Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Some reference has been made today to graduation rates. I should point out something here, Mr. Chairman, that I think is important in it all. It is true, on a comparative basis, on a national basis, that the graduation rates are below national rates. There is no question about that. How that works is on the basis of taking 18 year olds, and that is the comparison. If we were to also take into account the 19 to 24 year olds, our graduation rates would increase by 10 percent.
The other factor that is not taken into account here are those individuals who drop out of school, take adult basic education, adult literacy and obtain the ability to enter into an apprenticeship program or a college program. We do not count those as part of our graduates. A lot of people have come back into the system who could be regarded as graduates from our system, even though they may have dropped out of our system at grade 11 with 90 credits, but they are not considered a graduate. They may have grade 9 and over time have improved themselves with literacy programs. Those individuals are not part of our system.
We have access programs at Aurora College for people who do not have grade 12 in nursing and in teacher education. It is a tremendous, successful program. You know, we have to look at the overall picture in this. I will carry on, Mr. Chairman, because the Member had specific questions.
On possibilities for students who do drop out, yes, it is a very critical area because we recognize people are dropping out. We are in the process of developing some alternate pathways for those individuals who see challenges in trying to get through high school. Right now, we have two processes. One is academic. The second is through the SNAP program, which is an apprenticeship style program. We are developing a third, and that would take into consideration occupations so that a person can go out to the workforce, get experience and then graduate with a diploma that would indicate on that diploma what kind of graduation that would be.
There are two other pathways in addition to that, which we are working on but do not have instituted yet. We have support from educators throughout the Territory on that, Mr. Chairman.