Te Aka Kawerongo – Welcome

Each fortnight, Unitec leaders introduce the latest edition of our e-newsletter.

The welcome message allows us to celebrate success, highlight upcoming events and share the mahi that is going on in a diverse range of portfolios with the division as a whole.

03 July 2025

Kia ora koutou,

Welcome to our latest edition of  Te Aka Kawerongo.

I want to thank everyone who sends us emails and news tips about student successes, on campus events or a colleague who has achieved something special.

It might seem like a small thing to do. But it helps us celebrate our wins, feel proud about the impact we are having as divisions and connect each day to our higher purpose.

Like a lot of areas at MIT and Unitec, over the last twelve months, Comms has been focused on responding to kaimahi feedback received through Your Whakaaro survey.

Overall, one of the big themes was wanting to build stronger connections with the places where we work and the people we work with.

Communications has an important role to play in this, particularly as more and more we’re embracing flexible modes of working and continuing with sector reform.

Our team’s response is very simple. For us, we want to ensure when you go to The Nest you get to read a range of regularly updated stories celebrating our people and what we do.

One of the things that also came through the survey was the need to increase the profile of Senior Leadership Team, as decision making began returning to the regions. This was especially important for leaders who have had careers at either MIT or Unitec and are now working across both.

These introductions to our newsletters are part of allowing leadership the opportunity to talk about what’s happening in their portfolios, while also giving kaimahi greater visibility of major workstreams being delivered regionally.

Another change we’ve made recently is trying to move away from being overly reliant on using all staff email as a tool. Of course, it’s still important for major announcements and day-to-day business. But we knew from Your Whakaaro that there were really strong, supportive connections between People Leaders and their teams that we weren’t really tapping into.

That was how In The Loop began. It’s a Monday morning summary of weekly news and upcoming events sent to Extended Leadership at both divisions. Leaders either forward it on to their teams or use the information it contains to support the conversations they are having during the week. The response from managers so far is they are finding it useful.

Before I finish, I want to end with a shout out to the Comms Team – Elles, Romy, Peter, Scott, Kate and Priti. Thanks for your efforts and dedication all year round. It’s great to be working with a group for whom there is no job too big and none too small.

Ali Ikram
Senior Communications Manager – Unitec & MIT

18 June 2025

Ngā mihi mō te tau hōu Māori ki a koutou katoa! Greetings for Māori New Year to you all.

This week, we celebrate Matariki mā Puanga. A time to reflect on the past, celebrate the present, and plan for the future. It is a time of renewal and reconnection.

This year, it’s not hard to apply these themes to our sector as we transition out of Te Pūkenga to a new model which emphasises regional responsiveness and includes the potential for independent delivery.

We are about to farewell a chapter in our recent history, we will celebrate the present as the beginning of a new chapter, and as far as planning for the future is concerned, there are many variables to consider, but we are guided by our core purpose of creating a brighter future for our students and community.

My role includes oversight of the Tāmaki Programme. The aim of the programme is to ensure our divisions are prepared to transition to a future shape of delivery when it is announced by the Government. This announcement is expected mid-this year.

Irrespective of the outcome received, there is not a lot of time to prepare for a January 1, 2026 start date. To account for this, we are running two planning streams.

The first stream is planning for what we absolutely have to have done by January 1, 2026 as we transition out of Te Pūkenga. This includes all of the legal requirements of an independent organisation, as well as the practical things that allow us to operate with minimal ākonga disruption.

Julie Prentice has already mentioned to you the importance of ensuring all our databases are up to date so we can effectively communicate with our stakeholders through this important phase.

We also need to confirm everything that will transition out of Te Pūkenga with us. To do that effectively, we will need to update all of our registers from asset registers to Programme, HR and our registers for the external contracts we hold.

Our second stream focusses on 2026 and beyond but is subject to a number of prerequisite variables. We know an Establishment Advisory Board or Boards will be set up to guide the entity or entities announced by Government for our region. These in turn will need to appoint executive leadership and approve planning for 2026 before undertaking longer term strategic and financial planning.

