Young people and transitions policies in New Zealand.

• Author: Higgins, Jane

Abstract

This paper argues that the effectiveness, or otherwise, of policies concerned with youth transitions between education and employment is related to the adequacy of the concepts of youth transition that inform them. An overview of transitions policies in New Zealand is offered with a view to identifying the concepts of transition that have driven and continue to drive them. The "extended linear" model this overview identifies as being at the heart of much transitions policy is then considered in the light of a growing body of international research, the findings of which have led researchers to reconsider traditional understandings of transition, mindful of the complex ways in which young people manage the processes and relationships involved. The paper concludes that an understanding of young New Zealanders' experiences of transition is an essential starting point for the development of effective policy.

INTRODUCTION

School-leavers in New Zealand at the beginning of the 21st century face a labour market characterised by high levels of uncertainty. Not the least uncertain aspect of this concerns the relationship between post-compulsory education and the job market. Where once relatively uncomplicated transitions were established between, for example, apprenticeship training and employment in skilled trades work, or between university education and professional employment, in recent years the multiplication of post-compulsory education courses, the fragmentation of the labour market and the attenuation of the link between education/training and the workplace have combined to make transitions between education and employment a complex process.

Currently we know too little about the nature of these transitions in New Zealand. Reporting on the "Seminar on Children's Policy" held in association with the launch of the Government's "Agenda for Children", Smithies and Bidrose (2000:53) comment that there is, in general, a lack of good New Zealand data about many of the transitions that children and young people experience, and that this is "particularly the case for transitions from adolescence to adulthood. For example, there is little information on the move from education to employment, or on the combination of the two among young adults."

Aspects of transition have, nevertheless, been explored in a range of projects in recent times. Several longitudinal studies have considered (or may in future consider) transition in the lives of their young participants: these include the Competent Children study of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (Wylie et al. 1999), the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (Silva and Stanton 1996) and the Christchurch Health and Development Study (Fergusson and Woodward 2000, Maani 2000). Other research programmes have looked at educational inequality within the compulsory sector and touched on issues of transition: the Christchurch School Leavers Study (Lauder and Hughes 1990), the Access and Opportunity in Education Survey (Nash 1993), the Progress at School Project (Nash and Harker 1998) and the Smithfield Project (Lauder and Hughes 1999).

While these projects have not had transition as a particular focus, they have identified some crucial influences on the transition process: socio-economic class clearly has a significant bearing on post-compulsory destinations and ethnicity may also be significant (Coxon et al. 2002, Ministry of Education Group Maori 2002). But statistics about higher rates of university participation by pupils of high socio-economic status, or the under-representation of Maori and Pacific youth in tertiary education, do not explain the nature of the transition process for these groups. For this, more qualitative work with young people is needed. Nash's recent account of interviews with Pacific students about their aspirations is a good example, and the recent survey of school leavers by the NZCER (Boyd et al. 2001) is a welcome development in transitions research.

The present paper is a contribution to the developing discussion in New Zealand about education-employment transitions and about policy in relation to them. In particular, it argues that how we conceptualise transition is crucially important in crafting effective youth policy, and that such policy should recognise the complexities young people face as they manage not one but a multiplicity of transitions involving education, employment, family and peer relationships, housing and so forth. The first two sections of the paper offer an overview of transitions policies in New Zealand with a view to identifying the concepts of transition that have driven and continue to drive them. The discussion then considers these concepts in the light of a growing range of international research, the findings of which have led researchers to reconsider traditional understandings of transition, mindful of the complex ways in which young people manage the processes and relationships involved.

TRANSITION IN THE POST-WAR YEARS

Lauder (1992:3) observes that, during the post-war years, New Zealand operated "an elite [education] system in which large numbers of students were `cooled out' into the workforce without qualifications largely through the mechanisms of the School Certificate exam." In this system, a class elite moved on to university and thence, generally, to professional employment. At the same time, full employment created job opportunities for the unqualified young that enabled, and encouraged, them to move into the labour market early.

This process was highly gendered. As late as 1981 only 2.8% of women had a university qualification compared with (only) 6% of men--the elite to which Lauder refers. Among those who did not go to university some gained other tertiary qualifications: in 1981 13.9% of women and 16.9% of men had a non-university tertiary qualification (Horsfield 1988:361). For many young men, but few young women, this qualification was an apprenticeship.

The apprenticeship system that drew young men into the skilled trades largely excluded young women. Indeed, until 1972 there were legal barriers to young women taking up apprenticeships, and not until 1983 were they actively encouraged to do so. Even then, not many took this path (Murray 2001). In the early 1980s women took on between 8% and 10% of new contracts each year, three quarters of which were in hairdressing (Horsfield 1988:368). Many young women moved instead into female-dominated occupations, particularly clerical work, nursing and teaching (Horsfield 1988, Horsfield and Evans 1988, NACEW 1990, Davies and Jackson 1993).

One of the reasons these paths into employment were so successful in channelling young people into gender-segregated occupations was that they provided ports of entry into the labour market that were sheltered from competition from more experienced workers (Higgins 2001). In the case of apprenticeships, the system was set up formally to offer young people (men) places in firms where they could train on-the-job. In so doing, they gained access not only to trade skills but also to extended internal labour markets; that is, to networks of employers and fellow workers through whom access to employment opportunities could be negotiated.

Meanwhile, for young women the path into clerical, nursing and teaching work was sheltered also--not formally (except for nursing students, who undertook the equivalent of an apprenticeship), but for the most part informally in so far as the labour market participation of women, particularly in full-time work, was bi-modal: women left the workforce in their early to mid-twenties and many did not return (if they returned at all) until their late thirties or forties, and then often only to part-time work (Davies and Jackson 1993).

Finally, the transition infrastructure in the post-war years was also characterised by assumptions about the place of Maori and (later) Pacific youth in the labour market. The Native Schools, to which many Maori children went as late as the 1950s, had a curriculum that emphasised agriculture, manual and vocational training for boys and domestic training for girls. There was little emphasis on skilled manual work, professional qualifications or academic education (Rice 1992). This meshed with policy encouraging migration to the cities by Maori and (later) Pacific peoples to feed the demands of post-war industrialisation for unskilled labour (Hill and Brosnan 1984, Brosnan 1987, Horsfield and Evans 1988, Nicol 1991).

Clearly, assumptions about transition that informed policy in the post-war environment had in mind some fairly straightforward processes: that an elite would carry on to university and that the remainder would move into (gendered, and to an extent, ethnically segregated) employment straight from school.

This is not to say that these assumptions were not disputed, resisted and challenged, as Nolan's (2000) account of New Zealand women's experience of education and employment makes clear. Nevertheless, in the post-war years, important mechanisms within the education/training system and the labour market fostered segmentation among young people as pupils, and subsequently as workers.

This post-war transition experience illustrates the way transition policies can act as powerful sorting mechanisms. This happens because the transition infrastructure these policies generate (that is, the configuration of relationships they foster between educational, labour market and social welfare institutions) establishes particular avenues of access to educational, training and employment opportunities. Such infrastructures may be more or less formal in different contexts. In the case of Germany, for example (Hahn 1998, Blossfeld and Stockmann 1999, Heinz 2000), and Japan (Rosenbaum and Kariya 1989, Brinton and Kariya 1998), paths through education to employment have been strongly institutionalised over a long period, while in the...