The Destinations and Tracking Pilot - Executive Summary

Background and objectives

A key objective of the current government is to improve the transition from school to employment or further education, and to attempt to ensure that all young people under the age of 19 are engaged in education, training or employment (Tertiary Education Strategy 2002/07, May 2002). Currently, there is an absence of information about what happens to these young people.

The Destinations and Tracking Pilot, recently trialled among Year 10 to 13 students from eight Christchurch secondary schools and four Porirua secondary schools, was designed to develop and test a system to begin addressing this situation.

The "destinations" information that this system collected is considered to have a number of valuable outputs. It will:

• Inform the development of government policy.
• Inform decisions within schools about enhancing career education programmes for these young people.
• Provide information to agencies that work with these young people once they have left school.
• In both cases, help identify possible tools and approaches that may be used with these young people.
• For "at-risk" students, or those with no definite plans or unclear direction, help identify these students and ensure they receive appropriate career information, advice and guidance.

In response to the absence of information about school leavers' destinations described above, with the support of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs, Career Services developed and submitted a proposal to the Mayors Taskforce in March 2001, outlining an approach for the Destinations and Tracking Pilot (Destinations and Tracking Proposal, March 2001, Career Services). As well as outlining the approach, the proposal also sought support and funding for the pilot. Ministerial support was subsequently obtained, and Skill New Zealand (now part of the Tertiary Education Commission) committed as a funding partner with Career Services (see also Section 1.3.2).

Following subsequent discussion and refinement of the proposal, the pilot was launched by the Associate Minister of Education (Tertiary Education) Hon Steve Maharey on 24 October 2001, and project managed and funded by Career Services in partnership with Skill NZ.

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