Tasters, known as Short Introductory Courses since 2005, are a key part of the STAR resource. Short Introductory Courses (SIC) can be anything from a few hours long to a series of linking days, conducted within the school or done through external providers. They must involve some degree of teaching and learning, but they do not necessarily attract unit standards on the National Qualifications Framework.

However SIC or tasters have not always had an established place in STAR. In 2002, as the Ministry of Education prepared to commission a review of STAR, one of the many questions it was asking was about the worth of the tasters component. At that time, tasters were funded under a separate part of STAR funding, their purpose was not well understood, and discontinuation of funding for tasters was a possibility.

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) reviewed STAR in 2002-2003. We understood the particular challenges of youth transition, and therefore STAR, in terms of expanding opportunities and increasing pressure on young people to be responsible for thoughtfully choose from an ever-increasing range of in-school and post-school study and career options (Vaughan, 2003). We saw the specific New Zealand school-leaving environment in terms of a "pathways framework", consisting of a partially deregulated tertiary education system that had led to vast increases in numbers of courses and institutions, a qualifications system still developing approaches to give credit to a wider (non-academic) range of learning, and increasing investment in vocationally-oriented education and career guidance (Vaughan, 2004). Where transition had formerly been a pejorative word referring to underachieving students and the programmes that helped them into employment (Higgins, 2002), transition was now about positioning all students as navigators of their own transition from school.

In our evaluation, A Constellation of Prospects (Vaughan and Kenneally, 2003), we found a wide variety of activities going on, organised in different programmes and systems. Nearly all schools offered industry-related courses to their senior students, and more than half were also offering them academic programmes in addition to the subjects. But over half were offering short taster courses – 62 percent to their junior students and 57 percent to their senior students.

Almost half (47 percent) the STAR money was being channelled into short, career-browser courses or general skills, and the remaining 52 percent was for industry-related and academic courses, which tended to be longer and to take place away from school and attract credits against the National Qualifications Framework.

We concluded that taster courses served an important purpose and could be made even more available to senior students than currently. There are a number of reasons why.

That students may not necessarily go on to careers or further study in subjects that they "tasted" is not a failure, in fact it’s probably a success. Students use tasters as a way of sorting through options, trying new things, making mistakes. If it helps them eliminate a pathway, that’s positive. Outside of school, trying out careers or education options can be an expensive and time-consuming business. But when it’s done within school, it’s not.

Tasters can provide a practical, hands-on, close-up look at a potential career path, and a sense of whether it might be for them. Even a whiff of something that interests them early in their secondary schooling may have the added benefit of increasing motivation.

The flexibility of STAR means that students could potentially dip into a wide range of short courses throughout their time at secondary school. This can help students see their career pathway as a process that they need to prepare for, rather than just one fixed choice they need to make at a certain point. It may help them appreciate the need to understand themselves and their ways of working. They may even find themselves using a short course as a coping mechanism – a deliberate time-out from the need to make purposeful decisions about career of work identity.

Tasters work for schools as well as students, in that they’re able to widen the curriculum and provide an array of courses, with all the information on up to date industry specific skills, for what the OCED have called the "milling and churning" period (2000). Rather than seeing tasters as a series of false starts or blind alleys, we think they should be understood as one of the many tools that enable individual students to find their way through the senior secondary school curriculum and link it to possibilities beyond school.

We saw the flexibility of STAR as one its great strengths. Schools use STAR funding in a myriad of ways within the broad parameters of its goals and regulatory framework. STAR’s strength is in allowing individual schools to design programmes which they believe best meet the needs of their particular students and community. In many cases, STAR allows schools to widen their curriculum, acknowledge the importance of vocational as well as the academic, and re-engage students by presenting new and different possible pathways to them. It potentially targets any or all students in a school.

However STAR’s weakness was also precisely this capacity to accommodate all students through a vast array of courses, organised into different types of programmes and systems, limited only by the school’s imagination and resourcing. The tension between STAR’s dual aims at the time – to retain students and to assist them to leave school – coincided with a lack of clear direction from the Ministry of Education. This left some school STAR co-ordinators, school principals, and external providers confused about how to use STAR most efficiently, and to best give life to its intent. It also made compliance with STAR’s regulations somewhat ambiguous and challenging. These tensions also contributed to some disjunction between external provider, principal, student, and STAR co-ordinator perceptions of STAR’s overall purpose.

As a result of one of the review’s recommendations, STAR’s purposes have been clarified and STAR’s purpose is now to:

• facilitate transition to the workplace for students, particularly those intending to go straight into the workforce or those likely to leave school without any formal qualifications;
• provide or purchase tertiary courses which will better meet students' needs, which will motivate them to achieve, and which will facilitate their smooth transition to further education, training or employment;
• support students to explore career pathways and help them make informed decisions about their schooling and future work or study (Ministry of Education, 2005-2008).

The third purpose – supporting students to explore pathways and make informed decisions – is particularly relevant to tasters.

So what sort of taster courses are schools offering? The scope is limited only by the imagination – and the availability of providers. There is a huge range, from pattern making to welding, beauty therapy, nannying, arboriculture, snorkelling, to gasfitting. A taster course may even consist of enabling students to attend a university lecture in a subject they are interested in.

Typically schools will plan a programme of courses for the year, and then slot in one-off opportunistic courses as particular needs arise or as funding allows. Some schools cluster together in consortiums to purchase courses and to liaise over transport and organisation. Schools have a variety of methods for ascertaining student needs and developing a programme to meet those needs. Of courses there are always constraints: limited funding, the location of the school and availability of external providers, and complex logistics such as fitting STAR courses into the rest of the school timetable.

Another recommendation from the review of STAR led to a team of regional STAR advisors being set up. In the past several years they have worked to explicitly link New Zealand youth transition research with STAR purposes in order to help school-based STAR co-ordinators make the most of STAR for their particular students.

They have used Pathways and Prospects, another NZCER research project to make recommendations to schools about how to understand the dispositions and orientations of their students and tailor Short Introductory Courses to suit them.

In Pathways and Prospects, we found that young people’s notion of "career" was very much about process, rather than destination, and that who you could be was more important than what you could be. Young people’s exploration of different career options does not necessarily come before settling down; exploration may be a modern life mode for learning and skill development. We also found that back-up plans were not only important but may also be deployed before undertaking the most desired option or pathway. They not only served as risk-avoidance strategies but as creative platforms for tying together seemingly unrelated pathways or creating hybrid occupations. However the increasing volume and breadth of career options was overwhelming and inhibiting for some, particularly where there had been no prior practice in making choices (Vaughan, Roberts, and Gardiner, 2006).

By applying a cluster analysis to our interview data, we were further able to discern distinct orientations to transition for different groups of young people. These are summarised in the next table.

Clustered interview narratives from the Pathways and Prospects study

Adapted from Young People Producing Careers and Identities (Vaughan et al., 2006).

The regional STAR advisors have since created professional development for school STAR co-ordinators to consider the kinds of tasters they offer to their students. This is summarised in the following table.

Pathways and Prospects clusters and taster suggestions

Adapted from Deeply Love SIC for STAR (Dashper and Osbourne, 2008)

Schools now have a mandate through STAR to use tasters to meet the needs of a wide range of students. And they have the support of a set of regional advisors to guide them.

There are still important questions for schools, however. They need to look at how courses are chosen, how they are evaluated and how that information feeds into future courses. Where courses are run in the school, is that being done for the right reason or because it’s more cost-effective? What are the additional benefits in having students go off campus?

However STAR is doing well. Last year the Government added more support in the form of a $6 million dollar boost to STAR – a 30% funding increase.