Vocational Pathways – A Step in the Right Direction but not the Complete Map!

The Youth Guarantees Initiative within the Ministry of Education arena is welcomed, says leading youth organisation, Youthline. Overall this is moving in a useful direction, recognising that there needs to be different pathways to meet the needs of young people.  However there is a philosophical question about the role of education which is bigger than this one issue but does relate to the drivers behind this initiative which is to address how mainstream schooling is failing too many of our young people.

Youthline National Spokesperson Stephen Bell says “A question worth asking is: Is education’s primary focus to prepare a young person for employment or to teach them how to think, analyse and contribute to society? Hopefully it does both but this initiative could move the balance too far down the employment path. The focus on equipping young people for work needs to be there but what happens if the work is not there?”

One of the criticisms of NCEA is that it is too meandering without any clear direction, but possibly this approach is too directional (it will depend on the implementation) and pigeonholes young people into  a specific set of skills too early on. It could also be argued that developmentally some 15, 16 and 17 year olds aren’t really ready to choose a vocational path, particularly if that path is at the cost of some basic transferrable skills.   

It is claimed that vocational pathways will make NCEA a bit easier to interpret for parents, employers and young people i.e. everyone will be able to see what credits the young person has and what they are useful for, hopefully also giving young people more work relevant skills.  This could be useful if communicated well to parents. In some cases parents think that as long as their young person is at school then they are learning and doing well, meanwhile the school feels like the young person is wasting time because all they do is show up. The young person gets pressure from the school to leave but is told by parents they must stay.  This creates a pretty impossible situation for the young person.

Bell says “Hopefully a pathway approach will give young people a sense of achievement in terms of seeing them-selves build skills for something in particular. This could be fantastic if combined with work experience and volunteering to give them a chance to try it out and most importantly a chance to change if it’s not right for them”.

“As with the recent transition report (More Ladders Fewer Snakes), there is a hope this will improve engagement in school and the workforce.  It seems to come from a background assumption that young people disengage because they don’t see relevance in their education or get bored. Obviously, this is not the full picture for all and needs to be combined with approaches made by health and social development ministries to address the wider picture of youth disengagement”.

A place this is especially needed is where mainstream schooling is not working for a young person and they are being excluded. The Alternative Education pathway is conspicuous by its absence. In my view Alternative Education is the best structural intervention in the last 20 years. It is a specialty service, which unfortunately is often seen as a babysitting service. Alternative Education provides a community response and gives a very real alternative so that teenagers are not lost to the system when the system has failed them.

Anne Tolley in her speech at the Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand, Annual Symposium said: “For too long, teenagers who don’t fit within the system have been lost to education. We are ensuring that the system is more flexible, so that every youngster is given the opportunity to succeed”.

For further comment contact Youthline National Spokesperson and Youthline Auckland’s CEO on

Cell: 027 271 8151

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