News 16 Feb – vet bonding, prefects and boats

February 16th 2010 at 8:51am, By Dave Guerin

Radio NZ reports on a veterinarian bonding scheme that has been expanded to include any practice treating production animals, rather than just six specific rural areas. While this may not be good for cats and parrots, it’s interesting to see such a clear split between support for business versus personal needs in an industry, especially when the debate about the value of vocational education is heating up again. Could this be expanded to other industry areas where graduates serve business (especially export) and personal needs? Should plumbers and builders be encouraged to work on dairy conversions, rather than home renovations?
The Boating ITO is hosting their annual Marine Trades Challenge this Saturday at Westhaven, Auckland. Apprentices make their own boats and propel them around a course – should be good fun if you’re in the area.
In a good example of an industry-skilled tutor, a Tai Poutini Polytechnic jade carving tutor has had a piece of her work bought by Te Papa. She is also a TPP graduate, being top of her class in 2001.
AUT has got involved in training local college prefects in leadership. It’s not a big story in itself, but it highlights how few deep relationships there are between secondary and tertiary schools. MIT is obviously doing something about it, as is AUT in its way, but we are nowhere near as systematic as in, say, the US.