Two proposals to reduce youth disadvantage
19 Jul 2011
MEDIA RELEASE
The New Zealand Institute’s first social well-being discussion paper More ladders, fewer snakes: Two proposals to reduce youth disadvantage, investigates the plight of our youth and identifies two powerful interventions to improve outcomes.
“New Zealand’s youth are materially disadvantaged relative to the OECD average on measures of unemployment, crime, health and safety, and teenage births,” says Dr Rick Boven, Director of the New Zealand Institute.
“Disadvantage is strongly concentrated in Māori and Pacific ethnic groups and there is no convincing sign of improvement trends. More needs to be done to prevent poor outcomes for New Zealand’s youth.”
Unemployment is central; it is an important consequence of disadvantage as well as a cause of future disadvantage. Disengaged, inactive youth are at greater risk of lower earnings, needing social assistance, criminal offending, substance abuse, teenage births, suicide, homelessness, and mental or physical ill-health.
New Zealand allocates a higher share of unemployment to its youth than any other OECD country. Forty-five percent of New Zealand’s total unemployed are youth.
Many OECD countries insulate their 15 to 19 year olds from unemployment by keeping them in education or training so they are not in the labour force. New Zealand does not; it has the lowest median age of leaving initial education among OECD countries. Far too many youth are leaving school early and not successfully transitioning to work.
Too few students remain engaged at school. By age 16, 36% of students are reported to be usually or always bored and one quarter want to leave school as soon as they can, or already have. According to the Ministry of Education, New Zealand has one of the highest proportions of disengaged 14 to 18 year old students of any OECD country.
More ladders, fewer snakes proposes two interventions to improve outcomes for New Zealand’s youth: accelerating the roll-out of e-learning to low decile schools and improving the school-to-work transition.
E-learning, combined with a school improvement programme, improves student engagement and learning outcomes. There are successful examples of decile one primary schools using e-learning.
“E-learning can reach everyone and improve outcomes for those already disadvantaged,” says Dr Boven. “It should be scaled urgently and systematically with the initial priority being the lowest decile schools.”
Successful scaling will require:
- Provision of a turnkey technology solution to the schools;
- Development and communication of the principles to guide school improvement and to deploy e-learning;
- Resources at a district level to ensure professional support is available where and when it is needed; and
- Effective mechanisms for identification and transfer of best practice.
New Zealand’s school-to-work transition is not working well. Many young people are leaving school but not finding their way into permanent work successfully. Some students are given career guidance based on a professional understanding of their interests and aptitudes but many are not. One third of students commencing higher education courses fail to complete their first year or do not continue into the following year. The majority of trade apprentices do not complete their training.
Four initiatives are proposed to improve the school-to-work transition:
- Establish vocational and technical pathways to work that begin at a younger age and are positively encouraged and recognised as leading to employment success;
- Develop a national view of future workforce requirements and adjust education capacity to more closely match the supply of workers that will be needed;
- Strengthen the connections between employers and educational institutions so employers have more input into the content of education and earlier links with potential employees; and
- Require active career planning and tracking for all students, not simply those at risk or those who are headed for academic success.
The changes proposed involve refocusing existing capacity, capability and effort. As the best performing OECD countries have much lower costs for youth issues than New Zealand, large improvements are achievable.
Many people are making a difference for youth and successes are being achieved in New Zealand but the Institute’s investigations did not reveal evidence of a well-organised centre hungry for valuable interventions and capable of scaling them.
“The challenge now is to find a person or agency with the leadership, motivation, resources and mandate to successfully drive the effort and coordination needed to launch the changes we propose,” says Dr Boven.
ENDS
For more information contact:
Dr Rick Boven, Director, The New Zealand Institute
+64 9 309 6230
+64 27 597 5916