Election 2023: What the dire state of education means for the next generation

Those leaving high school are increasingly less educated, creating the prospect of a generation more likely to struggle to make ends meet - which carries potentially severe social consequences. Derek Cheng explores the latest Ministry of Education data, the grim future it paints, and what is being proposed as the election looms.

Every measure of education achievement for students leaving high school is going downhill.

And if you’re Māori, Pacific, or went to a low-decile school, the chasm between you and your peers is widening further.

Of the 64,000 or so students who left school in 2022, only half attained NCEA 3 or above. A quarter of them left without NCEA 2 - considered the minimum level needed to pursue work or further study - while 15 per cent failed to even reach NCEA 1.

These proportions are at their worst levels for several years, while the retention rate hasn’t been so poor since 2009; more than one in five school leavers - almost 14,000 teenagers - left school before they turned 17.

Fewer school leavers are enrolling in tertiary education, and as high inflation and interest rates bite into household budgets, more and more teens are working rather than schooling.

“Students are coming through with gaps in their learning, and that’s not going to go away in the short term,” says Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood, a former secondary school teacher turned university lecturer.

“And it’s just going to travel with us - this whole generation of children coming through.”

What that means for this generation of new workers is impossible to say with any certainty.

But the danger is that certain groups will be more likely to have lower incomes - if they find regular work - or be in limited employment, with all the stress and instability and downstream struggles that follow.

“If that’s what happens then the implications are really wide-reaching, not just in terms of our economy and productivity, but also in terms of broader social issues,” Hood says.

“Unless we’re making sure that we’re supporting all students in their learning journey - and also simultaneously addressing the really shocking mental health and wellbeing issues - it’s not a particularly pretty picture for the future.

“And it’s going to impact across the board.”

Educator Alwyn Poole, co-founder of Innovative Education Consultants, offers this stark assessment: “The long-term consequences for the young people, their families, and New Zealand as a whole will be catastrophic.”

It’s certainly not a future that’s set in stone, but the challenges are many within the school system itself, from the curriculum to the quality of teaching and classroom sizes to the resourcing of schools.

Then there’s the ongoing impact of Covid, which removed students from classrooms, and the cost-of-living crisis; household deprivation has a huge impact on the raising and educating of young ones in those homes.

The complex and multi-faceted nature of the challenge means there are no simple fixes, even though the same groups have been identified in multiple reports as falling further behind: Māori, Pacific, solo parents, the disabled.

But as political parties vie for votes this October, alarm bells are ringing over what might become of the next generation.

Progress report: Downhill in every measure

School leaver data is considered a robust picture of what is happening in education because it includes all students who leave school, including those who don’t sit NCEA or university entrance assessments.

The general trend in the latest data, released by Education Counts, is that more and more students leave school with fewer or lower qualifications. The biggest decreases are at NCEA 2 or above.

Performance continues to fall further behind for Māori, Pacific, and those in decile 1 or 2 schools, and while the gap between females and males is shrinking, it persists.

Ministry of Education data showing the proportion of school leavers, including Māori, with at least NCEA 1

The proportion of those leaving school without any qualifications has been rising.

Last year 15.2 per cent of all school leavers fell short of NCEA 1 - a more than 50 per cent increase since 2017, when the proportion was 10 per cent.

Only 4.9 per cent of those in deciles 9 and 10 left school without NCEA 1, a fraction of the 26 per cent in decile 1 or 2 schools.

This rate was still lower than for Māori across all deciles - 27 per cent, a 50 per cent increase since 2016. For Pacific school leavers, 19.9 per cent left school in 2022 without NCEA 1, a 60 per cent rise since 2016.

Also rising is the proportion of school leavers without NCEA 1 literacy and numeracy, which last year was roughly one in eight (12.7 per cent). For Māori school leavers it was more than one in five (22.9 per cent), while for Pacific leavers it was 16.3 per cent, a 38 per cent increase from 2021.

Ministry of Education data showing the proportion of school leavers, including Māori, with at least NCEA 2

About 6000 students left school in 2022 with only NCEA 1. Combined with those without any NCEA, they make up the 25 per cent of school leavers falling short of NCEA 2.

For Māori school leavers this rate was 41.4 per cent in 2022 (a 38 per cent increase from 2017) while for Pacific leavers it was 31.2 per cent (a 47 per cent increase from 2020).

NCEA 2 is considered a benchmark for further education and employment opportunities. Those falling short of this are twice as likely to be in NEET (not in education, employment or training) as their NCEA 2 or 3 peers.

Ministry of Education data showing the proportion of school leavers, including Māori, with at least NCEA 3

As for NCEA 3 or above, almost half (48.2 per cent) of all school leavers in 2022 fell short. For Māori school leavers it was two out of three, and for Pacific it was also well over half (56.7 per cent).

