Our Impact

One thing we have been very clear about from the start of the Inventorium is that we do not want to compete with anyone.  We are seeking to fill a gap because a gap clearly exists when 25%-40% of kids are dropping out of school!  Our student base consists of kids who, for whatever reason, choose not to go to a traditional school.  This could be due to family circumstances; a disability of some kind; anxiety and/or depression; having been bullied; being excluded from school; or simply disengaged due to the three reasons outlined in the research summary in Our History.

We work in partnership with schools to teach the kids who are on their register but are either on FLO (or the post-FLO alternative), or simply are school can't/school refusers/truants.  We also run a cohort of homeschoolers through their SACE in partnership with Open Access College.  We also sell subscriptions to homeschooling parents who wish to teach their kids themselves.  We are a social enterprise and commit over 50% of any profit we make to improving the curriculum, and also have a scholarship fund for homeschooling parents who need it.  

Over 60% of our operating costs are directly related to the delivery of our education services (teaching) and most of the remainder is expended on the platform hosting and maintenance, including sustaining our ISO27001 certification for our information security and management system.

While we are a 'for-profit' social enterprise, our whole raison d'etre is to re-engage the disengaged.  Recently we expanded to offer a 'womens leadership development program' which is utilising the platform to support women back into the workforce after they have had a break of service (at least 6 months) facing similar barriers in re-engaging and accessing the workforce.  

We measure our impact in terms of outcomes and inputs.  In terms of outcomes, we focus on retention and engagement because we work with a population of young people for whom these two areas have been problematic.  We do not focus on 'academic results' because we negotiate the outcomes our students want to achieve with them and so an external measure is not a valid measure of success.  However, if the young people stay with us and complete the pathway we agree with them, then that is a success in our books.  In terms of inputs, we consider the proportion of costs associated with running the Inventorium and the proportion of those that are directly attributable to serving our target populations.  This keeps us very lean in terms of management costs, marketing and other business expenses and drives us to be as efficient and cost effective as possible, and ensures we provide value for money to all our partners, parents and customers.