Yesterday Radio New Zealand ran a story and I’ve pasted the key details below and audio is here.

Only 43% of students successfully finish their courses, compared with almost twice as many at Te Wananga o Aotearoa (76%), and Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi (89%). Te Wananga o Raukawa’s Chief Executive, Mereana Selby, says the statistics are not good. But she says other wananga tend to select already high achieving students for their programmes. Ms Selby says Raukawa’s philosophy is to accept all those who are willing to learn. She says work has started to improve the low course completion rate, with many tutors undergoing professional development to strengthen students’ understanding of numeracy and literacy.

What amazes me about this story is what a bad rationale Mereana Selby came up with (and I’m relying on RNZ’s translation from the Maori). She says that they have an open enrolment policy compared to the other wananga’s selective policies, but that is unsupportable. TWOA is a mass market provider that relies on large enrolments in open entry programmes – p.6 of its enrolment guide basically says that most programmes are open entry. Awanuiarangi has a mix of entry requirements from open entry to more restrictive for their degree programmes (but most of their enrolments are sub-degree). Besides all that, Raukawa has quality assurance requirements to ensure people who enter have a good chance in the programme and support them in completing it.

It might have been better for Raukawa just to admit that they haven’t prioritised completions that much and now they’re working on literacy and numeracy to improve completions (and good on them for it). That’s a simple and accurate line as opposed to claiming that your peer institutions are creaming off the best students.

I wonder whether Te Wananga O Raukawa (Raukawa) should be funded in 2012. You see, they had the worst course completions of any tertiary education institution (public providers) in 2009 at 42%. The latest figures, just announced (here is Raukawa’s report), show that their 2010 course completions were 43%, a paltry improvement of 1%. That’s pretty poor.

You might wonder why I’m questioning Raukawa’s future funding. My reason is that, for PTEs with a successful course completion rate below 55%, the TEC has started 2012 funding negotiations with a zero allocation, as shown below.

“PTEs with 2010 successful course completions of 55% or less will receive an initial funding allocation of zero. This allocation applies regardless of 2010 delivery volume.”

That means that the TEC has defined very poor performance in PTEs as having successful course completion below 55% and proposes to offer no funding in 2012 to those PTEs. Since PTEs offer courses under the same quality assurance framework and report data in the same way as Raukawa does, the comparison is reasonable.

Last year, Waiariki Institute of Technology also had poor course completions, at 50%, but they have increased that to 65%. I gave Waiariki a hard time last year and am happy to recognise their good performance this time around. That post last year highlighted that Raukawa, Waiariki and 16 PTEs had course completions below 50%. Waiariki pulled finger and the PTEs either improved or are facing no funding in 2012, so what’s happening with Raukawa? Has TEC started negotiations with them with a zero allocation? If not, why not?

TEC has just released the Education Performance Indicators for 2010 for all providers and industry training organisations. I’m writing detailed reviews on the EPI data for the subscription-based ED Insider, but I thought I’d focus on a few specific issues on ED Blog. If you’d like to write a guest post, let me know.

Update 25/1/12 TEC announced a funding cut for Te Wananga O Raukawa for 2012 in December 2011, as a result of the low completions. That suggests that TEC is taking an evenhanded approach on the matter across different providers.

First up, he seems to have taken hook, line and sinker the Labour myth that National destroyed industry training in the 1990s and Labour fixed it – check out the following quote.

“Ideologically, a National-led government could easily shift more training costs to businesses, arguing they benefit from upskilling their staff so they should pay for it. But this was exactly the deeply damaging mistake the Bolger government made with the Industry Training Act of 1992. It radically reformed skills training, leaving only skeletal government support. Quickly, many companies developed a new training culture. Rather than take responsibility themselves, they poached skilled staff from competitors that kept training. As a result, the number of people in formal workplace training plunged and skills shortages became chronic.

Reviving industry training was one of the key planks of Helen Clark’s 1999 election campaign. The Modern Apprenticeship Act of 2002 was one of her government’s first major pieces of legislation. It created Industry Training Organisations, each tasked with developing government-funded programmes for its specific sector.”

Rod’s argument has many errors.

First, ITOs were established by the Industry Training Act 1992, by National, 7 years before Helen Clark gained power.