To help us prepare for transition we recently advertised three roles to join our team. A Project Manager, a Project Coordinator and an Analyst. Applications have flown in and we have carefully looked at every one of the more than one hundred and twenty we received. Thank you to all kaimahi who have expressed interest in the roles. We will be in touch soon and interviews will be scheduled shortly after.

So as the stars rise in the eastern sky this winter, may they inspire us to look up, look inward, and look ahead. Let us embrace our future with the same spirit of reflection, renewal, and unity that Matariki mā Puanga embodies. I believe the future is bright, inclusive, and full of possibilities.

Mānawatia a Matariki!

Simon Bilton,
Programme Director – Tāmaki

05 June 2025

Kia ora koutou,

Welcome to the latest edition of our newsletter and I hope you all enjoyed the long weekend! We’re excited to share some People and Culture updates with you this week.

We’ve started the year off well with our progress on the Your Whakaaro Action Plan, where last year we received your feedback to inform the workplan for 2025, some of the highlights are:

Congratulations to the recipients of the Priority Group Kaimahi Scholarships.  This scholarship programme is the first for MIT and Unitec and demonstrates our investment in growing our Tāmaki leadership, supporting Māori, Pacific, Neurodiverse and Disabled kaimahi.  We look forward to reading the achievements of the recipients as the year progresses.

Soon to launch is our 2025 Leadership Development Programme, this will support our managers and leaders with skills to navigate change, to have confident kōrero, and to create and lead an inclusive work environment.

With us introducing a Wellbeing Day for kaimahi in 2025, I hope you have either booked or started to think about how you would like to use your day.

A call out of thanks to the members of the Hidden Disabilities Working Group that was formed in 2025 to launch and successfully implement the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower Programme across MIT and Unitec – look out for communications coming on this shortly

At the moment, we are initiating a review of some key People and Culture policies and practices as an outcome of Your Whakaaro feedback and we are currently establishing the working groups. You will all have an opportunity to provide feedback as a part of the consultation, this is likely to be sometime over August – October.

Thank you for your continued support to our ākonga and communities, as that’s the heart of what we do.

Half of 2025 has passed quickly, and we will share the closedown dates for 2025/2026 soon to enable you to plan your summer leave.

Have a great week!

Ngā mihi,

Katrina Van de Ven,
Regional Director People and Culture

22 May 2025

Kia ora Team,

It was a real privilege to attend one of the five MIT graduation ceremonies last week. A sea of red MIT t-shirts filled the venue, with an incredible team of volunteers making everything run seamlessly. It was especially moving to see our kaimahi giving their time to ensure each ākonga received the celebration they deserved.

The pride and joy on the faces of our ākonga as they crossed the stage, acknowledged their lecturers, and expressed their gratitude was a powerful reminder of why our presence matters. The stage was filled with MIT kaimahi, showing up to support and honour our learners – thank you to everyone who was able to be there.

In Finance, we’ve been focused on completing the financial year-end process, which contributes to the consolidated results for Te Pūkenga. We expect the 2024 Annual Report to be published in the coming weeks.

A sincere thank you to the finance teams at both MIT and Unitec for your dedication throughout the audit process. Both divisions received a clean audit from Audit NZ – a testament to the importance of adhering to our policies and procedures, even when they can be challenging.

As we prepare to transition out of Te Pūkenga, we anticipate having greater autonomy over our policies, which will be an important area of focus once we receive guidance from Cabinet.

On the topic of independence, we’ve also been working on modelling financial viability for 2026. Both MIT and Unitec have made excellent progress, and I want to thank you all for your contributions to this vital mahi.

We’ve collectively made tough decisions and worked hard to achieve cost savings over several years. These efforts are essential to ensuring we can reinvest in the areas that support our ākonga and kaimahi. Returning to operating surpluses is a critical goal – while we’re not quite there yet, with both divisions forecasting a deficit this year, I’m confident we are on the right path.

