Photo: TiBine/ Pixabay
You have heard of University Entrance, but is it time for a 'trades entrance' qualification for teenagers heading for apprenticeships and industry training?
A report by an influential researcher for market-led think tank, the New Zealand Initiative, Dr Michael Johnston, says it is.
Johnston told RNZ that combined with other changes to school and post-school courses and funding, a new qualification could help double the number of school-leavers who opted for industry training and apprenticeships.
Those changes included entirely fees-free apprenticeships, lower wages for apprentices that increased as their experience grew, and allowing some secondary schools to specialise as trade training schools.
Johnston chaired the ministerial advisory group which led to sweeping changes to the primary school maths and English curriculums and is a member of the Curriculum Coherence Group overseeing changes to the entire school curriuculum.
His report "Trade Routes: Charting New Pathways from Secondary School to Industry Training" said only about six percent of school-leavers went straight to workplace-based training compared with about half of the school-leaver cohort in Germany.
"The situation represents a waste of human capital and opportunity. Industry training can lead to many high-demand vocations, yet about 40 percent of New Zealand's school leavers do not engage in any form of tertiary education in the year after leaving school. While most subsequently find employment, about 11 percent of 16-19-year-olds are not in employment, education or training (NEET) - nearly double the proportion in workplace-based learning," the report said.
Education Ministry school-leaver data showed 30 percent of 2022's school-leavers were enrolled with universities in 2023, 11 percent with polytechnics, seven percent with private institutions and seven percent were in industry training.
The data showed 44 percent of school-leavers were not enrolled in tertiary education.
Johnston said the average age of apprentices was 28, which suggested people discovered relatively late that they wanted a career in the trades.
He told RNZ part of the problem was a lack of esteem for trade training.
"At root, the problem is cultural. We just esteem university education much more highly than apprenticeship training for no really good reason. Trades people can earn great money and there's no reason why an arts degree, for example, should be seen as better than an electrical qualification or a plumbing qualification," he said.
Johnston said school students needed a clearer sense of their options.
"Our schools are very geared towards university and that's understandable when you consider that the New Zealand curriculum comprises largely, not entirely, but largely subjects that are derived from university disciplines. Up until Year 10, that's probably pretty defensible because these are the subjects that give young people knowledge of the world, give them the skills of thinking and writing and numeracy and the like. But from Year 11 on, I think we need greater specialisation," he said.
"While we have just a kind of unitary track secondary system, the vocational path is always going to be marginalised... Timetabling and other resourcing constraints mean they can't do everything well, so if schools could specialise, you would have some schools that were from Year 11 on perhaps geared towards university and others geared towards apprenticeships. That would raise the prominence of the trade training track and give students a clear option."
The report said fees-free funding could be redirected to help cover the cost of secondary schools providing courses that included workplace-based learning and enrolment in tertiary courses.
It also called for combining Trades Academies (which allow school students to study at polytechnics), Gateway (which gives school students work experience) and Vocational Pathways (groups of standards recognised as leading to particular industries) as the basis for a curriculum for specialist industry training-track high schools.
Johnston said other recommendations included means-testing the year of fees-free study for university students and diverting the savings to provide, perhaps temporarily, fees-free trades training, and providing a graduated wage for apprentices rather than the current setting of no less than 80 percent of the minimum wage.
It has been suggested before (sort of)...
The NCEA was billed as a flexible qualification that would help students specialise in subjects that interested them such as the trades.
In 2013 the government of the day added Vocational Pathways - colour-coding certain standards to show which industries they were associated with and providing awards once students achieved enough of those credits. For example, a student might leave school with NCEA level 2 and Vocational Pathways awards in primary industries and manufacturing and technology.
Ministry of Education figures showed 11 percent of 2023's school-leavers had at least one Vocational Pathway award.
In 2022 the ministry considered the concept of a "Vocational Entrance Award" and in 2023 it tested prototypes of the award in six schools.
This week the NZ Intiative report recommended establishing "a National Certificate of Industry Training at Level 3... based on configurations of unit standards recognised by industry bodies as certifying readiness to undertake industry training in specific trades".
"A well-designed qualification signalling preparation for industry training would help change the widespread perception of university as the default post-school destination. It would provide a clear goal for school students interested in industry training, and support schools to develop programmes for those students," the report said.
Johnston said he hoped the time was right for the report's recommendations because young people were increasingly questioning the value of a university education.
"I think we we're really starting to rethink that secondary-tertiary nexus and we're seeing more and more schools off their own bat set up really good programmes where they have collaborations with local businesses and maybe with a tertiary institution. The trouble is that at the moment it's all piece meal. It tends to depend on a committed principal or senior teacher organising it and that's not really a basis for a national system. I think we do need that system-level response," he said.
He said NCEA had not elevated the standing of trades training because it was not clear what the qualification was for, whereas an apprenticeship-entry qualification would proivde a clear signal.
He said the Vocational Pathways could be retained under his proposal and become a component of the trade-training school-leaver qualification.
Dr Michael Johnston. Photo: New Zealand Initiative
Tomorrow's Schools are yesterday's idea
The report was critical of the way schools were organised, saying it would get in the way of creating trade-specialist schools.
"Existing school governance arrangements do not facilitate the level of inter-school cooperation and collaboration necessary to enable specialisation across schools. Under the Tomorrows Schools reforms of 1989, every school is an independent Crown entity with its own Board.. t is difficult to see how the system-wide degree of cooperation required to deliver equitable access to a dual pathway system could be achieved under these arrangements."
The report said the New Zealand Initiative was preparing another, separate report on the subject that would call for a total overhaul of the Tomorrows Schools system.
"At the core of the proposed reorganisation is a new tier of governance and provision of educational services comprising communities of schools. The proposed structure has both similarities and differences to the 'hubs' proposed by the Tomorrows Schools Independent Taskforce that reported in 2018 to then-Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins. For present purposes the nomenclature of 'hubs' is retained.
"Hubs, rather than individual schools, would become the locus of accountability to government. They would be organised such that each encompasses a broad spectrum of socioeconomic circumstances. They would also be organised such that secondary schools were, to the greatest extent possible, grouped with the primary schools that feed into them. In this way, the schools comprising each hub would have strong incentives to work together. Funding would be provisioned by closing the regional offices of the Ministry of Education and greatly paring back its central office."
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