Latest news with #polytechnics
RNZ News
3 days ago
- Business
- RNZ News
Minister defends Te Pūkenga breakup, saying rural education will not suffer
Penny Simmonds. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds is confident her approach to polytechnics will not impact training in the regions, pushing back on criticism from the union. Simmonds on Monday unveiled the polytechnics that would emerge from breaking up Te Pūkenga, the mega-institute set up under Labour with the aim of making the sector more cost-effective. That merger in 2020 combined 16 polytechnics and nine industry training organisations, with most retaining their branding and continuing to operate but using Te Pūkenga as a "head office". Simmonds' proposed approach makes nine of those polytechnics independent once more, beginning operations from 1 January. Three of them will become a "federation", with the Open Polytechnic leading and providing services to Otago Polytechnic and the Universal College of Learning (UCOL). A further five polytechnics - NorthTec in Northland, Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki (WITT), Whitireia and WelTec in Wellington, and Tai Poutini Polytechnic on the West Coast - would be required to show a path to financial sustainability or face either closure or mergers. Simmonds signalled on Monday they would all likely be included in the federation. The former Industry Training Organisations would be replaced with Industry Skills Boards. Tertiary Education Union national secretary Sandra Grey is adamant the approach will be a disaster for regional education, saying the sector's become a political football. She told Morning Report it was important for polytechnics to be financially viable, but the funding model had not worked and needed to change. The $16.6m surplus Te Pūkenga reported last month was only possible because of drastic cuts and there was more to come, she said. "We've seen hundreds of jobs cut, dozens of dozens and dozens of courses go just to ensure they could reach this day... five polytechnics still have very uncertain futures, and we've got hundreds of job cuts coming just to meet the demands of the minister." "The only courses are [that] surviving are those that can get lots and lots and lots of students... I was at the Western Institute of Technology in Taranaki yesterday and one of the courses going is the course in agriculture - given that community is full of dairy farms, you cannot tell me they don't want agriculture courses." That agriculture course needed to be small because the students were working with heavy machinery like chainsaws and tractors, she said. "You can't have hundreds of students in a classroom when that's the activity you're doing, and that's what the minister's got to look at: a fit-for-purpose model that allows courses to run to meet community needs." Simmonds later acknowledged courses like that would need to be smaller, but said $20 million over two years had been set aside to support polytechnics to run them. "They have to have smaller classes for health and safety, and so that's what that additional funding is: to support them to be able to continue with those smaller classes that aren't viable but are really strategically important," she said. "It does give recognition to those areas where we really need to have training, but it can't be viable under the current funding system." She said the funding was specifically for regions like the Far North and East Coast that had a high need for such courses. She was confident her model would not impact rural training. "No, it won't. Because by putting the Federation in place, the regions are going to have access to online delivery through the Open Polytechnic and are going to have a wider range of programs available to be able to deliver blended delivery to smaller cohorts of classes." Otago Polytechnic also criticised the federation model , saying it would risk undermining its achievement rates, teaching quality and independence. Simmonds backed the federation as a solution to that rural-urban divide. "Putting the Federation in place, the regions are going to have access to online delivery through the Open Polytechnic and are going to have a wider range of programs available to be able to deliver blended delivery to smaller cohorts of classes. "Otago, for example, were running courses with quite small numbers in Central Otago. This gives them an opportunity to run those courses with blended delivery using the open polytechnics, online sources, resources. "The reality is, you can't run a course with five or six people in it on campus, fully sourced, fully staffed. But if you can have access to online learning as well, you can have that blended delivery online and on campus with smaller cohorts." She said Otago had "a little bit of work to do to get to a surplus", and the government could look at taking them out of the federation once that was achieved. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
4 days ago
- Politics
- RNZ News