The gender difference is wider at this level (56 per cent for females achieving at least NCEA 3 versus 47.6 per cent for males) but is shrinking, a pattern that is also apparent across all school leavers’ NCEA levels.

Those who left decile 9 or 10 schools in 2022 were twice as likely - an increasingly wider gap - as those in decile 1 and 2 schools to have NCEA 3 or above (74.1 versus 36.6 per cent).

There was also a drop in the proportion of school leavers who had University Entrance, down from 41.3 per cent in 2021 to 38 per cent last year. The rate for Māori school leavers was less than half that (17.8 per cent), while for Pacific school leavers it was roughly half (20.7 per cent).

Ministry of Education data showing where school leavers in 2020 ended up in 2021

Tens of thousands of high school drop-outs

Of all school leavers in 2020, 28.1 per cent had little or no work or education the following year. This fate was far more likely among those who had no qualifications (71.3 per cent) or only NCEA 1 (48.7 per cent).

More 2022 school leavers with NCEA 2 or 3 are ending up in work rather than study, while fewer are enrolling in tertiary education. Comparing school leavers from 2015 to 2019, the proportion moving straight into tertiary education declined from 64 per cent to 59.8 per cent.

Among the 2022 school leavers were 7000 teenagers who’d been in Year 10, 9000 who left from Year 11, and more than 14,000 from Year 12.

More than one in five school leavers (21.5 per cent, or 13,882 students) were under the age of 17, the worst student retention rate since 2009. And more than one in seven under 17 had been “continuously absent” in 2022 (having been out of school for 20 consecutive days), the highest proportion since 2012.

The worsening trend in retention in 2022 was across all deciles compared to 2021, with the biggest gaps for schools in deciles 1 to 6, and for Māori; 36.1 per cent of Māori were under 17 when they left school in 2022. The rate for Pacific school leavers (22.6 vs 21.5 per cent) was much closer to the average.

“Signs of continued inequity are apparent, with leavers identifying as Māori, Pacific, male, or from lower decile schools being less likely to leave school with NCEA Level 2 or above,” says Education Counts.

Ministry of Education data showing the proportion of those staying in school til at least age 17, compared to Māori leavers

The latest data is a continuation of declining education levels, which have been highlighted in studies by local non-profit The Education Hub and think-tank The New Zealand Initiative.

Then there’s the 2020 Unicef report, which found that a third of our 15-year-olds don’t have basic proficiency in literacy and maths. And last year, in a small trial of the new NCEA 1 literacy and numeracy standards, only one in three students passed the writing component, and only two out of three passed the reading and numeracy tests.

“International studies indicate that almost a quarter of New Zealand learners in Year 5 are not on track to become fully literate, and almost half of learners in Years 5 and 9 are not on track to become numerate,” says government paper Preparing All Young People For Satisfying and Rewarding Working Lives.

“Employers care about these skills, reporting that poor numeracy and literacy skills have a negative impact on their business.”

Commenting on the school leaver data, Education Minister Jan Tinetti pointed to government programmes, including Youth Guarantee, that enabled young people to re-engage with education or work.

Free apprenticeships, which have been taken up by more than 60,000 people since it was introduced in 2020, were also an opportunity for young people to re-engage with training.

“The Ministry of Education is also focused on lifting the performance of the education system for Māori students,” she said, including lifting the “cultural capability of teachers”.

“I am committed to ensuring this work continues and that our young people are supported to fulfil their learning potential.”

Never view education in a vacuum

Tinetti pointed to a number of factors, cited by Education Counts, contributing to the decline in achievement among school leavers.

The obvious one is Covid-19, which took students out of classrooms and disrupted staff rosters as teachers isolated when they got sick. It is a contributing factor to the current truancy crisis, though this has been brewing since 2015. Only 59.5 per cent of students in term 1 this year were regularly attending school, defined as more than 90 per cent of the term.

An Education Review Office report found that only 19 per cent of principals in 2023 believed their school had recovered from Covid-19 disruptions, almost half of the 37 per cent in 2021.

Dr Nina Hood says Covid-related disruptions have contributed to similar declines in academic achievement in schools around the world, including countries comparable to New Zealand such as Australia, Canada, the US and the UK.

“All the research tells us is that the longer a child is absent from school, on average, the worst the academic performance,” she says.

“I think what we’re also seeing - and this is particularly affecting lower socioeconomic areas - is that a growing number of adolescents are having to work jobs to support their families alongside engaging in their school learning.”

The rapid rise in inflation and cost-of-living pressures, as well as disruption from severe weather events, were also factors.

“The larger decline in attainment for Māori leavers suggests they have been affected more by disruption of learning due to Covid-19, severe weather events and increases to the cost of living since 2021,” Education Counts says.

