Youth Guarantee, no guarantee – NZSPC

Media Release 16 July 2009

Youth Guarantee, no guarantee – NZSPC

National’s Youth Guarantee promises early school leavers free access to polytechnics and trade academies– but it won’t keep them there.

Prime Minister John Key is targeting the wrong end of the educational spectrum with plans to roll out a scheme that will see 16 and 17-year-olds given a free pass to certain tertiary courses.

NZSPC (New Zealand Secondary Principals’ Council) chair Graeme Macann said research and commonsense showed students who drop out of school also drop out of tertiary courses.

Resources needed to be put in to dealing with difficult students before the problem becomes too big, Macann said.

“John Key has this all backwards. It is far more expensive to educate a student in any tertiary area than in secondary school. It is simply uneconomical to put money in when it’s essentially too late.”

Macann said if secondary schools had adequate money and resources, they could offer the programmes those students need.

“The recent Taumata Whanonga behaviour summit clearly showed that time and money needed to be invested in primary and secondary education, not in trying to fix them at tertiary level,” he said.

Students with behavioural problems require substantial support from a variety of agencies while at secondary school - rather than the “hodge-podge, fragmented approach” successive governments had taken, Macann said.

“Putting students with these sort of problems into the tertiary setting will not solve those problems
“We need to get away from yesterday’s ideas and move on to tomorrow’s.”

ENDS

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