New Zealand schools focus on enabling students to gain qualifications but are young people leaving school with the skills they need to succeed in life? In the second of a two-part investigation in our Making the Grade series, education reporter Amy Wiggins explores whether schools could do more to prepare students for life.
One fine winter morning four weeks before the 2017 election, then-Labour leader Jacinda Ardern stood in front of students at Kelston Girls’ College in West Auckland and promised to fund driving tests for all school students and make civics education compulsory.
The School Leaver’s Toolkit policy, which also included optional financial literacy and workplace competencies courses in the curriculum, had been signalled two years earlier by Chris Hipkins, who was the party’s education spokesman at the time, as part of Labour’s Future of Work Commission.
Standing in front of a room packed with the students who would benefit from the changes, Ardern explained the Future of Work report “identified the need to do better in giving young people the practical skills that they need, in the workplace, in their day-to-day lives, and as members of the community”.
Labour won the election but almost six years on from that campaign promise, little has changed for school leavers except a website that provides information on all those work and life skills for those who make the effort to look.
School leaders say most secondary schools teach financial literacy, civics, healthy relationships and work skills in the junior levels while it becomes optional for senior students - but for more to be added, something else has to be dropped.
Students and young people themselves, business leaders, and community organisations say more needs to be done to prepare young people to fend for themselves in the real world once they leave school.
Rikhugh Mackey, 19, was making $800 a week but before the week was up, the money was gone.
Now Mackey, partner Sanita Kaleta, 18, and their daughter Ngamaliah Kaleta-Mackey, 14 months, are living on less and managing to save thanks to a budgeting course run by Strive Community Trust.
It was not until they got involved with Strive, who have provided them with transitional housing, that they were told their spending habits were unhealthy.
“Now that we’ve been shown how to divide our money, it’s easier,” Mackey said.
The budgeting course taught them about what bills they would have to pay, how to pay them, how to prioritise expenses and how to save what they could.
“It was a lot of general life skills that should’ve been taught in school but weren’t. It was surprising that it took us so long to learn something so basic. This is so much more important than what schools are teaching now,” he said.
The couple, who left Trident High School in Whakatane part way through Year 12 when Kaleta fell pregnant, said they had now been shown how to save and use their money wisely.
They were now saving to cover their expenses when they were able to get a permanent home through Kāinga Ora but Kaleta believed if they had learnt budgeting skills at school they may have already had their own rental and some savings in the bank.
“It would have been a game-changer,” Mackey agreed.
A parenting course they had done through Strive had also been invaluable and was something else Mackey believed schools should offer.
Herald readers have backed teaching financial literacy as a priority for schools too. Responding to an online poll in last week’s Making the Grade story on work skills, almost half (47 per cent) said schools should teach it more, well ahead of the next most popular choice, personal skills (28 per cent).
Even students who do well academically at school seem to struggle with life skills. According to New Zealand Union of Students’ Associations president Ellen Dixon, many first-year university students lack basic knowledge, such as financial literacy and an understanding of the country’s governance system,
Dixon said students often came into tertiary study with little or no civics education, meaning they did not know how key elements of our democracy, like MMP, worked.
A Government minister recently asked her if students at tertiary level or below received any training in budgeting so they understood what they were signing on to when taking out a student loan.
“Our answer to that was no. No one does that. They don’t do that in schools, they don’t do that in tertiary.”
She said a lot of tertiary students, living on their own for the first time, had no idea how to budget for daily living expenses and didn’t fully understand loan contracts and credit card debt.
She believed adding civics and financial literacy into the secondary school curriculum would help many students have a better start to life on their own.
“The whole point of education in the first place, is meant to be knowledge that applies to the world,” she said.
“You’d like to think you’re training young people to feel prepared for their world, whether that’s mathematics so that I can purchase something because I know how much money I have in my bank account versus I know how to read effectively, so I’m able to read a contract.”
Sharon Wilson-Davis, chief executive of South Auckland-based Strive Community Trust, agreed young people were “absolutely not” prepared for life after school - especially when it came to financial literacy and resilience.
She acknowledged schools had a hard job but believed students should be taught how to manage their money and deal with failure and loss.
“Kids have got no financial literacy when they come out of school. I can only speak from my end of the spectrum in a low socio-economic area, that their parents often don’t have those skills,” she said.
“If they can’t get them from mum and dad, then they need to get it from school and they’re not getting it from school.”
