Questions over youth scheme's effectiveness

Questions are being asked about the effectiveness of the Youth Guarantee Scheme, with figures revealing that in its first year of operation, over a third of students dropped out.

The training scheme for 16 and 17-year-olds was introduced in 2010.

However in that first year, nearly $10 million was wasted by students who didn't finish their studies.

Labour MP Grant Robertson says at some polytechs, such as in Northland and Nelson, only half the students completed the course.

He believes polytechs go in with the best of intentions.

"But this kind of training is difficult, it requires a lot of focus and we need to know whether or not all of the polytechs have given the focus it needs."

Mr Robertson wonders if the polytechs see this as a way of getting additional resources.

He says you'll never get a 100 percent pass rate, but there needs to be a thorough review of what's going wrong.

"May be that students aren't enrolling in the right kinds of courses, that there aren't the right kinds of support mechanisms around the students. Given that the institutions get $500 for each student to provide what's called pastoral care, I'd hope that they'd be significantly better."

But Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce says Mr Robertson is jumping the gun.

"He's way too early and I can inform you that there's some considerably more robust data after two years which will be released in the next couple of weeks."

He says he's read the figures wrong and the 2011 ones, due out soon, will show a marked improvement.

"We are seeing better results once we include all the outcomes from 2010 which aren't included in the data that Mr Robertson has and he's been warned about that. The 2011 data is also seeing good progress. So I'm very happy with it to date."

Mr Joyce says those early figures include people who started in semester two of 2010, but hadn't got their results.

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