KEY POINTS:
Outwardly, things appear to be going well in education, but the reality is that a crisis is looming in New Zealand. We need to face up to some unpalatable facts.
At the age of 16, only 80 per cent of students are still in the mainstream school system.
At any one time, somewhere between 17,000 and 25,000 young people between the ages of 15 and 19 are not in employment, education or training. They are, in short, doing nothing.
Some 22 per cent of 15-year-olds have low expectations of future employment - they expect to get work requiring low levels of skills. In other words, they have poor aspirations about future employment and the ability of education to take them on a pathway to higher-level qualifications and employment.
The mayor's Taskforce for Jobs has signalled that it cannot reach its goal of getting all school-leavers engaged with further education and training by the end of this year. The recent Unicef Innocenti Report Card also paints a worrying picture of our youth. New Zealand sits four places below the OECD average overall.
We continue to be well-placed, in fifth, in the educational achievement of 15-year-olds in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. But we are last among OECD countries for the percentage of 15- to 19-year-olds in full-time or part-time education.
All of this paints a foreboding picture for the 15- to 19-year-old age group. It is my view that we must focus on this level and work back down into the education system to see that young people arrive at the age of 15 equipped to continue.
This includes access to early childhood education, engagement of families in schools, secure levels of literacy and numeracy, and so on. But it also requires something more. New Zealand is the only OECD country that withdraws the entitlement to free education training from young people when they leave the compulsory school sector.
Other countries continue to provide free training for vocational education and training. It is imperative that students continue to receive free education and training regardless of where that is obtained.
The monopoly on free education and training that the compulsory school sector currently has is clearly not working.
This requires a further change in the way we do things. A key issue in the levels of educational failure in New Zealand is that no one is accountable. Young people drift out of the school system and no one is accountable.
Fifteen and 16-year-olds leave education to do nothing and no one is accountable. Young people fail in further and higher education and no one is accountable.
Consideration should be given to the role of local authorities as in Sweden, where they are responsible for all young people to the age of 18.
Each young person not in full-time education or full-time employment is monitored and interviewed every 10 weeks.
A plan is drawn up to ensure a transition into education or employment. Young people are not allowed to fall through cracks.
Engaging the national network of authorities in this seems possible. It would be an effective role for them and in some areas the numbers would not be great.
I hear already the shouts about cost. Doing this would be the cheap option. The cost to the community of education failure in New Zealand is immense. The group of 15- to 19-year-olds not in education employment or training is probably costing the country about $1 billion each year.
We know from a study undertaken in Manukau several years ago that an unemployed youth in Manukau costs $60,000 a year. The amount of money spent on educational failure is huge.
Would it not be better for those sums to be directed to interventions with a chance of changing the way we work?
It is becoming clearer year by year, census by census, that if a community such as Counties Manukau gets it right, New Zealand will get it right.
When it was realised in the late-1990s that the reforms of the late-1980s had left communities such as Manukau stranded, the City of Manukau Education Trust (Comet) was established. The reforms had exposed issues that had long been there. In a diverse community such as Manukau, the conventional mainstream schooling system was not enough.
Some of those issues are still with us today. Manukau pre-schoolers still have restricted access to quality early childhood education.
Primary-school students are achieving at lower levels than their national cohort, but steadily getting better. Many Manukau secondary students then were failure-fodder for a national assessment system premised more on the protection of conventional advantage than on the recognition of achievement, but this is now slowly changing.
There continues to be something of a national panic about literacy levels, youth crime, and so on in that place not found on many maps - "South Auckland".
Back in the 1980s, New Zealand was waking up from a complacent belief that all was well. But all was not well.
Too many school leavers were not equipped to enter the workforce and make a positive contribution to the community.
The Manukau Education Strategy of 1998 asserted what was needed was a group that could act outside the conventional system to provide co-ordination, initiation, facilitation and advocacy - a kind of educational gap filler.
And the Manukau Education Trust has worked over the past eight years to undertake this role.
Successes include the internationally renowned Manukau Family Literacy Programme, a Youth Transition Service, the Principal for a Day and Executive for a Day programmes, mentoring activity, a range of IT/Digital Strategy projects, and initiatives in enterprise education.
The trust is a good example of what can be done across New Zealand. Or do we continue being complacent with the ability to be ranked at the top and at the bottom of international measures of educational outcomes?
* Dr Stuart Middleton is executive director of external relations and student affairs at the Manukau Institute of Technology and chairs the City of Manukau Education Trust.
