When she needs more from me and I can’t do any more. It just breaks you as a parent.
“A lot of the time they [her children] would be really stressed out, they’d be like, ‘It’s not fair, I need these things for school’,” said Headon, a welfare campaigner with the Anti Poverty Network who is on the single parenting payment.
“I’d reiterate what the school was saying, that they could go to the homework centre, but I knew it wasn’t fair.”
Mission Australia conceded in its report that “economic factors are just one dimension of disadvantage” but said the findings showed the need for more focused education programs for “at risk” students, as well as an increase to income support payments such as Newstart.
The study found economically disadvantaged teenagers were also:
Less confident about achieving their post-school goals (43% compared with 49%)
More likely to perceive barriers to finding work (52% compared with 38%)
Less likely to feel positive about the future (51% compared with 63%).
“We must listen to the voices of young people facing economic disadvantage who feel less supported, have poorer feelings of wellbeing, risk educational disengagement and report more barriers to finding a job,” Mission Australia’s chief executive, James Toomey, said.
Higgins is now in her final year at an Adelaide public school. She hopes to start a tattoo business when she graduates. She still worries about her family’s situation but things are looking up.
“When we got wifi at home just recently, my grades and communications with the teachers have been heaps better,” she said.
Asked if she was surprised economically disadvantaged teens were twice as likely to “feel sad”, Higgins replied “absolutely not”.
“It can make you really upset and sad because it doesn’t feel fair,” she said. “Growing up, I never did anything to deserve being poor. It’s like, why me?”
But she said her “outlook on that has changed”.
“I used to think, ‘Oh, other people don’t need to know that’,” she said. “It’s something I constantly tried to hide.
“It’s something that I’m still anxious about but it’s not something I can help.”