We’re also pleased to welcome a new member to our team. Ernest Bernard will be joining us on Monday as the new Risk & Assurance Manager – Tāmaki. He’ll be working closely with many of us as we navigate the risks associated with our transition. Please join me in giving Ernest a warm welcome when you see him around.

Lastly, MIT Finance has kicked off a new project to implement Workday Adaptive, a budgeting and forecasting system already in use at Unitec. This will enable improved visibility, functionality, reporting, and financial modelling across both divisions. We’re aiming to go live in August and plan to use the system to build our 2026 budgets. We’ll share more details as the project progresses.

Ngā mihi nui and thank you all for the incredible work you do every day.

Kristine Brothers
Finance Director – Tāmaki

07 May 2025

Kia ora koutou,

Hope you’re all doing well.

I just wanted to write to thank everyone for the work that’s going on to build new partnerships and strengthen current ones.

It’s great to see us listening to our communities to meet a need out there, whether it’s retail businesses in Franklin wanting to find ways to upskill existing kaimahi or the screen industry out West looking to develop their talent pipeline.

We are at our best when we are working alongside iwi, businesses, schools and service providers as a catalyst and connector unlocking human potential, economic development and overall wellbeing.

We know how to do it. It’s something we are good at. It’s something we’re going to be doing more of in the future.

At the moment, we are planning a celebration for MIT Trades Academy’s tenth anniversary. It will be a chance to applaud the innovators who were among the first to recognise the importance of school students being able to try out the trades while completing their secondary learning and pathway into tertiary education or an apprenticeship.

These pipelines are crucial and our School Liaisons across MIT and Unitec are in their busiest time of the year, showcasing how we can support rangatahi to build the skills for their dream job. The transition into the Trades Academy at MIT and UPC at Unitec gives them that taste of the world after secondary school.

The end result of our student journey will be on show in MIT Degree and Diploma Graduation ceremonies next week at Due Drop Events Centre, Manukau; when our latest graduates cross the stage.

They are in demand in the job market because they are awesome!

But also because of the way we work closely with industry and community partners to design our qualifications.

It’s an exciting space to be in.

We can all play a role in keeping these connections strong as we move through the upcoming period of transition towards more regional independence by ensuring schools and team stakeholder contact lists are up to date.

Let’s keep up the great work!

Ngā mihi,

Julie Prentice
Head of External Engagement, Unitec & MIT 

10 April 2025

Kia ora koutou katoa,

This is my first panui in my capacity as DCE – International and Marketing portfolios for Unitec and MIT.

A couple of weeks ago, I visited China with the Unitec International Team. Over a week-long trip, I visited five large cities in Shandong and Zheijian provinces, gaining some very useful insights into our partnerships and opportunities in China, building relationships and signing a number of Memorandums of Understanding.

We visited Beijing first, meeting the Education New Zealand team and getting some great insights and support from them. In the current geo-political environment, they are very positive about New Zealand standing out as a welcoming, safe location for Chinese International learners.

Shandong Institute of Commerce and Technology is a potential new partner for us in Jinan. They are similar in size to Unitec and MIT combined, and have strengths in areas such as computing, finance and logistics. They are a highly applied institution, with strong connections to industry, and therefore felt very familiar to us. Shandong is also familiar, as Unitec’s School of Architecture has a long-standing joint programme with Shandong Jianzhu University.

From Jinan we went to Shanghai, in the middle of the South China Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone. This is a high GDP area, with a high-level of English spoken. We visited the Shanghai University of Engineering Science. They are a bit bigger than us (!!) and have international partnerships with more than a hundred countries. Their beautiful main campus is in the heart of Shanghai and was replete with blossom trees at the time of our visit.

Our fourth visit was to Wenzhou Polytechnic in Zheijiang Province. They also feel very similar to Unitec and MIT. They have multiple industry-education ‘communities’ and very impressive levels of collaboration with local industries such as fashion and shoe-making, and a great deal of high-tech work in AI, Internet of Things and various “intelligent manufacturing”.

The trip rounded off with a visit to the Zheijiang Provincial Education Department, who were supporting some of our visits.

