Demographics

The future of our society is dependent on the health, wellbeing and educational achievement of the young people of today. It is therefore important that society promotes and enables young people to be healthy, happy, well educated and productively employed. The study of the effects of early economic inactivity on young people has identified a link between early inactivity with a high probability of inactivity at a later stage (Maloney, 2004). Maloney initially defined economic inactivity as "…occurring when an individual is not enrolled in education or training, and not working in the labour market." Consequences of this economic inactivity or non-participation are negative both for the young person and wider society (Flemming, Kainuku-Walsh, Denny, Watson 2004).

In his address to the inaugural Council Meeting on 27th October 2004, Mayor Garry Moore said. "I'd like to give some new guarantees. To our young people I'd like to guarantee that:

In this city they will get to certain levels of literacy and numeracy. If you can read and count then you've got a very good start in life. This, however, cannot be undertaken by our schools on their own. There are squads of retired people out there who could really spend some of their time teaching one of our future ratepayers how to read or count.

There is a great deal of anecdotal evidence about the abilities, or lack of, of our youth. For Christchurch we need to find out what the problems are. Young people with these problems will probably fall into one or more of three categories - never been taught or learnt, not enough teaching to enable skill retention, or unable to be taught through mental or physical or emotional conditions. The education system can identify and perhaps deal with those in its care, but we all know that schools never have enough staff, funding or time to support all students' individual needs. Other Government agencies appear to be stretched or just not coping. The youth that don't fit into those categories, and those who do, need extra support to reach the literacy and numeracy benchmarks that society demands to enable them to be a positive contributor to our great city."