(From a blog)

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I was deflated after year 12, as were some of my girl-friends. Many of us grew up in and around the same country town and we went to the same primary and high schools. So it was 12 years of going to school together, and all building up to the focus and the promise and the work and the ambitions of year 12. But for me and some of my girl-friends, what followed the end of year 12 was the loss of the promise, the thudding realization that there weren't going to be any glittering prizes of a university place or a career for us - that our future was as check-out chicks, or receptionists, or working in a shop, or serving in a pub. No wonder some girls in country towns get engaged and/or pregnant before they turn 20.

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I think the whole year 12 system in Australia is [screwed] up. We are sucked into this absolute focus on doing well in year 12 - or else. But lots of us won't do well in year 12, because we are either not clever enough, or not motivated enough, or too immature to do something as important as year 12, or diverted by the hormones which are running rampant in our maturing bodies, or not living in the home environment which the year 12 system seems to assume all year 12 students are living in. We go through this stressful and crazy last year of high school in which we are encouraged to be creative and questioning and ambitious and focused. We are made to feel important. We are engaged. We are told it's an unavoidable rite of passage into adulthood. Then a few weeks after the end of that final school year, the rug is pulled out from under us and those ambitions come to nothing. We have been cast adrift, disengaged, never to darken the door of school again, and we are left alone to deal with our failings and our misplaced ambitions and the dispersion of our friends and our sense of not belonging any more.