There are fears the high number of school leavers with no qualifications is becoming baked into the education system.

Education Ministry figures show 15 percent of school leavers last year had no NCEA certificates or equivalent qualifications.

It is the third consecutive year the figure has been so high after years sitting at 10-11 percent.

Manager of the Whanganui Learning Centre Jen McDonald said the increase had been noticed and felt like it was becoming the new normal.

"We've heard many stories of ones that have just struggled with anxiety at school, the school environment hasn't suited them. Some of them come out of school with enough credits to be passing level 1 or level 2 but they're missing those critical literacy and numeracy credits, so 10 literacy and 10 numeracy, the compulsory credits," she said.

The main way teens achieved the literacy and numeracy credits was through online tests but McDonald said a lot of students who came to the centre failed those simply because they did not cope with exams.

Leaving school or being kicked out without qualifications had a lasting effect on people's self-esteem and on their future opportunities, she said.

"Jobs are few and far between for people with zero qualifications. If they're wanting to have an apprenticeship they need to have at least level 2, so again even if they've got aspirations to be a builder or whatever, they've got a lot of work to do," she said.

Often the young people the centre worked with were very capable but they had not received the support or the environment they needed to succeed, McDonald said.

The Kākano Youth Arts Collective in West Auckland also worked with young people who had left school with nothing.

Director Mandy Patmore said the teens it saw had not coped with school or with alternative education.

"A lot of those young people, they just don't fit, so they're kind of being cast aside and it doesn't look like from our perspective there's a whole lot of nets to catch them. It just seems like they go into an abyss," she said.

"They're expected to go into employment but they've got no skills or support networks to make that happen."

The collective's youth support coordinator Sarah Candler said many schools were too quick to kick teens out.

"The number one thing is that it is way, way too easy for schools to exclude kids," she said.

"Often the reasons for the kid losing their entire education is one mix-up, one fight in the playground, one incident of something going wrong and they're a really at-risk kid already and they go," she said.

Excluding students was disastrous because they were under huge pressure to get jobs and get on in life but had none of the qualifications they needed to help them get there, Candler said.

More leaving with level 2

Meanwhile, the school leaver figures did have some good news - 78 percent of last year's leavers had at least NCEA level 2 and 59 percent had level 3, both improvements on the previous year.

Papakura High School principal Simon Craggs said it was good to see an increase in level 2 attainment because that was the baseline for employment and further study.

"It's disappointing not to see the number of students leaving without qualifications reduce but unsurprising I guess given schools have been grappling with a lot of change over the last few years," he said.

"I don't see in the near future that figure coming down, particularly when we do bring in a new qualification, and that was signalled in the advice to the minister, that there would be a decrease in achievement for students with a new qualification."