Amy - I'm Amy Taylor, I'm 19, and I finished school in 2015. 
David - My name's David Taylor. My daughter just did her HSC about a year ago. Married to my wife Meryl, son Jacob, who's in year 11 at the moment. The school that she went to was very much everything led to the HSC. 
Amy - When they talked about HSC, they talked about universities. 
David - And we were trying to give her a different message, saying you know what, it's a stepping-stone. 
Amy - They were really drilling into us the expectation of after school, you go to uni. 
David - Yes, you have to do your HSC and, yes, give yourself the best opportunity but it's not the end of the world. 
Amy - When like a TAFE or apprenticeship was mentioned, it was sort of like, oh, well, you didn't get into uni so this is what you have to do now. 
David - We've always sort of had the conversation of what do you think you wanna do? What are you interested in? She'd expressed an interest in teaching. By the time they got to year 11 and 12, that was her focus, she was looking at some form of teaching and so it was a natural progression. And so we looked around and we found an early childhood education course at TAFE, so we looked at that, and she read through that and was like, yep, that's exactly what I wanna do. 
Amy - So I'd looked at unis beforehand but found that TAFE was more appealing to me and I got accepted into the course before I'd finished my HSC. 
David - And so it was, right, okay, well, let's have a look at the requirements for that, what marks you need, things like that, and as we looked at it, she didn't particularly need a set mark. 
Amy - Post year 12, after graduation, everything, I went straight into TAFE. 
David - Initially, I was a bit uncomfortable with it because I had a view of TAFE as sort of like a Mickey Mouse institution. It like uni's three or four years and you get a degree and whereas if you go to TAFE, oh, you come out with a diploma and it's only a year, a year and a half, two years, that type of thing, not sure if TAFE is the way to go, but then I looked into the type of courses that they offer and you can't really do that at uni, what they were offering. Once I sort of researched into the whole TAFE thing, looked at the course outline, looked at what it would give her at the end, yeah, I was fine. 
Amy - I went straight into doing a Certificate III in early childhood, and then after that and doing my work placement, that was only a six-month course so I pretty much went straight into diploma. And then I finished my Diploma II and currently about to finish my Diploma III in a month.