She said young people jumping into buy-now-pay-later schemes such as Afterpay for things they did not need “just leads to disaster”.
Wilson-Davis said one of the grandaughters she raised got a good education at a boarding school but had no idea about how to manage money.
Within a couple of years of leaving school, she was $30,000 in debt and “didn’t even really know how the hell she got there”.
She said young people were not equipped to cope with all the enticements in the world like “the iPhone, the flash stuff that’s in their face and the easy Afterpay stuff”.
“Then what happens? Their credit rating will be ruined. They are very likely not to get a rental property. They’re not likely to be able to get a loan for a car.
“It’s gotta be learned right back then. It’s got to be part of their education.”
Wilson-Davis said everyone needed to consider how they could be part of the solution, which is why Strive worked with families to help them develop financial literacy.
She said young people were also not being taught the skills to handle emotional upheavals.
“They often don’t have any resilience, which I feel could be part of a curriculum to give them scenarios of what is likely to happen.
“Shit happens, we all know that. We’re not giving them the tools from as early an age as possible for them to be able to cope with that and go, ‘we learned about that’.”
She said it was important to teach young people about what failure looked like and how to handle it - in work, study or relationships - as some resorted to suicide.
“We’ve got kids bloody topping themselves when a relationship ends.”
Auckland Business Chamber chief executive Simon Bridges believed schools could be doing more to help students get their driver’s licence - even if it was outside of school time.
He said his organisation put about 3000 young people into driver training each year through a Ministry of Social Development programme.
“it’s still a pretty basic requirement for anyone in New Zealand not just rural and provincial,” he said.
“Evidence is incredibly clear that if you haven’t got a driver’s licence, chances are you’re still driving but you’re going to find it a whole lot harder to get into work, you’re much more likely to enter the criminal justice system and have a less successful life.”
A study published in 2016 found 40,000 young people were ticketed for licence breaches every year and 73 per cent did not pay their fines, making driver’s licence offences a “primary gateway into the justice system”.
It also found there were 4300 criminal convictions and 288 people jailed for licence breaches each year.
Bridges said some students’ families were not able to help or support them in getting their licence so schools could play more of a part.
“It could just be that the pipeline is provided at school where students are invited, maybe subsidised into driver’s licences before or after school.”
Making civics education compulsory in schools was another key promise of Labour’s School Leaver’s Toolkit policy.
Instead, a teaching and learning guide was added to the School Leavers Toolkit website for teachers in 2020, meaning it remains optional for schools to teach.
The guide admitted there was “considerable variability in the extent to which learning experiences at school promote active citizenship and support students to develop a robust understanding of political institutions, processes, and systems”.
While some schools teach civics and citizenship comprehensively, usually as part of social studies, others skim over the basics.
Former Motueka Community Board member Joni Tomsett last year launched a petition calling for civics education to be a core subject in New Zealand secondary schools by the 2026 general election.
“In New Zealand, we have less social cohesion, lowering levels of trust in the government and lowering voter turnout rates. These are urgent matters that require action,” the petition reads.
“We believe it requires implementing education and training within schools so young people have the ability to learn before they are able to actively engage and understand how decisions are made.”
Earlier this year, the Manurewa and Papakura local boards also called for civics education to become compulsory as part of their feedback to the inquiry into the 2022 local body elections.
Both wards had very low voter turnout for the recent election and Manurewa chairman Glenn Murphy said he believed civics education could help boost that.
“That could include components on local and central government, running mock elections and age-appropriate civics education could even be included in primary schools.”
In 2018, high school students told the Ministry of Education they were not learning many of the life skills they needed during their school years.
As well as basic workplace competencies, students identified teaching on mental health, sexual health and consent, driving, financial literacy and civics as essential to preparing them for life after school.
The findings came as part of the Open Government Partnership New Zealand’s school leaver’s toolkit research, which aimed to “ensure that students have access to foundational knowledge in civics education, financial literacy and key workplace competencies” before they left school.
The toolkit stemmed from the Labour Party’s 2016 Future of Work report, which suggested teaching financial literacy and providing driver licensing in secondary school.
On the campaign trail in 2017, Labour leader Jacinda Ardern promised five hours of free driving lessons, a free defensive driving course and free learners and restricted licence tests for all seniors students as part of a School Leaver Toolkit if her party was elected.
The toolkit would also include optional courses in budgeting and financial literacy; a compulsory civics course for Year 11 to 13 students; and options for workplace competency and practical skills like first aid or heavy machinery licences, she announced.
