Todd McClay: New education initiative will benefit our kids

On Friday I was delighted to announce a significant new education initiative for Rotorua schools alongside Education Minister Hekia Parata. This major initiative is aimed at improving the educational success of Rotorua's children and young people.

The Rotorua education initiative is the first of its kind in a suite of government Social Sector Trials which focus on improving social outcomes for young people in New Zealand. Specific to our city, it will be focussed on children and young people aged 0-18 years and be led by a contracted local community organisation or individual employed by the Government.

The initiative focuses on five important outcomes - getting more children into early learning; ensuring more children have strong literacy and numeracy skills; increasing the number of young people leaving secondary schools with NCEA Level 2; and making it much easier for them to enter into further education, training and jobs. It will also aim to reduce risky behaviour including alcohol and drug use, sexual behaviour and offending.

Importantly, it will allow us to take the reins and focus the resources of the Rotorua community on ensuring better educational success of our children.

Education success requires everyone in a young person's community to be actively involved. The responsibility must therefore be shared by early childhood educators, schools, families, whanau and communities.

This initiative is a unique opportunity to explore how a community-led approach can work to enhance children's learning. The programme will allow our communities to work with local schools and early childhood services to deal with the issues that affect their children's learning.

In 2011 I campaigned on putting Rotorua first and part of this is improving educational achievement. Involving the wider community in decision-making processes regarding specific local education issues is extremely important - after all lifting student achievement benefits us all. As a community we need to be more accountable for the future success of our young people.

To assist in achieving this, the Government has committed significant resources to enable communities to target specific local challenges in ways that are appropriate for each community. Like the Children's Team underway in Rotorua, professionals from the education, health, justice and social services sectors will work together to implement the trials in partnership with the local community.

Launched in 2011, the first Social Sector Trials brought communities together to find local answers, to their local problems and issues. These original trials have shown that they are a useful way to make the most of community resources and rally the community behind getting better results for young people.

Results from these first trials have had unanimous community feedback that the new approach is working. The atmosphere in the trial towns has lifted, there's increased pride in their young people, and the approaches to working together on local solutions for local issues has created a catalyst for other positive changes.

A further 10 trials are now being set up in other communities around New Zealand starting in July.

The success of the Rotorua education initiative will rely on everyone putting children and young people, and their learning and education, first and working together to make it happen. I look forward to working with parents, the community and local schools.

If you'd like to find out more about the Rotorua education initiative, or if you need assistance with any other issue, please contact my Rotorua office on (07) 348 5871 or email me directly at rotorua.mp@national.org.nz.