School Leavers' Toolkit (NZ0014)

Commitment 3: School Leavers’ Toolkit
Objective:
To develop a Schools Leavers’ Toolkit, comprising a suite of tools, resources
and curriculum supports making it much simpler for schools to:
• Integrate civics, financial literacy and workplace competencies into their
local curriculum
• Understand and respond to learners’ levels of civic and financial literacy,
and work readiness
• Effectively teach civics, financial literacy and workplace competencies.
Civics education, and an understanding of how government and the
democratic process works, is an important element in developing young
people who are confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners.
The Toolkit will also provide a vehicle for increasing young people’s access to
other Plan commitments, such as the information products being developed
by the Office of the Clerk, and the Youth Parliament programme, delivered
by the Ministry of Youth Development and the Office of the Speaker of the
New Zealand House of Representatives.
Ambition:
Every young person can access the civic and financial literacy, and workplace
skills, they need to succeed, before they leave schooling.
Status quo:
The National Curriculum already provides for civics and financial literacy
and capabilities and workplace competencies. This includes high-level
commitments to citizenship and readying young people for participation in
the community.
In practice, schools and kura are variable in the extent to which they deliver
the breadth of civics, financial literacy and workplace competencies.
Research indicates that New Zealand teachers are confident teaching topics
in the social sciences related to cultural identities, equality, human rights
and the environment, but only moderately confident teaching aspects of
civics such as legal, political and constitutional topics.2
In addition, there is
an inconsistent view across New Zealand schools about what ‘civic and
citizenship education’ ought to involve and what means are effective in
developing students’ competencies.3 Approach:
We will work directly with young people, to co-design a schools
engagement plan that ensures the voices of young people, their parents,
whānau/family and the wider school community are at the forefront of our
Toolkit development process.
This approach to the Toolkit is designed to evolve as we develop an
increasingly sophisticated understanding of the resources, tools and
supports currently available, and the barriers which currently impede
schools and kura from offering a full range of civics, financial literacy and
workplace competencies. This initial exploratory phase will inform the
detailed approach we take to achieving the Toolkit’s objective.
Lead agency: Ministry of Education
Timeline: June 2018 – June 2020
Commitment 3: The School Leavers’ Toolkit – providing opportunities for
young people to access civics education and financial literacy education and
key workplace competencies
OGP Values Public Participation
Verifiable and measurable milestones to fulfil
the commitment
Start date End date
Stocktake of existing Toolkit resources complete June 2018 September
2018
Ministers consider Ministry of Education analysis
of opportunities to support expanded access to
Toolkit opportunities
September
2018
December
2018
Exploratory co-design phase concludes and is used
to inform detailed implementation support plan
June 2018 February
2019
Pilot implementation reporting and evaluation
complete
February
2019
November
2019

3. School Leavers’ Toolkit [25]

Objective: To develop a Schools Leavers’ Toolkit, comprising a suite of tools, resources and curriculum supports making it much simpler for schools to:

• Integrate civics, financial literacy and workplace competencies into their local curriculum;
• Understand and respond to learners’ levels of civic and financial literacy, and work readiness;
• Effectively teach civics, financial literacy and workplace competencies.

Milestones:

1. “Stocktake of existing Toolkit resources complete”;
2. “Ministers consider Ministry of Education analysis of opportunities to support expanded access to Toolkit opportunities”;
3. “Exploratory co-design phase concludes and is used to inform detailed implementation support plan”;
4. “Pilot implementation reporting and evaluation complete”.

Start Date: June 2018

End Date: November 2019

Context and Objectives

The objective of this commitment is to create a School Leavers’ Toolkit to help students learn civics, financial literacy and workplace skills before leaving compulsory schooling, and which will be a key resource for their teachers. It considers the issue that many young people leave school unprepared to participate actively in the community, which is seen as a factor in low youth enrolment and voting at general and local elections. [26] Research commissioned by the Office of the Clerk of the House of Representatives in 2018 revealed that 76 percent of the 1,200 surveyed agree that schoolchildren should be taught about Parliament and the democratic process as part of the curriculum. [27] The IRM Progress Report on the 2016-2018 action plan recommended introducing citizenship education to increase democratic participation. [28] Civics education was a top submission for this action plan. [29]

While civics, financial literacy and workplace skills fall within NZ’s social studies curriculum, many schools and kura (schools where lessons are generally taught in the Māori language) do not include them in their local curriculum. Academic research reveals that teachers are only moderately confident teaching aspects of civics such as legal, political and constitutional topics and that schools vary in their understanding of what should be taught. [30] A civics and citizenship summit, run by civil society in November 2018, considered this issue in depth. [31] This School Leavers’ Toolkit where students “learn how our political system operates through civics education at school” was a 2017 election pledge by the NZ Labour Party, [32] and received initial funding of $1.7m for "design work” in the May 2018 budget.