In 2019, then education minister Chris Hipkins announced the launch of the School Leavers’ Toolkit website, saying the Government wanted to make sure young people understood how money worked and how to participate in “our democracy”
“The Toolkit will provide easy-to-find – and understand – advice and information on how to set up a bank account, and learn about compound interest and debt.
“It will also provide civics education and advice on what to expect when moving into a flat, when applying for a job and enrolling in further study or training, and in other areas that will add to students’ personal and financial well-being and sense of connection to the community.”
The website now provides advice on financial literacy, sexual consent, mental health, civics and work readiness for students. A separate website provides resources for teachers wanting to include those topics as part of the curriculum.
Funded driver licencing is offered by a number of Government agencies outside of school for those who face financial and social barriers.
Ministry of Education acting general manager of strategy and integration Tara Taylor-Jorgensen said a cross-agency approach was a more targeted and cost-effective way to provide driver training to school students, as well as those not in education, employment, or training.
She said driver licencing was not part of the national curriculum but the ministry did support the cross-agency Driver Licence Improvement Programme led by Waka Kotahi and the Ministry of Social Development to reach school students who need driver licence support.
Taylor-Jorgensen said life skills currently sat within compulsory learning areas of The New Zealand Curriculum, such as Social Science but schools had flexibility as to how skills such as civics, wellbeing and financial literacy were delivered.
The refreshed curriculum would make life skills easier to identify in all learning areas, she said.
“For example, in the refreshed te ao tangata (social sciences) learning area, ākonga (students) develop understanding, knowledge, and skills in relation to social, cultural, economic, and political processes. This enables them to contribute to and participate in society as critically informed, ethical, and empathetic citizens with a concern for the wellbeing of communities and a commitment to a fair society for all.”
The ministry did not respond to questions about how Ardern’s Toolkit promises devolved into the creation of two websites.
Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand president Vaughan Couillault said most schools did offer financial literacy at some point during the high school years.
He said his school, as with most secondary schools, had financial literacy classes in Years 9 and 10.
Once students moved into Years 11, 12 and 13 and chose their own courses the topic became optional, he said.
Sometimes speakers were brought in to address issues like budgeting but again it was up to students to decide whether to attend, he said.
Couillault said his school also helped students gain driver’s licences where there was a need.
He said the Gateway team helped some students gain their licence but schools had to seek out separate funding for it through organisations like the Auckland Business Chamber.
However, he knew helping his own children gain their driver’s licence had made a big difference in them being able to take part in recreational pursuits or employment which they would not otherwise have been able to get to.
“So for the students who really do need a licence and for some reason there’s financial barriers and stuff there we have historically had ways to help support them.
“I’m all for it. It’s just the funding side of it that’s challenging.”
Time was another issue, Couillault said.
“Schools have a place to help socially engineer and encourage prosocial behaviour but we’ve only got students for 190 days and we’ve only got them for six hours a day,” he said.
“There’s a lot that people that want us to resolve but the community needs to assist.
“We got to a point years ago, where we can’t fit much more into what we do in our day without something falling off. So the debate becomes - what falls off?”
Retirement Commission director of Māori and learning Erin Thompson agreed financial literacy was an important skill for all young people to leave school with which was why they ran the Sorted in Schools programme.
Almost 10 years ago the Retirement Commission identified the need for students to learn more about money. At the same time, students were starting to say they needed those skills to help them make better decisions when they left school, she said.
So they began work developing a programme for schools that offered just that and in 2018 they started to offer it to secondary schools.
Last year about 68 per cent of schools offered the programme along with 81 per cent of kura kaupapa Māori, she said.
Students are able to complete achievement or unit standards through the programme which can be taught as its own subject or integrated into other areas like maths or economics.
The course covers topics including budgeting; investment; retirement; Kiwisaver; compound interest; the risks of credit cards and Afterpay; and tax.
“The feedback from students is positive. They find this program valuable, they can see how it helps them and supports them in making future decisions as they’re starting to progress through and starting to think about what they want to do when they leave school,” Thompson said.
She said they were also starting to see students take that knowledge into their communities and homes and contribute to their family decisions.
Next week: Should schools teach teens more about sexual consent?
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Amy Wiggins is an Auckland-based reporter who covers education. She joined the Herald in 2017 and has worked as a journalist for 12 years.
Reg Hennessy has owned pubs, taverns and liquor stores over a nearly 50-year career.
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