Overall, my impression was of quite a strong government-led drive to engage and partner, which must be positive for us. We were very warmly welcomed by senior leadership teams, devoting whole days to hosting and working with us.

The institutions we visited all had strengths in taking a highly applied approach to learning and maintaining very strong commercial partnerships on campuses and in local regions to support that practical learning. Very impressive, and we need to think about how to build on those obvious similarities. Pedagogically, we are a bit different, and there are things to think about there.

This week, we have a return visit from Hebei University of Engineering (following previous visits by us to Hebei and them to Tāmaki).

Thank you again for stellar support from the International team!

Dr Simon Nash,
Deputy Chief Executive – Learner Experience & Success, Unitec & MIT

27 March 2025

This is the view we started our day with on Wednesday. That still moment, after dawn, as we waited, and prepared, for the full force of 250 Māori and Pacific Trades Training tauira to descend onto Te Noho Kotahitanga Marae – hailing not only from across Tāmaki and iwi from throughout Aotearoa; but also with whakapapa tracing back to the islands of Te Moana nui a Kiwa.

It’s at these times, as Whaea Lynda’s karanga of welcome rings out across the paepae, and Papa Hohepa sends words of mihi and whaikōrero, as we look across to Rangimārie, our pā harakeke (flax bed), and to Te Wai Unuroa o Wairaka, our puna (spring) and the tipuna from whom we are named, that we reaffirm our commitment to Te Noho Kotahitanga, our Tiriti partnership, and the values we hold dear as Te Whare Wānanga o Wairaka, Unitec.

It’s in these moments that I can’t help but pause to reflect on what a privilege it is to be part of a place that is so rich in whakapapa and in the many taonga tuku iho – treasures passed down from those who came before us.

Amid a heady day of rousing Māori and Pacific haka, wānanga and the gathering of colleagues from across the region in celebration of 10-years of MPTT, we as a Māia whānau also reaffirmed, at our strategy day, our commitment to ‘Manaakitia te Rito’, as the foundation from which we can best serve our ākonga, whānau and communities.

At the heart of Manaakitia te Rito, symbolised in the Unitec logo, are the ‘rito’, our tauira, with us as the āwhi rito – leaders, teachers and kaimahi – wrapping support, guidance and learning around them so they reach their potential and gain the mātauranga they need to achieve their career and wider aspirations. The power of a Manaakitia te Rito approach, underpinned by Te Noho Kotahitanga, is well evidenced here at Unitec with the big shift we achieved as an institution in the past few years.

For kaimahi who are new to Unitec, including those who work across both MIT and Unitec, I encourage you to take on and deepen your knowledge of Te Noho Kotahitanga, through our badging, a requirement in all our ADEPs, which you can enrol in through our Te Rito suite of workshops.

The next sessions are:

• Living Te Noho Kotahitanga – Thursday 10th April 2025 from 10.00am to 11.00pm (online)
• Te Tīpare: Embedding Mātauranga Māori – Wednesday 21 May, 10am to 11.30am (online)

Also keep an eye out for our new micro-credentials which we will be piloting with kaimahi soon:
Taumata Oho: Pepeha
Taumata Tu: Tikanga
Taumata Ora: Mātauranga Marae

The efforts of so many in coming together in the last fortnight to celebrate our cultures, including the Unitec Pacific Day and Manaaki Whenua which saw us fulfil our role as kaitiaki, show us that manaakitia te rito is already thriving.

Kia kaha tonu e te whānau. Mauri ora!

Vivienne Merito (Ngāti Pūkeko, Ngāti Awa),
Taharangi – Director, Māori Success, Unitec

13 March 2025

Kia ora koutou,

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the New Zealand Athletics Championships in Dunedin supporting some of the forty athletes I coach outside my work with Unitec and MIT.

I often draw on these experiences of how clear focus on a thousand tiny things plus hours of blood, sweat and one or two tears can build great performance and better outcomes.

Like so many parents, I have found myself on the sideline coaching my own son in competition. When approaching the big day, I find myself giving him the same best piece of advice, my first coach, my father gave me (cough) a few years ago now.