The Toolkit employs a flexible approach that will allow teachers to create tailored resources that students will be able access directly. The commitment meets OGP’s access to information and civic participation values by creating a public resource and releasing it on student and school-facing websites and co-designing its implementation with young people to ensure the community is at the forefront. The Ministry of Education (the Ministry) will stock-take existing resources, report to Ministers, and, with youth, co-design, test and evaluate a pilot Toolkit implementation which will include resources in English and Te Reo (Māori language). [33]

The action plan’s milestones are specific enough for objective verification. If fully implemented as designed, teachers and students will have access to civics education resources, and implementation planning will be completed and tested. The commitment’s potential impact will be minor as the toolkit is only a stock-take and this stage of the work is a pilot. Experts whom the IRM researcher interviewed supported this work and offered advice on the next steps. A youth development professional sought more sustained civics learning to engage youth and rigorous exploration of New Zealand’s bicultural issues, citing Austria’s strong citizenship education programme and Canada’s complementary work with charities. [34] This was endorsed by academics, with one noting that the commitment as written has no practical component which “gives students the values and skills that support a democracy,” [35] though the toolkit website notes that it will be updated with details on what schools can use to implement the program at a later date to provide a functional aspect to the toolkits. [36] Training teachers to teach civics and engaging experts to design resources for specific ages and ethnicities would enable more lasting outcomes. [37] An expert proposed that a Professional Development Hub lead this work so teachers can talk about, share and reassemble their work, and affirmed the use of the curriculum website Te Kete Ipurangi [38] to show how practitioners are teaching civics education, thereby inspiring other teachers to teach it. [39]

Further funding was allocated in the 2019 Budget. [40] Government advises that Phase Two of this work includes training for teachers to use the new civics education resources and guidelines for schools on how integrate Toolkit learning into their local curricula and that the Ministry will also implement an evaluation programme to measure the impact of Toolkit tools and resources. [41]

Next steps

If this commitment is carried forward to the next action plan or if there are improvements to the implementation of this commitment, given Budget 2019’s allocation of further funding, the IRM researcher recommends that:

• the Ministry also publishes the Ministry’s School Leavers’ Toolkit Phase Timeline for further specificity;
• the Ministry releases a Request for Interest from teachers in creating the Toolkit;
• a new activity is added to require and drive schools and kura to learn about and apply the School Leavers’ Toolkit; and
• trainee and practising teachers are taught how to teach civics education.

The IRM researcher recommends that a commitment to measure the success of schools’ and kura use of the Schools Leavers’ Toolkit for effective civics education is fed into the development process for the next action plan.

3. School Leavers’ Toolkit

Substantial:

A School Leavers’ Toolkit (SLT) to prepare young people leaving school after completing compulsory education was developed collaboratively, released, and promoted widely on social media. ^[17] This website for 16–24 year olds provides advice on civics, wellbeing, financial literacy, and workplace capability in English and te reo Māori. ^[18] A parallel SLT teacher website ^[19] includes related activities and the civics guide in English ^[20] and te reo Māori. ^[21] Teacher trainings were held across NZ in 2020. The Ministry of Education (MOE) states that, since the September 2019 launch, 78,000 users have accessed the student website with nearly 200,000 page views and a weekly average traffic of 2,000 to 2,500 users. ^[22]

Evaluation of the SLT pilot will now be completed as part of MOE’s evaluation of the SLT, including the forthcoming off-the-shelf packages developed for SLT teachers. ^[23] Work developing digital badges for students to display the capabilities they have acquired to employers, their communities, and tertiary institutions requires new funding. MOE’s statement that the SLT is now funded as business as usual is welcome news for teachers as neither the Minister nor MOE have released updates about the SLT since its launch. ^[24] However, SLT is promoted by schools and charities on the internet. ^[25]

Despite extensive commitment by MOE officials, students, and teachers to create the SLT, academics are concerned that the civics and citizenship guidance is only optional ^[26] and is “being left to chance because it is not compulsory.” ^[27] There are also concerns that material on the rights in the NZ Bill of Rights Act, Human Rights Act, Official Information Act, and Privacy Act are not part of the compulsory curriculum. [28] Social studies teachers say the SLT cannot be accessed on the Social Sciences Online ^[29] pages of NZ Curriculum. ^[30] They want it included in new Social Science curriculum workshops; compulsory for junior secondary students; optional for senior students; and promoted at least annually by teachers and careers advisers. Removing “School Leaver” from its name would broaden its value and usage at secondary schools and earlier. ^[31] Social studies educators reported that MOE’s collaborative work with specialists and students positively influenced the update of the social science curriculum. ^[32]

In 2020, Colmar Brunton found that 78% of respondents (up three percentage points from 2019) supported teaching school children about Parliament and democratic processes as part of school curriculum; this suggests this education is still needed. ^[33] Nearly half of the voters who failed to enrol in 2020 were aged 18–24 despite an increase in this age-group voting at the 2020 General Election. ^[34] While these results cannot be linked to SLT and civics resources, it does indicate a continued need to raise young people’s understanding of and preparedness for their civic responsibilities.