northland chamber

ADVOCATE COLUMN 3rd WEEK AUGUST 2011
On average New Zealand youth are more disadvantaged across a number of performance indicators than many other OECD countries and this disadvantage is strongly concentrated in Maori and Pacific Islanders. With 45% on New Zealand’s total unemployed being youth, this has significant impact on our future well-being. While our youth perform (comparatively) well in education, this does not follow through on average after leaving school. The New Zealand Institute has released a discussion document “More ladders, fewer snakes: Two proposals to reduce youth disadvantage”. It makes interesting reading identified that accelerated roll-out of e-learning to low decile schools and improving the school-to-work transition could materially reduce youth unemployment and resulting social issues.

The paper looked at both the advantages of increasing student engagement by rolling out e-learning to low decile schools and at improving the transition from school to work as two forms of intervention that have a positive outcome on reducing this disadvantage. Obviously with the roll out of Ultrafast Broadband and the Rural Broadband Initiative there will be opportunities to improve outcomes through e-learning. There will also be a number of challenges to be met to ensure that we do not create a digital divide across our various communities.

An equally critical point is how we can assist youth in the transition from school to work. Youth often have difficulty in finding their way into permanent. In part this is due to a disconnect between workforce needs and education capacity that can lead to a mismatch between supply and demand. The paper gave an example of a program undertaken by the Otorohanga District which has lead to a zero youth unemployment rate over the last 5 years as a way that this situation can be addressed if the community are willing to commit to making a change.

There are real economic benefits if we get this right. If we achieve the OCED average this could result in annual cash savings greater than annual investment. As well as this there a number of other economic and social benefits to the community and also opportunity to attract further inward investment. Using the Otorohanga case study as an example, businesses relocated there due to the support the program gave to employers and the resource of young trained workers. There is not room to go into this paper in detail due to limited space but the document is available at http://www.nzinstitute.org and certainly worth the time to read.