Anahera Pickering: School curriculum needs lessons in life skills

Imagine if everyone was taught how to change a flat tyre, something as small as that could save a lot of money and stress. Photo / Getty images

FRESH PERSPECTIVE

How do you get a job? "You need a CV." How do you make a CV? "You create a document that provides your education and work history with your attributes and skills shown as well."

What if I've never had a job? "We can get you to do volunteering to gain that experience." My whanau don't have a reliable car to get me there, is a conversation I hear too often.

This is just one example of how young people fall through the gap.

"Wait until you get into the real world," said our parents. "School is the easy part, wait until you get a job and pay bills, then you'll know what hard work looks like" played on repeat.

Unless you were in a home where your parents had enough time to teach you how to prepare for this "real world" you probably left school without any life skills, like me.

School curriculum gives you a variety of options to explore different pathways from cooking, media, culture, arts and your favourites English and math. The options you can go through make it seem that school is preparing you the best it can for the "real world" and support you deciding which career you may want to pursue in your adulthood.

Wouldn't school be much more effective if you were taught basic life skills and tools to enable you to live an independent adulthood life? Imagine if everyone was taught how to change their flat tyre, imagine how something as small as that could save someone the major bucks to have someone do it for them.

Imagine if we were taught how to budget, manage our time effectively, getting an IRD number, the little things that would enable us to be able to survive.

Reality of adulthood comes with bills, tax, insurance, mortgage/rent and more bills. Now this doesn't exclude any race or gender, this is adulthood, so every single person who steps into this chapter of their life should feel prepared for their next steps but actually, how can you be ready when it wasn't compulsory to learn this in the education system even though it's compulsory in life.

• Anahera Pickering is community outreach co-ordinator at Whangārei Youth Space. She can be contacted at Anahera@youthspace.co.nz