Latest news with #polytechnics
RNZ News
5 days ago
- Politics
- RNZ News
Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds says staff numbers at polytechnics abysmal
Vocational education minister Penny Simmonds. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver 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. She said polytechnics had reduced their staff numbers by 8.2 percent on a headcount basis and about 4.9 percent 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 percent 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." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
06-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Foreign student income down on pre-Covid earnings
More than half New Zealand's foreign students studied in Auckland last year. Photo: 123RF Foreign students paid $1 billion in fees last year and more than half that money went to universities. The figures were supplied to the Education Ministry by providers, as part of their reporting for the export education levy. They showed 74,990 international students in New Zealand last year, including 18,020 at schools and more than 25,880 at universities. Their fees totalled $1.085b, about $100m less than the pre-pandemic years of 2018 and 2019. However, two sectors achieved their highest fee incomes on record - universities with $580m and government-funded private tertiary institutions with $167m. The fee take at non-government-funded tertiary institutions, schools and polytechnics last year was well below pre-pandemic numbers. The figure for non-government-funded tertiary institutions - a category that covered English language schools - was just $52.8m, down from a 2019 figure of $135m. Schools received $152m, down from $201m in 2019, and polytechnics received $132.8m, down from $178m. More than half the foreign students last year (43,060) studied in Auckland. Most students (61,500) came from Asia, with the next most significant source being Europe with 5345. At universities and polytechnics, management and commerce was the single largest field for foreign enrolments, accounting for 30 percent of polytechnic enrolments and 28 percent of university enrolments. The 74,990 individual students equated to 46,005 full-time equivalents, three-quarters of the 61,530 full-time equivalents in 2019. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
04-06-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Te Pūkenga disestablishment 'will not be completely equitable'
A 'federation' of polytechs may be needed after the dissolution of Te Pūkenga. File photo. Photo: supplied Polytechnics are unlikely to emerge from Te Pūkenga with the savings or debt they took into the mega-institute. Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds today told the Education and Workforce Select Committee the government was working on how to re-establish polytechnics that were subsumed by Te Pūkenga at the end of 2022. "There are some that went in with very high debts, some that went in with very high reserves. The disestablishment will not be completely equitable and that, unfortunately, needs to occur because we cannot stand up new entities that are going to be insolvent," she told the committee. Simmonds confirmed that polytechnics that were "not very solvent" would be more likely to be merged with another institute or placed into a federation of polytechnics. "There are still decisions to be made around that, but where there are some that there isn't a pathway, then obviously mergers are an option, but also support by being able to go into the federation," she said. Simmonds said a federation model was suggested when the previous government was considering submissions that led to the creation of Te Pūkenga and it had been wrong to ignore those submissions. "I think where Te Pūkenga went wrong was that classic mistake of form before function, and if the functions that would benefit from being centralised had been looked at, Te Pūkenga probably wouldn't have been the form that eventuated and a federation model might have been," she said. Simmonds told the committee Te Pūkenga's financial situation had improved, but only because it had shed many of the centralised functions it was set up to provide. She said the $20 million the government had set aside to ensure the continuation of strategically important vocational education might not be enough. She said it could be used to protect courses in areas with high levels of youth unemployment, and courses related to significant industries such as agriculture. The committee was hearing submissions and evidence on the Education and Training (Vocational Education and Training System) Amendment Bill which would disestablish Te Pūkenga at the end of 2026. The bill would also allow the re-establishment of individual polytechnics and the creation of a federation of polytechnics led by an "anchor" institute. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
11-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
'Change fatigue' hits vocational education
Trades training and vocational education is bearing the brunt of political to-ing and fro-ing, some industry figures say (file photo). Photo: Supplied/ UCOL It's been called 'change fatigue' and the tertiary sector covering vocational education is exhausted by the meddling of successive governments. Since 2020 there have been major upheavals with vocational training and polytechnics, and the key word for those in the industry is uncertainty. There's also frustration at the amount of money spent rearranging the deckchairs for ideological reasons, instead of just getting on with the job of equipping students for work. "In effect what we are doing is, we are holding hostage the adequate, in favour of the perfect," says Professor John Tookey. He is an AUT academic who deals with construction industries in developing advanced trades training. He talks to The Detail today about the dangers of throwing away a workable system and replacing it in haste. "You're going to burn through an awful lot of good will in the trades training world to a point where those journeymen type of operators who've been around for a long time are just going to throw their hands up and say, 'enough. Not going to play any more'." The disruption started in 2020 when Labour decided to centralise and standardise polytechnics, and bring trades training in under one umbrella, with a mega-organisation called Te Pūkenga. Workforce Development Councils were established to ensure training courses were fitting students for industry jobs, to set standards and develop qualifications. The transition was messy, half the CEOs of the polytechs resigned, staff were being made redundant, enrolments dropped and courses started to close. But before the new body had time to sort itself out, National kept an election promise to dismantle it. Workforce Development Councils will be gone by the end of this year, to be replaced by around seven Industry Skills Boards. None of those boards include the creative or digital technology industries, which frustrates Paula Browning, the chair of WeCreate, an alliance that covers all sorts of creative and tech industries, from music to publishing to interactive media and fashion. Creative industries contribute more than $17 billion to the economy, generate $4.1bn in export revenue and support more than 117,000 jobs. Digital technology is a sector that Kiwis are excelling in globally. It's worth $13.4bn in exports a year, and contributes more than $17bn to GDP. Browning says they're being sidelined by the new changes, and Workforce Development Councils haven't been given a chance to work. "We had to, along with the digital sector, fight tooth and nail to get creative and digital as part of that system," she says. "In the proposed model that the government's looking at now, creative, tech and business skills are going back under NZQA, so they won't have one of the new industry standards boards that are proposed. "What we are doing with these proposals is looking to put those industries of the future, back into the past, and it just doesn't make sense." The government promises that every effort will be made to make sure that learning is not disrupted, but Paula Browning questions how that will happen without a transition plan and just seven months to get the work done. "And for some of us there is no transition ... it's just, 'you're out of here'. And it just feels like we're doing something in haste that we are going to regret in the not too distant future." Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here . You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter . Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
