Latest news with #TertiaryEducationCommission
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Staff numbers at polytechnics abysmal: minister
By John Gerritsen of RNZ Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds says staff numbers at some polytechnics are so high they are abysmal. Appearing before the Education and Workforce Select Committee to answer questions about the government's Budget decisions for Tertiary Education, Simmonds said institutions' ratio of staff to students was critical for their viability. Claim govt setting up polytechs to fail She said polytechnics had reduced their staff numbers by 8.2% on a headcount basis and about 4.9% on a full-time equivalent basis but their staff to student ratios were still lower than they were in 2016-17. "Those ratios are critical to the viability of an institution. If you're running at a ratio of less than one to 18 for academic staff to students, you are in financial trouble and they are low," she said. Simmonds said a number of polytechnics were "incredibly damaged by the last four or five years under Te Pūkenga". She said they had lost domestic enrolments, failed to rebuild international enrolments quickly, and had not responded quickly to changes. Simmonds said Te Pūkenga should have addressed staff surpluses at loss-making polytechnics more quickly. She said it had not become financially sustainable, even though it recorded a financial surplus last year. Simmonds and Universities Minister Shane Reti insisted government funding for tertiary education was increasing as a result of the Budget. Committee member and Labour Party MP Shanan Halbert said Budget figures showed total tertiary funding would drop $124m in the 2025/26 financial year to $3.79b. Tertiary Education Commission officials said the drop was due to the end of the previous government's temporary, two-year funding boost and moving the fees free policy to the final year of students' study. Simmonds said the government ended equity funding for Māori and Pacific students because it wanted to target extra funding to needs not ethnicity. She said if a Māori student who was dux of their school enrolled in a polytechnic qualification, their enrolment would attract the equity weighting, even though they had no need of additional support, which she said did not make sense. Tertiary Education Commission chief executive Tim Fowler told the committee enrolments had grown so much that institutions were asking for permission to enrol more students this year than they had agreed with the commission in the investment plans that determined their funding. "We've had most of the universities come to us and ask to exceed their investment plan allocation... over 105% this year. In previous years, I think we might have had one in the past decade, so unprecedented levels of enrolments," he said. Fowler said it was the commission's job to balance that growth, favouring government priorities such as STEM subject enrolments and removing funding from under-enrolled courses. "We're continually adjusting in-flight what that investment looks like and where we see areas where there is demand that we want to support we try and move money to it. Where there's areas of under-delivery, we try and take that out as quickly as we possibly can so it doesn't fly back to the centre - we want to reinvest it elsewhere," he said. "The challenge for us this year, there are far fewer areas of under-delivery than there is over-delivery."
RNZ News
07-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Māori, Pacific removed from extra education funding priorities
The Tertiary Education Commission warns it doesn't have enough money to cover enrolment growth next year. Photo: AFP The government will remove extra funding for Māori and Pacific enrolments in vocational courses, and trim funding for workplace training. The Tertiary Education Commission told institutions this week it was "reprioritising a small amount - approximately 8 percent - of learner component funding towards provider-based delivery rates, through the removal of Māori and Pacific learners as an eligible category". The weightings for Māori and Pacific enrolments were worth $152 for each student enrolling in work-based level 1-2 certificates and courses at levels 3-6, and $364 per student in non-degree level 7 courses. However, the $1327 weighting for disabled students and students with low prior educational achievement would continue. The payments were added to subsidies for courses offered by polytechnics and private providers, ranging from $6584 for humanities and business courses to nearly $11,786 for health, science, engineering and agriculture, and $19,753 for special agriculture. The commission said funding for work-based training and education would drop 10 percent, while also repeating warnings from earlier in the year that it would not have enough money to cover enrolment growth next year . "Current forecasts indicate the demand for funding will be greater than what we have available to allocate," it said. "Given the multi-year nature of much education and training, we will need to prioritise our future investment." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Otago Daily Times
08-05-2025
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Soon-to-be graduate ‘proud'
Junior So'oula will graduate from the Cargill Academy training programme on Monday. PHOTO: LINDA ROBERTSON For the first time in his life, Junior So'oula has somewhere to go — and he is not wasting any time getting there. The 41-year-old New Zealand-born Samoan has a cognitive barrier to learning, so he finds it difficult to retain information. At school, he fell through the cracks, leaving in year 11 without any qualifications. He then went through a string of labouring jobs, which would only last a couple of weeks at a time, and he was left feeling lost — he felt he had no identity, no purpose in life and no idea what the future held for him. In 2005, he became mentally unwell and he was referred to Cargill Enterprises by his medical team in a bid to give him some purpose in life. "I was a bit unsure about it, but I thought I would give it a go. I don't regret it," he said. "This place has given me really good support, the bosses are lovely and the workers here are inspiring." More recently, he was invited to join the Cargill Academy, where he and about 20 others were given literacy, numeracy, digital literacy, financial literacy and life-skills training to help them become more independent. "It's been a long road to recovery, but I have become a more loving and caring person because of it. "I will still struggle, but I am more equipped to cope now. "I feel I am more able to figure out solutions better." Cargill Enterprises chief executive officer Geoff Kemp said Mr So'oula was very timid and shy when he first arrived, and it was heart-warming to see him "come out of his shell" and be much more confident. And best of all, he now had direction in his life. He said the academy had provided him with "stepping stones" to reach his goals. He planned to do another year of study there, which would help him get his driver's licence and, ultimately, help him find a job in the community. Ideally, Mr So'oula said he would love to find a job where he could help other people. "I've got goals and no-one's going to hold me back from achieving them now." Last year, the Tertiary Education Commission stopped underwriting the programme, and there were fears the academy would have to shut down after just one year. Fortunately, the public rallied around the academy and gave money to keep the programme running and Literacy Aotearoa provided tutors. It meant the academy was able to continue operating and would remain open next year. Mr Kemp said if the programme was not around, people like Mr So'oula would get lost in the system and their full potential would never be realised. "Their options in life are drastically reduced. They would just drift from one thing to the next ... they get trapped. "The academy gives them an opportunity to flourish." He said most of the Cargill Enterprises "family" had very few academic achievements, so graduating was "a really big deal" to them, their support people and their parents. "The parents will go, 'I never expected my son or daughter to get an academic award'." On Monday, Mr So'oula will officially graduate from his first year at the academy. "It feels fantastic and I feel very proud," he said.
