Reading between the lines

Tuaula Asiata has joined a family literacy programme with her daughter Dion. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Four "peas in a pod," said the celebratory Herald headline when Tuaula Asiata and her three identical sisters turned 15 in 1995.

A decade later, New Zealand can once again celebrate Asiata's success - this time as one of the first adult learners in a unique family literacy programme aimed at getting in early to give children the support they need to become successful young adults.

But it has been a close shave. Despite her fame as a quadruplet, our schools taught Asiata that she was "dumb".

"Before I started adult literacy, I thought I was the 'd' word," she says. "When you are younger, you get people saying negative things. That's what turned me off."

Her mother, a solo mum, flew from Samoa to have her babies in New Zealand and stayed. The four girls grew up in Otara and all excelled at basketball, but Asiata skipped many classes at Penrose High School.

Her first daughter, Tionne, was born on the quads' 19th birthday. A second daughter, Dion, followed two years later. Asiata supports them both on a domestic purposes benefit.

But as Tionne got closer to school age, Tuaula enrolled in an adult literacy class at Manukau Institute of Technology in 2003.

"I thought I had to go back and refresh for the sake of me and the kids," she says.

Last year she and Dion joined a new family literacy programme at Otara's Bairds Mainfreight Primary School. Dion attends the school's kindergarten, Asiata and eight other parents train on the school site as early childhood teachers, and the parents spend 15 to 30 minutes each day reading with their own children, one-on-one.

The City of Manukau Education Trust (Comet), which runs the programme, sees it as breaking the intergenerational cycle in which the children and grandchildren of Otara's original gang members are now figuring in a flareup of gang violence.

The trust, set up by Manukau City Council, also runs one of the country's first "youth transition" services, supporting about 300 early school-leavers from seven Manukau colleges for up to two years until they get jobs or further training.

The Government picked up the idea in last year's Budget, allocating $3 million last year, $6 million this year and $9 million in each of the next two years to set up pilot youth transition services in 14 places.

In the recent election campaign, Labour promised to expand the service to the whole country to achieve the goal of having all 15 to 19-year-olds in work, education, training or "other options that will lead to long-term economic independence and well-being" by 2007.

If it succeeds, the services may be the best long-term answer to gang culture. But it will need a lot more money than the $500,000 a year that has been allocated to each pilot so far.

At present, 92 per cent of the 300,000 youngsters aged 15 to 19 are in work, education or training at any time. But that leaves 24,000 nationally, including about 1800 in Manukau if it follows the national average (and in reality, almost certainly more), who have left school but are neither working nor in further training.

In 2001, when unemployment was higher, 15 per cent of those aged 15 to 19 were out of work or education - twice as many as in Australia and more than in 23 other developed nations.

The main reasons were our relatively early school leaving age of 16 and our high teen pregnancy rate.

Many teenagers, like Asiata, spend part of their first five years after school economically "inactive".

Almost half of all young New Zealanders go on a benefit for some time before they turn 20.

"It's not that they don't want to work," says Comet chief executive Bernadine Vester. "It's just that they don't have the strategies and support in place to find the work, or to recognise that they actually have some skills."

So far, the youth transition pilot schemes are just a drop in this large bucket. They are funded to support only "at-risk" school-leavers who are referred by schools or literally discovered on the streets.

Tasi and three colleagues based at Tangaroa College, Mangere College and Aorere College ask students what they want to do, put them in touch with local employers and training providers, and then "keep an eye on them" with regular calls to make sure things are going okay.

"Some of 'them' - and I pause because I was one of them - don't find the system here in schools very inviting," says Tasi, who came here from Samoa when he was 13.

"This [Hillary] is a predominantly Pacific Island school and literacy is a huge problem. Sometimes it comes down to just the delivery of it - it's pretty boring. I hung in there, like most of these guys do, because you can play rugby in winter and you can run fast in athletics in the summer and there is absolutely nothing going on between the eyes.

"A happy guy I was - I still am. But with huge embarrassment. I achieved greatly through sport and stuff like that, but was very embarrassed through not understanding English."

The Government-funded three-year pilot schemes started this year in Whangarei, Waitakere, Rotorua, New Plymouth and Porirua.

In the second round, now under way, services are starting in the Far North, Manukau, Hamilton, Gisborne and Hutt Valley.

In Waitakere, the Youth Horizons Trust won a tender to manage the service and hired a manager, Wendy Wright, who had run a similar scheme called Taranaki Connections in Waitara.

The service opened an office in Henderson in July and aims to track 1850 school-leavers and "transition" 420 "at-risk" 15- to 17-year-olds.

As well as the manager, it has employed an administrator, two personal advisers to work with school-leavers and someone to co-ordinate volunteer mentors for some of them. It is about to take on a sixth person to liaise with employers.

The first nine mentors have finished their training and are being matched with young people this past week or next week.

But Wright says her two personal advisers are struggling to cope with 105 "at-risk" young people between them.

"Half of those are now in training or work, but that leaves 54 from Child, Youth and Family, the courts and truants. These kids need time and support and consistency and you can't do that with two personal advisers. There should be one personal adviser to 20 of these kids, max," she says.

Ironically, Wright's former agency, Taranaki Connections, failed to win the tender for the youth transitions service in the New Plymouth district, which went instead to iwi-based health provider Tui Ora.

Wright worked for it as a consultant and ended up setting up a structure very similar to what already existed.

The same thing is now happening in Manukau, where Comet has lost the tender for the pilot youth transitions service to the Manurewa-based Solomon Group Education and Training Academy.

It, in turn, is subcontracting with a neighbouring group in Manurewa, Ideal Success Academy, for services to Maori, and with a Papatoetoe-based mentoring agency, Affirming Works, for Pacific Islanders.

Chief executive Frank Solomon says the group will focus on Manurewa in the first eight months, and hopes to start in the first week in November.

"It's a matter of finding facilities for a drop-in centre and establishing relationships with the schools.

"The new Government is trying to get us to have an official opening but we can't even find premises yet."

The Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, a group of 67 mayors chaired by Nelson Mayor Paul Matheson, said in February that the new services were characterised by "rushed process, restrictive timeframe, poor timing, difficulties with collaborative and tender processes, lack of understanding by Government agencies of the nature of partnership with local Government and the community".

"In most areas there has been some damage to the intersectoral relationships within communities due to the process used to develop and negotiate these first services," he said.

In Manukau, Solomon and Vester both hope to work together, but it will not be easy.

"When you set up a competitive process for tenders of this nature, you end up polluting the collaboration and networking that has to take place to address the issue," Vester says. "We want to work alongside Frank but the structure of the contracting process means that we have been forced into a competitive position." 

* Clarification:An earlier version of this story reported Bruce Tasi as saying he found a youth on the street who had been out of Hillary College for four weeks without anyone at the school informing him. Mr Tasi explains that the youth actually left the school three years earlier and he could not have expected staff at the school to have told him about it.