Life without qualifications

Don’t leave your child in any doubt about what school is for, and why its important for them to succeed.

Whatever their ambitions in life, children have no choice but to attend school between the ages of six and 16.

Not succeeding is both a waste of their time, and means they have a high chance of living a penniless, hand-to-mouth existence.

Just how shockingly bad it is for children’s futures to leave school with no qualification is shown by data I stumbled over when researching unemployment last week.

I’d been struggling to understand why it often takes people so long to find a job when the unemployment rate is just 5.7 per cent.

I was having a Donald Trump moment, finding it hard to believe the official jobless rate. I started asking questions. The questions took me to the ‘‘underutilisation’’ rate, which

GOLDEN RULES

Learning is a child’s job Parents are responsible for it happening

Education is the foundation for a wealthy life doesn’t make headlines like the unemployment rate.

That’s a shame, because an unemployment rate of 5.7 per cent would seem to suggest we live in a workers’ paradise, which clearly we don’t.

The underutilisation rate includes not only the officially unemployed, but also part-time workers who want more hours, people wanting work who aren’t available to start tomorrow, and people not looking for work as actively as the Government believes they should be.

And, in June last year, it was 12.8 per cent.

Who are the people counted in this tragic statistic?

The easy answer is ordinary people, but there’s a heck of a lot more of people from certain groups being ‘‘underutilised’’ by employers.

Overall, New Zealand doesn’t rate too badly.

At 12.8 per cent, New Zealand’s underutilisation rate in June last year was lower than average of 14.1 percent in all of the OECD club of rich countries against which we like to compare ourselves.

Australia’s was 21.8 per cent. The UK’s was 11.2 per cent.

But some of us are living with a labour market that is far more

‘‘An unemployment rate of 5.7 per cent would seem to suggest we live in a workers' paradise.’’

like one of those hot European countries that gets called a basketcase, has a national debt that makes its finance minister cry, and which people only want to go to on holiday, not to live.

The underutilisation rate for Maori was 22.8 per cent.

That’s about the same as Portugal, which has a headline unemployment rate that’s double New Zealand’s.

For Pacific Island people the underutilisation rate was 18.8 per cent. That’s the same as Turkey’s.

For people with no qualifications, the underutilisation rate was 30.4 per cent.

That’s higher even than Spain and Greece.

This is why families need to take their children’s school years seriously, and talk to their children about why school matters.

Children need to know this stuff. They thirst for knowledge. It’s their future. Education is the foundation for that future.

I completely agree that people can succeed in life without passing school cert, but why make life harder than it needs to be?