RNZ News
21-04-2025
- General
- RNZ News
Fears new teacher maths requirement will halve enrolments, worsen shortages
Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller Teacher education providers warn there is strong evidence the timing of a new maths test for would-be primary teaching students will halve enrolments in some courses, worsening teacher shortages. The Literacy and Numeracy for Adults Assessment Tool (LNAAT) will become a pre-requisite for entry to one-year English-medium postgraduate programmes next year, and for multi-year programmes such as Bachelor's degrees in 2027. Students who enrolled this year in English-medium primary teaching courses would have to pass the one-hour test, which was developed for the Tertiary Education Commission and administered by the Council for Educational Research, before they graduated. The change was prompted by the government's push to raise maths achievement. Lecturers told RNZ the LNAAT was a good measure of teachers' maths ability but making it a condition of entry rather than requiring students pass the test during their course of study was a mistake. Their fears were based on Otago University's 15-year history of using the LNAAT with its students. Otago's associate dean of initial teacher education, Naomi Ingram, said the test's content was very close to the knowledge primary school teachers required and much closer than the requirements of NCEA Level 2 maths which was originally expected to be the benchmark for entry. But she said requiring students pass the test before they were accepted to a teacher education programme was a bad idea. "We've got 15 years of data to show that the first time they attempt this assessment our primary teachers in our initial teacher education programme, about half of them pass it," Ingram said. "Some of these people might be older students who just haven't done fractions for a while or there might be people that have genuine gaps in their knowledge. "It's going to have a massive impact on teacher supply and teacher supply is a problem in primary so I'm very concerned about that." Ingram said by the end of Otago's three-year degree all students who successfully completed all other aspects of the programme passed the test, though some required tuition or resources to get there. She said students enrolled in one-year, postgraduate teaching courses tended to do a lot better in the test. Ingram said students tended to struggle most with "proportional reasoning" involving fractions, finding percentages, place values and metric conversion. Education Ministry figures showed in recent years more than half of the graduates from primary teaching programmes were from Bachelor's degree programmes and in 2023, the most recent year for which statistics were available, the figure was 70 percent. Anthony Fisher from Early Childhood New Zealand Te Rito Maioha said its degree students would attempt the test next semester but students in its one-year programme had already sat it, with most passing. Fisher said the high pass rate was probably because the one-year students already had a degree. "They've come in with a prior degree so their level of mathematics is probably at a different level to some people coming into a three-year programme," he said. Fisher said making the test an enrolment requirement would lower student numbers. "As an entry requirement it's definitely going to have an impact on students. I think particularly a number of students who have I suppose what we could term maths anxiety," he said. "It will be a definite barrier I think for some students coming into primary teaching." The chair of universities' Council of Deans of Education, Joce Nuttall from the University of Canterbury said universities had pre-entry literacy and numeracy tests for years and its members "absolutely support" the need for graduates to be mathematically competent. Nuttall said students who failed the test on their first attempt this year would get extra support and the university was confident all students would pass it before graduation. "What we're more concerned about is that students who have to sit the test before they get into teacher education from next year. If they don't pass the test we may lose them," she said. Nuttall said deans of education hoped the Teaching Council would change the rules. "We'd really like to see the test incorporated within our courses rather than something that's required prior to entry. That would bring us in line with very similar testing systems in Australia," she said. The Teaching Council said the decision to make the test a prerequisite for enrolment was reached after consultation. It said candidates would be allowed two attempts at the assessment, the second time a month after the first. In addition, providers could seek exemptions allowing them to offer post-entry assessment for candidates who met conditions such as being strong candidates in other respects. "Partly due to these mitigations, we expect that the mathematics requirement is likely to have only a modest impact on supply of candidates entering English-medium primary ITE programmes," it said. "We will, however, work with the Ministry of Education as the mathematics entry requirement policy is implemented to achieve the best possible understanding of teacher supply impacts and we will consider changes to the policy settings if needed." The council said it initially considered allowing entry for students who had NCEA maths credits at Level 2. "Concerns were, however, raised by sector experts about unintended consequences from the use of this measure. In addition, we had already identified that another assessment would need to be available since it would not be fair or possible to rely solely on a candidate's school record," it said. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
