The Government has recently announced a review of the Vocational Education Training (VET) sector to consider how quality VET can be better supported by the funding system.
Concurrently, the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) has established the ITP Roadmap 2020 project to ensure that the ITP sector can continue to deliver what New Zealand learners and employers need from it, in a sustainable way. According to the TEC, over the past 10 years, domestic ITP student numbers have declined by nearly a third due to a combination of changing demographics, a strong labour market, increasing retention at secondary school, and competition from universities and private training establishments.
Alastair Carruthers, Merran Davis and David Glover are all part of a working group and have contributed to a number of conversations and huis involving different stakeholders including TEU, to shape the direction that the Government will take. The project group is working to a tight timeframe to meet the Government’s aim of presenting a recommendation to cabinet before the end of the year.
We also want to make sure that our voice is part of the wider conversation about the reforms. Last week we issued a media release to express our support for the review while emphasising that funding is one of the key issues than needs to be addressed. In it, Council Chairman Lee Mathias said: “Shifting demographics and a high employment market have accentuated the flaws in the existing model for ITPs and created winners and losers in a highly competitive education market. The existing funding system is inflexible and favours high-volume, low overhead programmes and hasn’t kept pace with costs.” Click here to read the full release.
The Executive Leadership Team and the TEU will be working together to run events on campus over the next few months so that staff can also have their say in the review process. We’ll share more details on times and locations shortly.