Centrist: The kids are alright – but the system still isn’t

First, the good news

Despite showing a sharp drop in serious youth offending and improvements across several frontline indicators, the report appears to have attracted little, if any, attention from RNZ or the wider New Zealand mainstream media.

Read straight, the latest annual report on the Child and Youth Strategy shows that, across several frontline indicators, New Zealand children and young people are doing better.

Youth offending is down. School attendance is up for a third straight year. Substantiated abuse and neglect findings have fallen. Food insecurity has eased from last year.

Start with the clearest good news. The youth offending rate fell to about 140 per 10,000 children and young people aged 10 to 17 in 2024/25. That was down from about 163 per 10,000 a year earlier, a drop of roughly 14 per cent, and down from about 182 per 10,000 in 2019/20, a fall of about 23 per cent.

School attendance also improved. About 59 per cent of students aged 6 to 16 attended school more than 90 per cent of the term, up from about 54 per cent a year earlier. That is an increase of roughly 10 per cent, though it remains below the 65 per cent seen in 2019/20.

There are other encouraging signs, too. The number of children and young people with at least one substantiated finding of abuse in the previous 12 months fell to about 11,400, down from about 12,900 a year earlier, a drop of roughly 12 per cent.

Compared with 14,800 in 2019/20, that is down about 23 per cent. Food insecurity also eased, falling to about 21 per cent from roughly 25 per cent the year before, a drop of around 14 per cent.

One survey measure in the report found that about four in five children aged 0 to 14 lived with a parent who said they were coping well or very well with the day-to-day demands of raising children.

More children are growing up in benefit-receiving households

But then you hit the other half of the report, and the mood changes fast. There were 230,700 children in

households receiving a main benefit in 2024/25, up from nearly 222,300 the previous year and almost 197,600 in 2019/20.

The report notes that children in benefit-receiving households are approximately six times more likely to experience material hardship than children in working households. Material hardship itself sat at over 14 per cent, or about 169,300 children, with the year-on-year change not statistically significant, but the three-year trend heading upwards.

Housing remains one of the ugliest numbers in the report. Among children in low-income households, nearly 57 per cent were living in households spending more than 30 per cent of disposable income on housing. That is worse than the more than 49 per cent recorded in 2019/20. Potentially avoidable hospitalisations also remain stubbornly high at 75.5 per 1,000, compared with just over 58 in 2019/20.

Immunisation at 24 months remains at about 78 per cent, far below the roughly 91 per cent recorded in 2019. Note: Centrist submits that whether this news about lower vaccination rates is good, bad, or neutral depends on your perspective.

Progress is real, but not evenly shared

Material hardship remains far higher for some groups, hitting just over 25 per cent for Māori children, 31 per cent for Pacific children, nearly 30 per cent for disabled children, and 27.5 per cent for children in disabled households.

Those figures are well above the national average, but they point more clearly to concentrated disadvantage than to identity itself. Read in context, the report suggests the deeper drivers are poverty, benefit dependence, housing strain and wider economic pressure, which are not falling evenly across the population.

At the same time, Māori school leavers who learnt mainly in te reo Māori achieved NCEA Level 2 at a rate of nearly 83 per cent, above the all-school-leaver rate of about 79 per cent. That does not prove a single cause, but it does show the picture is more mixed than the usual deficit framing allows. It may also reflect the family support, cultural grounding, and educational commitment often associated with that pathway.

The Centrist is an online news platform that strives to provide a balance to the public debate - where this article was sourced.