It was that ultimately the only thing you can control is how you prepare and how you front up on the day is where it counts.

The enabling areas at our divisions I’m connected with, including Property, Facilities Management, Fleet, Security, Logistics are all aspects of our businesses that are well within our control, show off our collective attitudes and where each of us has a key role to play in ensuring they:

• Deliver the best student experience possible and
• Support teachers’ ability to teach.

Taken together our divisions have a significant footprint across Tāmaki with seven campuses located from as far north as Warkworth to Manukau in the south. Currently, we have a total of 104 projects on the books.

We know delivering this workload is a major part of seeing ākonga and kaimahi feel valued and take pride in where they work and learn.

As I mentioned, overall success is made up of many small things like the building wash we conducted at Unitec Mt Albert before the start of Semester One or major work like the remediation of the water issues we were experiencing last year at MIT Manukau.

Together they make a huge difference!

Helping keep our places well maintained and safe

One of the things it is important to remember is our properties are serviced by a small hardworking team carrying out proactive audits. There’s a great story in this edition of Te Aka Kawerongo about how they have been learning the basics of plastering at Unitec Trades Services.

While our kaimahi do their best to identify areas needing attention, it’s likely you will be the first to notice any issues. Everyone can make a contribution to this effort by logging a job here when they see something that needs our attention.

We also all have a role to play in promoting safety on campus. Our security teams conduct patrols day and night. If you witness behaviours that concern you please call 0800 10 95 90. Ideally, you’d have the number saved on your phones ready to use if and when required.

For life threatening emergencies requiring police, fire or ambulance response or where there is immediate danger to yourself, others or damage to campus property, call 111. Then – if possible – alert security by calling the number listed above.

As we move towards a more local approach for our providers it’s important we compliment this with a renewed sense of ownership of our places, spaces and the hubs these represent for the communities we serve.

Hei konā mai,

Dan Brady,
General Operations Manager (MIT & Unitec) 

27 February 2025

Kia ora e te whānau,

It’s been an absolute pleasure this week to pōwhiri and welcome our ākonga hou onto our marae and into our classes. There is a palpable sense of excitement as our campuses come alive with the arrival of both new and returning learners.

The first few weeks are a hugely important time—a busy but exciting period as we connect with and welcome learners, look to more deeply understand their needs, and provide the academic and pastoral support that sets them up for success.

Our ākonga really are at the heart of everything we do, with their energy and enthusiasm this week being a pertinent reminder of the impact our mahi has on their educational journeys, their whānau and communities, and their lives. Ka nui te mihi to all our teaching and support kaimahi who work so hard to create a welcoming and engaging environment.

We’ve recently received the first round of 2024 Educational Performance Indicators data from Tertiary Education Commission:

• Successful course completion is at 82.0%, just below our 85% target. We expect this to improve in May once all grades are processed, with our internal data indicating we are on track.
• First-year retention stands at 75.7%, our highest result in 20 years.
• Qualification completion is at 57.5%, slightly below our 60% target. This is something we will monitor closely and through self-assessment and Programme Evaluative Plans.
• Progression from Levels 1-4 to higher study has increased to 39.0%, the highest level in the past decade.

The results show both some excellent outcomes for learners, as well as areas where we can continue to focus and improve, particularly with regard to parity for our Māori and Pacific priority group learners.

Our latest Student Net Promoter Score results are pleasing, with our returning student NPS rising to 26, and our new student NPS at 37. In their feedback to us our learners consistently highlight the support of our staff, our engaging learning environment, and our practical, career-focused courses.

These outcomes are a testament to your passion and commitment. Key areas for continuous improvement focused on enhancing course content and structure, strengthening communication, and upgrading our facilities.

As we look ahead to the continued evolution of vocational education this year promises to be a significant one. Whatever changes, challenges, and opportunities 2025 may bring, I know that through the mahi we do and the way we support each other we will continue to provide the excellent teaching, learning, academic quality, and support that empowers our learners and strengthens our communities.

Ngā mihi

Chris King,
Director – Schools & Performance, Unitec