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Trevor Grice founded Life Education in New Zealand in 1988. After twenty years helping addicted people, and after seeing many unnecessary deaths of New Zealand's young people, Trevor realised that equal emphasis needed to be put into prevention through education.
In 1987, he was approached by a group of people, who had heard about Ted and Margaret Noffs' work developing and starting the Life Education concept in Australia. They were looking for a suitable person to spearhead Life Education in New Zealand. Trevor went to Australia to meet with Ted, only to find that he had suffered a massive stroke a few days before and was in hospital. However, Margaret met Trevor at Ted's famous Wayside Chapel (in Kings Cross, Sydney, a renowned drop-in centre for addicts looking for help) and left Trevor in Ted's office to read through Ted's writings.
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As Trevor read, he fell in love with the idea of Life Education. He loved the innovation of the programme, of capturing children's imagination using technology and building their self-esteem at a young age. Every addict Trevor helped brought home to him the need "that there is no such thing as a nothing". Most youngsters in trouble had fused into their brain the belief that they were worth nothing. Low self-esteem, caused by all the ravages of addiction, prostitution, destitution and corruption, had most times seeded in early life.
Trevor spent time with Margaret Noffs, and watched the Australian teachers in mobile classrooms and fixed centres teaching the Life Education programme, and came back to New Zealand with Margaret's blessing to start Life Education in New Zealand
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In 1989, New Zealand's Prime Minister, the Hon. David Lange, endorsed Life Education and encouraged New Zealanders to support the programme. Trevor met with the Ministry of Education, and they created the first links document for Life Education (NZ), that showed where our programme linked in to the school curriculum.
We continue to work with school principals to develop our programme. We now offer 19 learning modules to primary and intermediate schools that can be adapted to meet specific curriculum needs. All our learning modules are based on Ted Noffs' original philosophy.
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