A stronger labour market was another factor. Stats NZ data shows the employment rate for those aged 15 to 19 rose from 39.2 per cent in 2019 to 47.5 per cent in 2022.

Hood says you should never view education in a vacuum, but there are also issues with the school system itself.

Many of these were investigated in the Herald’s Making the Grade series, including school leadership, teacher quality, and students experiencing a different standard of learning across different schools, and sometimes even within the same school.

One of the major challenges is how to standardise the system so every school leaver had the essentials - reading, writing, maths and science - but in a way where schools could tailor lessons to the particular needs of their students.

Both Labour and National have found common ground in wanting to put greater emphasis on essential subjects in the national curriculum, though how much flexibility teachers will have remains to be seen.

Focusing on primary and intermediate schools, National wants:

• a requirement for students to be taught an hour a day each in reading, writing and maths.
• minimum requirements (in a new curriculum) for what schools must teach every year in reading, writing, maths and science.
• students tested at least twice a year from Year 3 to Year 8.
• to make reading, writing, maths and science the focus for teachers’ professional development, with support from an online resource that includes lesson plans.
• a ban on cellphones in schools.

Labour has announced it would:

• amend the law to ensure schools - primary, intermediate and secondary - are teaching maths, reading and writing the same way from 2026.
• provide “guidance, professional development, and materials” to help teachers implement the new rules.
• introduce compulsory financial literacy lessons in schools from 2025.

There appears to be more common ground between Labour and National than between each of them and their natural governing partners.

Act wants a government education account for every child with $250,000 in it, which parents can use to apply for their child to attend any registered school, public or private.

And the Greens want more teachers per student - which the secondary teachers’ union says would make one of the biggest differences - and “school hubs with health and social services on-site, including mental health support”.

Intersection of education, employment, housing, poverty, crime

The Greens are also pushing for a universal basic income, which would help address poor education outcomes because they are intertwined with socio-economic deprivation.

This cuts both ways: the poorer your household, the more likely you are to have lower education, and the poorer your education, the lower your earning potential and job prospects, and the more likely you’ll live in a poorer household.

OECD report Education At A Glance 2022 showed that, in 2020, workers with poor high school qualifications earned 12 per cent less than those with upper secondary (at least NCEA 2) education, and 49 per cent less than those with tertiary education.

A 2018 research paper, Post-school labour-market outcomes of school-based NCEA, found:

• More than 40 per cent of those with no school qualifications - which was about 10,000 teenagers in 2022 - never engage in employment or further education or training.
• The average earnings of this cohort after seven years - $18,000 - are 40 per cent lower than those with NCEA 1.
• Those with NCEA 1 are 10 per cent less likely to be employed than those with NCEA 2, with earnings about 15 per cent lower.

Looking at a range of data, government paper Preparing All Young People ranks the factors that can lead to many years of limited employment (long periods unemployed, under-employed, or in low-wage or insecure work); the second biggest factor, after being a teen mother, was leaving school with no qualifications or only NCEA 1.

“School leavers with no qualifications or NCEA 1 only were four times more likely than someone who left school with NCEA 2 to spend half their years in limited employment between ages 16 and 24,” says the paper, a collaboration between four ministries including Education, Social Development, Business Innovation and Employment, and Women.

The paper estimates that 22 per cent of the half a million young people aged between 16 and 24 are likely to spend more than half of those years in limited employment. Overrepresented in the group are Māori (35 per cent) and Pacific (15 per cent).

Most of them live in urban areas including parts of Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington, but also in rural areas with limited access to education and jobs, such as parts of Northland and Tairāwhiti.

Looking at people born in 1994, the paper found that 8 per cent were in limited employment every year between ages 16 to 24. A quarter of this group were Māori, while 14 per cent were Pacific, 5 per cent were young mothers, and 2 per cent were disabled.

A common thread in multiple reports

Exactly the same groups - Māori, Pacific, solo parents, the disabled - are “overrepresented in groups of people that experience low well-being in multiple areas”, according to Treasury’s 2022 wellbeing report, Te Tai Waiora.

Treasury highlighted a crescendo of issues for younger Kiwis: an increasing number not attending school; growing numbers of children without basic literacy and numeracy; “rapidly increasing levels of psychological distress” among teenagers and young adults; and, with more and more people in their 30s and 40s without their own home, “rental housing among the least affordable in the OECD”.

Treasury Secretary Caralee McLiesh warned: “For the first time in recent history, there is a possibility that the next generation won’t be better off.”

Another report - A Fair Chance For All, by the Productivity Commission - identified the same four groups as far more likely to be among the one in five New Zealanders stuck in a cycle of persistent disadvantage, which traps households below an illusory even-playing field.

