Tertiary education funding is the same. The more rules there are the more difficult the interpretation becomes and the better ‘players’ succeed because they know how to work them.

Rent seeking mindset? Absolutely.

The answer, if there is one is to reduce the rules and make them simplier and less susceptible to interpretation. We’ll get a much more open game.

The same principle might just work for tertiary education funding.

‘The 5-point try and learned helplessness’

I’d Like to make a point about the dependency mentality fostered by the ‘Education system’ that pervades these discussions /news items, amongst us education policy wonks/ practitioners, that people running actual businesses might find a little depressing.

The particular funding mechanisms that we delight in inventing, comparing, tinkering with, and ‘improving’ are in themselves a mini industry, and I question the value added to date (i.e. in the last 25 years since I have been following the issues from various perspectives). Rational attempts to create an equitable and objective method or system of scoring and identifying a desired output, and quantum of value, seems to create an endless regress of problems, as successive generations of managers study the rules in order to extract maximum advantage from the revised incentive pattern. Most efforts to change the ‘system’ get bogged down in resistance and guerilla warfare from those who perceive their advantage or interests to be threatened. Management energy is necessarily trained on the need to position one’s organisation to maximum advantage within the constantly changing incentivisation pattern. This imperative then leads to actions which are perceived as ‘bad behaviour’. As the old proverb from family therapy has it, ‘Inconsistent parenting leads to manipulative child behaviour’. There is more than a coincidental connection between system ‘scoring’ mechanisms, and the recent history of ‘behaviour’. The way the game is scored determines how it is played.

As an example, we now have Polytech CEOs complaining about their inability to meet increased demand, as they have reached their ‘caps’. There is no hint that they are conscious of their fiduciary responsibilities as Public servants, responsible for the proper management of public resources, to be constantly seeking and creating effectiveness and efficiency gains as part of the overall requirement of Fiscal responsibility on the part of the wider state sector of the economy. Instead, ‘students are being turned away’… This is learned helplessness.

If we had a ‘system’ whose ‘scoring’ incentivised entrepreneurial innovation in educational value production, we would see these CEOs reporting how they had been able to meet increased demand through efficiency and effectiveness gains. It might seem like a radical and politically impossible dream to bring in such a system, but humans are quite good at inventing new ideas and adapting old ones. It is clear that a system where state funding is rationed by a fixed amount per student , encourages rent-seeking behaviour.

I can promise that enormous, and necessary, gains in educational productivity are readily available, if we change the rucking rules for the annual funding scrum.

I will also suggest that not all completions are equal. For example, for some businesses a Supplementary Credit Programme of 20 odd credits may be of equal value to a full level 3 certificate of 80 odd credits, and those businesses or industry sub-sector might prefer a 50:50 mix of both. If qualification completion becomes a KPI then funding will shift to the qualification completion away from SCPs and produce a less productive outcome.

Can the system handle the types of judgments officials will have to make to keep the outcome in mind rather then the outputs relating to KPIs?

Wayne raises a lot of issues and it would be great to get some further comments.