Background to the LANE Project

In a 2005 release to schools on Working and Growing together, the New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark wrote “Christchurch is a vibrant exciting city with a lot going for it, thanks in no small part to the hard work of people like you. Our community forums are about helping communities achieve their goals through direct communication with central government.”

Also included in the above document: Government Community Forum 3 on Education states “We're working hard to raise student achievement and education standards. We have: Invested heavily in reading, writing and maths. We'll spend close to $43 million this year on targeted reading and writing programmes and another $12 million on targeted maths initiatives”.

However, despite the above initiatives, this funding is targeted towards a narrow group of students and many others will not receive any benefit from this extra funding.

In his address to the inaugural Council Meeting on 27th October 2004, Mayor Garry Moore said “Let me turn now to the matter of a Sustainable Community. This is something we do well. This is something which doesn't happen by chance. We all have to work on it. Every person who watches a sporting event, goes to the library, attends a festival, walks in the hills with a friend, visits a friend, takes their kids to a park or for a swim all add to this being a sustainable community.

I'd like to give the young and the old some new guarantees.

To our young people I'd like to guarantee that:

If you look at our prisons and at those who are not in high paid jobs often the issue is that these people cannot read and count properly. I'd like to give another guarantee to our kids 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.

I consider that an early task for our city to adopt is to accept the sort of target which has been set by the Mayor's Taskforce for Jobs that one of our society goals must be that everybody in our city under 25 is doing something. This means that all of our young people will either be in work, or, in training. This target on its own will stimulate our economy. As employers complain that they cannot get good labour as a city we must ensure that our young people are getting the jobs which are already there.”

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.

The LANE Project was started in 2005 with funding from the Wayne Francis Charitable Trust.

LANE Project

The project was to set up scope the problem of youth literacy and numeracy competency, and investigate strategies to enable the City guarantee to be fulfilled.

It would start with no preconceived parameters and encompass as many potential types of youth as possible; from reluctant learners to truants to the more disadvantaged categories, as outlined above.

Questions to be looked at could include;

• What levels of competency does society require our youth to achieve?
• What are the problems with respect to the levels of competency in literacy and numeracy in Christchurch youth?
• What best practice / research exist as support programmes around NZ and the world to address these problems?
• What commercial products and support networks exist in Christchurch?
• What are possible effective ways to deal to these problems for Christchurch?
• Is there one possible solution or is it complex enough that it requires alternative programmes for different situations?
• What resources can Christchurch tap into to enable a pilot programme to proceed?
• What community resources can be utilised both in plant and human resources?
• How can we coordinate different agencies to work together?

Scoping on several wide ranging fields including an extensive literature search on literacy and numeracy review was carried out. During 2005 the research showed the importance of removing barriers to learning before pedagogical solutions to diagnoses were implemented.(1). Medical barriers to learning was one area where dramatic change could be affected, but it was necessary to see what the size of the potential problem was. A pilot scheme at Linwood College was devised which included a Health and Wellbeing Stocktake of students.

Linwood College was deemed to have the expertise, support and infrastructure to mount such a pilot.

This resulted in a recommendation to the Wayne Francis Charitable Trust that LANE provide a complete medical assessment of all the year 9 and year 10 students, examining ears, eyes, nose and throat, teeth. This will give factual evidence to back what is currently being observed. Treatment can then be offered to correct any problems found. This needs to be standardized and performed by medical experts under medical ethics conditions to ensure the robust nature of the research. The rest of this report focuses on that project.