Neville Owen ran his own plastics engineering business for more than 30 years. He didn't hire young people. They'd let him down once too often. "I thought juniors were virtually unemployable," he says, his 75 years showing in a clipped personal manner and certain world-weariness.

These days Neville is pushing a different barrow. He has someone else's interests at heart. Ken, 14, is the fourth adolescent he's taken on through the Plan-It Youth mentoring project being run on the NSW Central Coast. Neville knows that if Ken is to have a chance at life, someone's got to be persuaded to employ him. "I have had to change my attitude completely with this scheme," he says.

Ken's not an academic kid. He's been labelled plenty of things during his school career - ADHD, for one, troublesome too. Truanting, expulsion, suspension are all in his repertoire. His mum, who's out of work, left school at the end of Year 10, and he wants to do the same. He likes the breaks at school, and that's about it.

Neville was shocked to discover Ken didn't know his three times tables. Higher School Certificate is out of his league. He's done a few vocational courses - automotive, retail and now video, through TAFE, but he'll need a Year 10 certificate before anyone will give him a second look for the motor mechanics apprenticeship he'd like. He knows that, too. "If I end up finishing school I end up with the certificates to say I have stuck it out and achieved something," he says. He's trying hard to believe in himself. That much is obvious.

Neville has got him started on ordering his resume. "He's not really someone who tells me what to do, but he's giving advice and most of the time it is pretty good advice," says Ken. Neville is less optimistic, it has to be said. "I'm using a bit of Dale Carnegie on him, trying to tell him that it is very desirable for him to change his attitudes ... but I don't know how you can do it in the time. He has so much to pick up and really get up to speed."

Plan-It Youth is an attempt by a few schools on the Central Coast, in conjunction with Dusseldorp Skills Forum, TAFE and the Central Coast Active Retirees and Mentors, to build a safety net for kids for whom staying on at school is probably not a real option but for whom the consequences of an unplanned or early exit are so frequently dire. Plan-It Youth is what you have when you don't have a school curriculum that caters for all young people, not just the academically inclined. The mentors, trained at TAFE, are mostly retirees such as Neville or Mollie Watson, 58, who helped Nicole, 16, into a hairdressing apprenticeship earlier this year. "Her parents were very grateful and yet I didn't really feel it was anything that wonderful," says Mollie. Nicole sent out 25 resumes and was offered two apprenticeships. Without Mollie, she says, she wouldn't have known where to start.

Terry McDonnell, 62, did much the same for John, 16, who "just wanted to get started". He'd more or less checked out of school in his head in Year 9, he says. Terry had left school at the end of Year 9 himself, but those days were different. His parents ran a poultry farm. There was always work around. He ended up as a leading hand with a construction firm. Of John, he says, "He's quiet, but I thought to myself, I used to be like that." He built on John's work experience at a local interior fitting company. "I kept on at him to ask if there was part-time work, weekend work, and I said, 'Now put it on them to see if you can get an apprenticeship'." John's on his way now, but they still meet up around the traps. He's proud of his charge, you can tell. "Our deal was if you don't get an apprenticeship, you go back to school, and he agreed with that ... you have got to find a bit where you and him meet, in the right spot. We aren't parents, we aren't teachers."

Mollie Watson (above) on Nicole: "Her parents were very grateful and yet I didn't feel it was anything that wonderful [that I had done for her]."

Mentoring is one way to go. The results up at Gosford look promising – of 114 students at risk of leaving school at the end of Year 10 since the program started (albeit slowly) in 1998, all are accounted for bar two, more than half are still at school and only two are unemployed. The estimated cost of the project is $1180 a student – but that needs to be put alongside the $74,000 overall average lifetime cost to the country of each early school-leaver.

A different kind of safety net puts employed transition brokers into schools, mobiles at the ready, to be hand-holders. On the northern fringes of Melbourne, in the local authority area of Whittlesea, eight schools have pooled funds to hire three young women, all with youth and employment backgrounds, at a cost of $120,000 a year, to identify, guide and track students who want to leave school early. After one year, the results are in (Dusseldorp Skills Forum is doing the analysis): a decline of about a third in early school leavers from 1999 to 2000, an apparent rise in participation in training, a decline in known jobseekers and a marked decline in "unknown destinations".

"It's a pragmatic outcome for schools," says Peter Mildenhall, principal of one the participating schools, Mill Park Secondary College. "Each kid is worth money to us, and we lose a client [when they leave early]. I also regard it as a failure on our part to someone we had a commitment to."

Megan Fox, one of the transition brokers, explains why she thinks the hand-holding works: "It's simplifying things for them, and it's also the fact that someone cares."

The brokers let students make up their own minds about their future but if, after all the talk, they still decide to leave school, they then take them physically to job interviews, to TAFEs, to various programs on offer such as Jobs Pathway Program, they introduce them to people who'll help them, then follow up with them at least twice (often more) in the next six months. A community team of about 30 people – including careers teachers, job network people, local council youth workers and so on – supports the work of the brokers.

"For me, it's really quite simple," says Bill Low, district superintendent for education on the NSW Central Coast. "Every kid that we stop dropping out at Years 10 to 12, you have increased their chances of having a meaningful life enormously. A lot of people don't understand that, I think." – DIANA BAGNALL

Reproduced from the Bulletin of June 27, 2001. Copyright Bulletin.