Auckland Sport Colleges - Youth Village

Auckland Sports College - Youth Village

Our vision is for the Sports College to be at the centre of a number of nested, intersecting services. These services would be available after 3pm and on weekends to youth not enrolled at the Sports College. We are particularly interested in seeing the various government departmental silos work together on campus. None of the services below can be funded through our operating grant, so we are looking for community partners funded through government contracts.

Food, Transport, Tutoring, Laptops

Our students are 'at risk' youth. They have enrolled at Auckland Sports College because they want to succeed academically. We have the funding of a state school but so did their previous school. That funding is not enough to overcome some obvious barriers to achievement.

Food is enormously important. The boys arrive hungry. Although there is a lot to be said for the free school lunch programme, our boys have not had good experiences with their free lunches in the past. Each of our students can go through a loaf of bread a day, and that's just for snacks - sandwiches and toasties. We would like to provide the ingredients for breakfast and lunch. Dinner, for those who stay, would be cooked.

We will be drawing students from Central, South, and West Auckland. In the past Pro-Pare Athlete Management Trust has picked students up from home. This is still the most reliable way of ensuring students get to school.

Our students will have significant gaps in their prior knowledge. We will rely on tutors to help fill those gaps as there is only a limited amount a teacher can do, for example, in level 2 mathematics, for a student who cannot add together two fractions or who cannot 'make x the subject'.

Laptops are expensive. They are also a necessity at senior secondary school.

Employment

Historically, MSD has looked at funding programmes that reduce the expected cost of future unemployment or job seeker benefit payments. The work on social investment headed by Bill English in the last National-led government together with better data collection means that the data exists to make statements like "on average, 16 year olds with these characteristics will cost the state $x in welfare payments, ACC and health costs, police justice, and corrections costs before they turn 60. That amount reduces by $z if the 16 year old gains NCEA Level 2 (or some other outcome or collection of outcomes)"

Auckland Sports College would be very keen to partner with other youth development providers in social investment contracts where a base contract is augmented by performance payments.

Activity Centre/Alternative Education

Traditionally Activity Centres have taken a small number of students at risk of disengaging. These are normally students whose behaviour disrupts their learning or those of others. The aim has been for these students to transition back to their referral school after a couple of terms. There are two activity centres in Auckland (Herne Bay and Papakura). The Otahuhu Activity Centre closed some years ago.

Alternative Education "is an educational intervention provided to young people who are disengaged or alienated from school and who are unlikely to be able to learn productively in school. Alternative Education aims to provide young people with a quality education and support them back into education, training, or work". The quote is from an Education Review Office report that is available here. The report goes on "When they move out of Alternative Education only around one in four return to school. More than half do not go on to further training or employment. By age 20, almost 70 percent are receiving benefits. ...Alternative Education does not provide good outcomes. These young people have significantly worse outcomes than other young people, worse even than very similarly disengaged young people with high needs. They are very unlikely to achieve an education qualification. As adults, they are much more likely to be receiving benefits and be involved in the criminal justice system"

At Auckland Sports College we will offer enrolment to those students for whom we believe we can make a difference. There are a number, perhaps a large number, of students who would benefit greatly from achieving NCEA qualifications but whom we would hesitate to enrol because they require resources, such as a teacher aide or mentor, that we cannot fund from our operating grant.

We would be very supportive of partnering with a community group, such as Pro-Pare Athlete Management Trust, that was funded to work with NEET youth to prepare them for enrolment at Auckland Sports College, and to support them through their time at Auckland Sports College and beyond.

Oranga Tamariki - What happens after Boot Camps

One of the problems with boot camp (and Limited Service Volunteer, LSV) programmes is that strengths developed away from a young person's home environment melt away when the young person returns home. For a number of youth who have responded well to boot camp or the LSV programme, enrolment at Auckland Sports College supported by a suitably funded community provider might embed the strengths developed during boot camp or the LSV.

Power Up

We would be very pleased to open Auckland Sports College to a community group on one or more nights a week for a tutoring and homework help programme that involved adults, young adults, and youth from year 10-14 enrolled at other schools. The programme would pay tutors and teachers. It would have people available to talk with youth and parents about schooling and preparation for a career pathway. There would be food.

The original Power Up programme was Ministry of Education funded and ran from 2015-2019. It was replaced by the Ministry driven Talanoa Ako.

Summer School

The summer school operated by Te Kura, the correspondence school, has been very useful to youth served by Pro-Pare Athlete Management Trust for a number of years now. Auckland Sports College would be a great venue to support summer school enrolment.

The only issue with summer school has been that it is a 'top up' or second chance opportunity. Presumably that reflects Ministry of Education policy. It is not an opportunity for Pacific students to try something new or to get ahead.

Dental Services

The team from Whanau Smiles have delivered dental checks to our Onehunga students (February 2024)

Mental Wealth Services

We see Auckland Sports College as a possible delivery point for a variety of youth services, including suicide prevention to a youth population wider than our student base.

Support in the transition to Tertiary Study

The transition to tertiary study is not easy for our students. There are two main reasons for this - in many cases nobody in their family has gone on to tertiary study, and they do not know anybody on the tertiary campus.

Individual tertiary institutions place their own obstacles in the way of Pacific and Maori student achievement.

Barber

Haircuts seem to be a major preoccupation of our student group, and there is a lot of practice on each other. We have the space to set up a chair.

Sport - NRL Clubs

For many years there has been a brawn drain of talented teenage rugby league players to Australia. The reason for this is obvious - nearly half of the players in the NRL are Maori or Pacific and most of these were born in New Zealand. The Warriors are just one rugby league franchise. They can't take everybody.

Around 90% of those who relocate to Australia to chase the NRL dream do so without a contract with an NRL club.

Our goal in this space is to increase the number of Auckland teenagers who make their NRL debut while reducing the number of teenagers who cross the ditch in the hope of making it in the NRL.

We do this by increasing the visibility of players to NRL clubs (a key task of our sports co-ordinator), so that players accept that if they haven't been scouted yet it is most likely because they still have things to work on. At the same time we recognise that a major reason for moving is that players have no job prospects or career path keeping them in New Zealand, so we place players on a career path through achievement in education.