Watch: Christopher Luxon on the the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds have revealed the latest on the disestablishment of the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology, Te Pūkenga. Luxon also announced the date of the Tāmaki Makaurau by-election, following the sudden death of Te Pāti Māori's Takutai Tarsh Kemp. It will be held on 6 September 2025. Te Pūkenga, the mega-institute that combined polytechnic and workplace training and education, is due to be disestablished by 31 December 2026, and be replace with 10 stand-alone polytechnics and a new system for work-based industry training. The 10 polytechnics will start functioning on 1 January 2026, with Te Pūkenga operating for another year to cater for courses that aren't offered by the 10 named institutions. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
4 days ago
- Politics
- RNZ News
Te Pūkenga changes: 10 polytechs to return to 'regional governance'
Otago Polytechnic, one of the 10 polytechs to return to "regional governance". Photo: Google Street View The government is moving ahead with its long-signalled plan to re-establish polytechnics merged under Labour into the super-institute Te Pūkenga. Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds confirmed 10 polytechnics are returning to "regional governance" as part of the government's plan to build a vocational education system that's "locally led, regionally responsive and future-focused". Labour combined 16 polytechnics and nine workplace training providers at the beginning of 2023 . The coalition government moved quickly when it came to power, agreeing as part of its 100-day plan to begin the process of disestablishing the mega institute. The announcement comes after listening to "extensive industry feedback" Simmonds said, and the changes were part of legislation currently before Parliament. "We campaigned vigorously against Labour's reforms which saw all New Zealand polytechnics merged into one unwieldy and uneconomic central institution, Te Pūkenga, taking away the ability of regions to respond to local training and employer needs," Simmonds said on Monday. "Labour dismantled regionally led vocational education - and we are restoring it". She said she was confident the coalition's plan will set the sector up for "long-term economic and learning success". The ten polytechnics returning to regional governance, which will begin operating from 1 January 2026, are: NorthTec, Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki (WITT), Whitireia Community Polytechnic and Wellington Institute of Technology (Whitireia and WelTec), and Tai Poutini Polytechnic (TPP) will remain within Te Pūkenga for now as they "work toward viability, with decisions due in the first half of 2026". Penny Simmonds. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver There will be an "anchor" polytechnic of the new federation - the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand. That federation will coordinate programmes and other services, including shared academic boards, Simmonds explained. "It will provide a low overhead way for polytechnics to create more efficient business models than they could on their own through the use of online learning resources and programmes." Just last week Te Pūkenga warned MPs the government would have to bail out struggling polytechnics despite its reforms. Te Pūkenga will continue to operate as a "transitional entity" for up to a year, allowing for a "smooth handover", and the new legislation allowed for mergers or closures if polytechnics were not able to achieve viability. "With more than 250,000 students in the vocational education system each year, these changes offer greater flexibility, financial sustainability, and ensure training remains relevant to employment needs," Simmonds said. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said vocational education - and the polytechnic sector - mattered deeply to communities, the economy and the country's future. Luxon said the vocational education system had been through a "turbulent few years". "The last government's Te Pūkenga reforms intended to strengthen the system, but what we've seen instead is a model that's become too centralised, too removed from local communities, and ultimately too slow to respond to regional training and employer needs. It's not good enough." He added it was a "good day for communities" getting back their polytechnics "as we had said before the election". Simmonds rejected assertions there'd been a lack of consultation with Māori, saying she'd engaged with the education group of the Iwi Leaders Forum. In selecting 10 polytechnics, Simmonds explained those institutes had financial pathways to "affordability" whereas the other four had "got some work to do, they've got some unique challenges". She explained those challenges were unique to those institutes and their communities, like being small or needing to shift campuses. Simmonds acknowledged Te Pūkenga was in surplus, but said that was because the "duplication of bureaucracy" in the head office had gone. Asked whether these reforms recreated that duplication, Simmonds said that was not the case. "The main purpose of the federation is to support the smaller polytechnics that don't have the capacity themselves, particularly in online learning." On whether all polytechnics would be operational in two years time, Simmonds said that was "their responsibility". Those who were still facing "unique challenges" had been given a business case with a pathway to financial viability "if they stick to it.". Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
17-06-2025
- 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.
