Michael Johnston: NZ Initiative author on the report into the lack of apprenticeships, need for better pathways

There’s a belief better pathways to industry and trades training are needed. 

A report from the New Zealand Initiative has found just 6% of 16-to-19 year-olds participate in workplace learning, while 11% are unemployed. 

It states schools are geared toward university education, even though only about a third enrol in degrees. 

Report author Michael Johnston says apprenticeship options need to be more visible to young people. 

He told Mike Hosking part of the problem is apprenticeship training is viewed as being for the kids who don’t cope with the academic path. 

Johnston says we need to rearrange the system so that young people, regardless of their background and propensities, look at apprenticeship training as a viable option. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Can you report this morning that suggests we need noblehaul

(00:02):
of the apprenticeship system. Nearly twice as many school leaders
fall into unemployment compete to those in the workplace learning.
I mean, how on earth did this happen? New Zealand
Initiative Education Research fellow Michael Johnston's Well, it's Michael, very
good morning to you.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Good morning Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
So eleven percent sixteen to nineteen year olds not in
training or anything, six percent go to work based training.
How does that work? Why do we allow that to happen?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Well, it's not so much. What we allow to happen
is what we incentivize and what we put in front
of young people. The fact is that university education has
much higher status in New Zealand than apprenticeship training. That
can trusts really strongly with countries like Germany, which has
half of its young people leaving school going straight into apprenticeships.

(00:46):
We need to do much more at various levels of
the system to bring together apprenticeship training into a coherent
system so that young people are aware of its existence
and also see it as a a high status option.

Speaker 1 (01:01):
See when I was at school, and it's a long
time ago, the Dunce class, or what we called the
Dunce class. They were the kids who were identified as
they weren't going to university. They traped off to the
local factory to look at factory work. Is that the
sort of thing we need to go back to. In
other words, give them options and open doors for them
to see what's out there.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well well, seeing apprenticeship training as a being for the
kids who don't cope for the academic part. As part
of the problem. We need to rearrange the system so
that young people, regardless of their background and propensities, look
at apprenticeship training as a viable option. It shouldn't just

(01:40):
be for the kids who are judged not to be
good at a kind of normal schoolwork.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
And so how does that work. Does the school need
to change the rattitude or does education need to change
their ratitude, or does industry need to get into schools
and go here's what engineering is, and here are all
the availabilities to you.

Speaker 2 (01:57):
Yeah, kind of all of the above. So you know,
one thing that we can do is bring together existing
schemes for secondary school into a coherent system. And I'm
talking about the provisions under Youth Guarantee So there's great
stuff there, like trade academies that allows young people to

(02:18):
have a dual enrollment at school and at a tertiary institution,
the gateway funding and the vocational pathways that give kind
of assessment options for pathways into apprenticeships. So that's kind
of school level stuff. And then we have to look
at the way apprentices are paid to incentivize businesses to

(02:41):
take more of them on. So I'm talking about a
graduated apprenticeship wage so that they get less at first
and more later. Maybe a bonding system to encourage employers
to take more.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
See what you're telling me, Michaels. I mean, with all
due respect to you, it is fairly obvious. Do we
want to do this? Is that part of the problem
we haven't thought about it, or we have thought about
it but can't be bothered, or I mean, none of
this seems hard.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
Well, it requires joined up thinking from secondary to tertiary
and for the training institutions to the businesses to the schools.
So it's a matter of coordinating bringing the pieces together,
and I guess that is politically difficult. It requires moving
some funding around probably and in times as we have

(03:32):
at the moment where the government has no spare money.
They have to do it in a budget neutral way.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Yeah. Interesting, all right, Michael, appreciate your time. Michael Johnson.
The report by the New Zealand Initiative. He's an Education
Research Fellow. For more from the Mic Asking Breakfast, listen
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