Currently in greater Christchurch:

• 30% of school leavers, that’s between 5,500 and 6,000 leavers each year, have not achieved level 2 NCEA
• One in five school leavers has engaged in no further formal education or training by the time they are 20. Some of these will have gone overseas and others will have entered sustainable jobs. But many will be not in employment, education or training and at serious risk of long-term unemployment. We call this the NEET trap.
• Included in this 20% of leavers are:
  • 35% of those who left school with no formal qualification, but only 8% of those who left with NCEA level 3;
  • 43% of leavers whose sole ethnicity was Māori and 39% of leavers whose sole ethnicity was Pasifika;
  • 29% of those who went to decile 1–4 secondary schools, but only 17% of those who went to decile 7+ schools.
• Clearly Māori and Pasifika young people are disproportionally represented in this at-risk groups; as a corollary, they are under-represented in tertiary education. There are some big disparities:
  • In 2009, Māori were five times as likely as Asians to leave school with no qualifications
  • And Pasifika twice as likely
  • Asians were twice as likely as Māori to leave with level 2+ and 50% more likely than Pasifika
• The prospects for people with no qualifications in greater Christchurch have become worse after the earthquakes as there are fewer low-skill jobs.
• 2011 saw high secondary school enrolments in Christchurch but, probably as a result of the earthquakes, more young people leaving through the year – in the first half of 2011, the number of leavers was 28% up on 2010.
• Between September 2010 and September 2011
  • The number of young people in Canterbury has fallen by 7%
  • The number in employment has dropped by 22%
  • The number not in the labour force is up 17%
  • The number in education has been stable
  • More in the school system balancing the fall off in tertiary enrolments