KEY POINTS:
The number of 15-year-olds leaving school early has halved - but a youth mentoring trust says schools are still consigning difficult youngsters to the streets.
The Government policy to keep young people at school has cut the number of early leaving exemptions for 15-year-olds from a peak of 4191 in 2005 to just 1934 last year, dramatically reversing a rising trend.
Under-15-year-olds cannot get exemptions at all and are legally required to be at school.
But Bill Grayson of the Auckland youth mentoring trust Brothers in Arms says schools are still kicking out difficult children, sometimes as young as 9 and 10, and other schools are refusing to take them.
"If you plot the enrolments in a school you find they peak at March 31 and thereafter they fall off, (a) at the end of the Polynesian cultural festival, and (b) at the end of the rugby season," he said.
"The schools get funded on the number of bums on seats on March 31.
"They keep them as long as they can to keep them in the cultural festival and the footy teams, then ... they just kick them out, and thereafter they are consigned to the streets."
Former Penrose High School principal Ann Dunphy, who chairs the Youth Mentoring Trust, an umbrella group for 20 mentoring schemes, said the problem was still serious, despite the Government's policy, because of widening gaps between rich and poor areas.
"What you have now is that the high-decile schools tend to be larger and have less space than the lower-decile schools, so for some of them to get rid of a difficult kid is perfectly sensible because they can replace them with a better kid," she said.
She pointed to practices to get around the Government policy, such as the "Kiwi suspension" - quietly advising parents to take their child out of a school rather than suffer the indignity of a formal suspension, thus dodging the official statistics.
A 15-year-old Titirangi boy, Dan Simpson, has been suspended twice from Green Bay High School and can't get back in even though he would like to stay at school "till I'm at least 17".
"I would like to be able to get NCEA Level 2 so I have some sort of qualification to be able to get a job," he said.
Green Bay principal Morag Hutchinson said a meeting would be called soon to decide on a suitable placement in alternative education.
City of Manukau Education Trust chief Bernadine Vester said any principal who excluded a student under the leaving age of 16 was required by law to ask five other schools to accept the student. But no school was required to accept such a student.
Once they turn 16, they are no longer entitled to alternative education and may need to take out student loans to attend tertiary training.
"It's a city issue actually when there is no place for young people to go when they have been kicked out of school," she said. "The real issue is there is no concerted effort in New Zealand for youth programmes. There isn't even a youth mentoring strategy."
Former Rotorua Lakes High School principal Frank Solomon, who runs a youth transition service for Manukau school-leavers, said briefing documents for the service estimated there were 3500 youngsters aged 15 to 17 in Manukau who were outside any employment, education or training.
Nationally, the Ministry of Social Development put the number in 2003 at between 26,200 and 39,500.
Former Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope said last July the ministry planned to monitor all under-16-year-olds exempted from school to make sure they stayed in "useful activity". The ministry's national manager of youth gangs, Carl Crafar, said this week that monitoring "hasn't happened yet".
The manager of the Ministry of Education's central-south region, Murray Williams, said the ministry started a $2 million-a-year "student engagement initiative" in 2001 to keep students in schools, and had reduced the high school suspension rate from 1.75 per cent in 2000 to 1.4 per cent in 2006.
