There are a number of factors that have dulled the capacity of the education system to keep the flow of young people coming through into such positive outcomes as further education and training and employment. These are not the result of a conspiracy. Some are unintended consequences and others are what happens when misplaced enthusiasm for futurology overtakes a rather less glamorous focus on immediate outcomes.

The notion that we must prepare young people for jobs which don’t yet exist has simply led to unprecedented numbers of young people not being prepared for jobs at all. The emphasis on the need to prepare for seven careers in a lifetime has little meaning for those who have not even one career.

The process of managing progression through education, training and employment is continuous and the dysfunctional gaps that appear in the education of too many young people are disastrous.

New Zealand is not alone in this. The international youth labour market has taken itself to a space that is different for that which characterised countries such as New Zealand until the late 1980s. Changes to the structure of the economy through government withdrawal from activities such as railways, postal services, infrastructure development and maintenance saw the unintended destruction of the apprenticeship system – the government in New Zealand employed 80% of our apprentices - and we have struggled to put anything as good in its place.

But most importantly was the coming together of two forces within the schooling system. One was the belief that the comprehensive high school was the vehicle that would deliver positive education outcomes for all our young people. This saw the incremental but inexorable drift of the school system into a general academic programme, the disappearance of trades from the secondary school. The role of the introduction of ‘technology’ will eventually be raised.

Disengagement

Put alongside that the well-intended drive to keep young people in education and training and to address the issue of our low numbers of 15 to 19 year-olds in education and training. But this turned out to be largely a drive to keep young people in the comprehensive high school. Between 1975 and 1990 the proportion of each cohort that stayed in secondary school for five years rose from 12% to 65%. And it was during that period that disengagement was born.

The issues were not always within the schools. There was also a shift in attitude of employers towards young people and the capacity of business and trades to take a young person on and give them a go was replaced by a preference for experienced workers. It is simply a matter of logic that if you lessen the capability of business, industry and commerce to give a young person a start, the supply of experienced workers will shrink. The labour market therefore starts to rely on experienced immigrant labour rather than inexperienced school leavers.

Maori and Pacific students are over-represented in the statistics of disengagement and educational failure. The two need to be discussed separately.

Maori have always been disadvantaged in the education system and there is evidence that patterns of disengagement have been relatively constant for the past 50 years with too many Maori youth drifting out of the system by around age 14 or 15 years. This is sad because we know now so much more about getting good results and the raw figures for Maori success are actually on the increase. They are, however, overtaken by population growth of that community. Small increments in increasing Maori success aren’t enough - step changes are required.

Pasifika communities came to New Zealand largely in search of education and in the 1950s were a welcome addition to the labour force that was then still waiting for the baby boomers to grow up. But New Zealand has struggled to get equitable outcomes for this community despite it being the most persistent ethnic group in our educational institutions.

The situation however is not without hope.

Education reform drifts and is often thwarted to some extent by the practices that it seeks to replace. When we as an education community understand the potential of the NCEA qualification to provide pathways characterised by flexibility, personally designed for each student and proving linked learning that moves students effectively on to whatever they are going to do next (further education , training or employment), progress will come more quickly.

Distortions

The uncertainties about NCEA are largely caused by people within and outside the education system who have yet to grasp that it is an assessment technology for reporting achievement across a wide range of education training activities. New Zealand has the advantage of having one comprehensive qualifications framework which is, in itself, simple. What makes it complex are the distortions created by trying to make NCEA behave like an old-fashioned examination system. There is no need to link NCEA levels to specific level in the school, there is no need to delay NCEA work until the senior secondary school, there is no need to restrict NCEA to school qualifications when tertiary qualifications can easily fit into and alongside the standard school fare.

The Youth Guarantee, with its focus on giving some pattern and shape to NCEA through Vocational Pathways, is hitting the mark. The fees-free places at tertiary providers for students who would make better progress in those settings is an encouraging start to giving all young people an entitlement to free education regardless of where they are pursuing it. Trades Academies and other programmes similarly provide new opportunities for young people.

As secondary students develop an awareness of such flexible options they will be making better decisions about their futures. Careers Advice has been dominated by the mechanics of navigation through the institutions of education. There is increasing awareness that a career orientation in students’ thinking is developed over time and has multiple sources. In quite a number of cases it is hugely influenced by the experiences and conversations of the home. That is the middle-class advantage.

New Zealand can get it right – scale is on our side and there is enough money in the system. We will, simply, have to work differently, use resources differently, and view students and their place in the system differently if we are to achieve different outcomes.