It’s not as if the Government doesn’t have these groups in its sights. Minister Tinetti has announced $10 million for better data collection so certain tertiary students - including Māori, Pacific, and the disabled - can be better supported before they become at risk of dropping out.

The Productivity Commission identified a number of systemic obstacles that also feature in the Preparing All Young People paper, including:

• fragmented and short-term plans and budgets rather than long-term approaches.
• narrowly focused government silos instead of whole-of-system engagement.
• discrimination that feeds inequities across education, health, housing, justice, welfare and employment.

The statistical analysis in Preparing All Young People shows several social issues, beyond education, that are linked to limited employment. These include involvement in the justice system or a mental health service by 18; being the subject of an Oranga Tamariki notice as a child; living in a socio-economically disadvantaged neighbourhood or a beneficiary household.

“Young people who experience long-term limited employment are more likely to face issues with housing and homelessness, and to engage in risky behaviours such as drug use and criminal activity,” the paper says.

No single factor sets a young person on a path to limited employment, but there is a clear link to “the early home environment and experience of socio-economic disadvantage”.

“In turn, early life experiences are strongly associated with education and employment outcomes in adolescence and early adulthood, such as leaving school with low or no qualifications. Educational attainment is not a silver bullet, but it is protective.”

Other measures can also be protective.

“Wider government and community efforts to promote inclusion and address poverty, family violence, housing security, mental health and addiction have a critical role to play in enabling all young people to reach their potential,” the paper says.

Many struggling families have early involvement with a range of government agencies, which might show they’re reaching households with high needs.

But the paper adds: “It also highlights the underperformance of core government services and the failure of existing education, welfare and employment system responses to deliver equitable outcomes for current and future generations of young people.”

This sentiment is echoed in a 2022 paper on child offending: A Breakdown Across The Whole System: “Child welfare and child offending proceedings were full of missed opportunities to make a long-term difference, whether because of lack of resources, poor coordination across services, chronic delays in responding to need, poorly implemented plans, lack of culturally-centred responses and poor engagement with families who had survived often intergenerational systemic failure and harm.”

One of the authors, chief science advisor on justice issues Professor Ian Lambie, told the Herald recently that locally-led, whanau-centred early intervention with cross-agency support would have the biggest impact. While such successful programmes exist - some are highlighted in the Productivity Commission’s report - they are the exception rather than the rule.

Entrenching the status quo

The incoming government, whoever that will be, faces an enormous challenge with the generation coming through high school. Without change, there is a danger of entrenching the declining education standards of the status quo.

Preparing All Young People recommends a “life-course approach”. This includes a greater focus on early cognitive and emotional development via parenting courses, for example, and instead of support in isolation, cross-agency work in partnership with communities and whanau along similar lines to what Lambie and the Productivity Commission are recommending.

The paper also has suggestions in the employment space and within schools, such as more “earn while they learn” opportunities for school students, and an “inclusive education” (targeting Māori, Pacific and disabled students) to keep students engaged.

Not all schools are inclusive places.

“Māori and Pacific children and young people are more likely to experience bullying, marginalisation and discrimination in our schools. These ākonga need a culturally competent teaching workforce that reflects them, and access to learning that reflects their experiences,” the paper says.

“Around a fifth of parents and whānau of disabled children report being discouraged from enrolling their child at a local school, with a quarter being asked to keep their child home for specific activities.”

Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood says there are complex and multiple factors that contribute to the quality of education. Photo / Supplied

This broader point is echoed by Dr Nina Hood.

“For many of our young people, school’s never been a place that’s been a particularly positive experience. In a number of cases, the system has completely failed them. They’ve never been taught to read or write effectively. They’ve not been taught to do maths effectively,” she says.

“So if they’ve been failed by the school system, why should they go?”

She would ideally like to see schools reflect what is known about child development, including beyond academic learning.

“How can schools become real hubs of the community? How can schools fulfill their academic learning focus, but also add far more value? Then we need to think more creatively about what actually goes on in a school, and the range of people we need within a school to be able to achieve that.”

Schools are not so resource-abundant, however.

And even if the next government wanted them to be, the fiscal circumstances are tight. It couldn’t just inject massive amounts of new spending without finding the money from somewhere, and potentially putting more pressure on inflation and interest rates. Increasing cost-of-living pressures could push more teenagers out of school and into work.

This also means political parties’ plans to ease the cost of living - as well as addressing deprivation in general - are part of their packages to improve education, including the continuing slide for Māori, Pacific, solo parents, and the disabled.

The status quo will do little to shift the dial, Productivity Commission chair Dr Ganesh Nana told the Herald recently. His report includes recommendations - echoed by other reports - on how to level the playing field so that “a fair chance for all” is not an illusion.

The government will formally respond to his report - but not until after the election.

Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery and is a former deputy political editor.