Second, there was no “skeletal” support for ITOs. They got substantial start-up grants to explore feasibility (which is partly why we ended up with so many ITOs) and then had funding transferred from polytechnics to purchase training. Everyone wants more money, but ITOs were not starved.

Third, workplace training did not plunge due to the Industry Training Act 1992. The table below shows that industry training numbers started falling in the March 1988 year, when Labour was in power. The drop is unsurprising given the huge structural changes being made in the economy, education and in labour markets over that period – an increase would have been surprising. Even though the decline started under Labour, it reached its highest percentage decline in the June 1992 year (the Industry Training Act became law on 22 June 1992, so can’t bear too much blame). The decline continued until the June 1993 year, after which numbers rose the next year.

The rise in workplace training numbers in 1994 was not a one-off. As the table below shows, industry training numbers increased throughout the 1990s, with a 43% (!) increase in the June 1998 year. These tables finish in the December 2002 year, but the numbers continued to increase through the rest of Labour’s 1999-2008 term. If you compare growth in the two nine year terms of National and Labour, trainee numbers went up by around 120% in both periods (NB the tables are sourced from an ITF report, co-authored by now-Labour MP Chris Hipkins). Labour did a great job of branding industry training as their own, but they weren’t unique in their support for the area. Both parties have played an important part in fostering industry training (and in contributing to the long-term focus on participation, rather than achievement, which has recently ended rather badly).

Rod Oram also wrote that ITOs “offer a confusing array of 4600 qualifications at levels one to six”, whereas readers will know that the majority of qualifications are owned by providers, not ITOs.

Rod’s piece has been undermined by some serious errors of fact, but he also makes some boilerplate arguments for better school-work links.

I am supportive of some of Rod’s ending comments. There he points to an important issue: the recently announced industry training review may have a focus that is too narrow.

“Theoretically the review just launched can look beyond industry training to all related areas of vocational training. Two crucial areas are how to better anticipate what new skills need to be taught and how to better co-ordinate the training of ITOs and polytechs. But the review is due to be completed early next year. So it will inevitably be rushed and superficial. It runs the risk of failing to give employees and employers the much-improved systems and resources they urgently need.”

Competenz had to repay over half of the total, at $2.2m, while the (since taken over) Local Govt ITO paid back the highest proportion of 2009 funding, at 21.4%. You can see all the details below, from the TEC media release.

Having a think about it, I’m not sure how much there is to this issue. Almost half of ITOs are caught up in this, but 10 of the named ITOs had 5% or less of their funding recovered. I suspect a tough audit of a range of providers against newly-developed measures would find some bad results too. What is probably of more interest is those ITOs where 10% or more of funding was clawed back: Apparel and Textile ITO, Competenz, Equine, Local Govt, Seafood and Social Services. If you can’t account for that large a proportion of trainees, then you might have real system problems – the EER report for the Local Govt ITO certainly suggested they were somewhat of a basketcase.

The news post is late today because my monitoring supplier’s site is down. I’ll run it when I can get access.

• Best Policy The release of performance data on tertiary education organisations wins hands down. We can all find reasons why the data isn’t perfect but it makes it pretty hard to hide a decision to run a lot of rubbish courses and it shifts funding towards results, rather than enrolments. It will change the tertiary landscape.
• Worst Policy Interest-free loans continues to be a major drain on taxpayers and diverts tertiary education investment unnecessarily. If we even adjusted loans for inflation we would save hundreds of millions of dollars and it would have no or minimal effect on access. Luckily for other policy-makers and lobbyists, their policy is unlikely to displace free loans as worst policy of the year for the foreseeable future
• Best News Story Well, it had to be the husband asking the MOE to do something about his wife sleeping with a Brazilian homestay student. Blogging gold that one was.
• Best Regulatory Response I’ll give a joint award to NZQA and Immigration NZ for finally pulling finger and doing something about those bottom-feeding providers, mainly in Auckland, that exploit international students and/or NZ by poor education, visa fraud and cheating. It took them long enough, but they have been firm on a few places and it is great to see. There is more to do in 2011.
• Best TEO initiative The work on commercialisation that both the Metro ITPs and the universities did was great, both in websites and other work. There is much more to go in terms of actions and results, but they did something very positive and it deserves to be recognised. Many TEOs did other good things, but these were substantive efforts to address a largely unserved need.
• Best Use of Social Media I can’t go past Jason Nockels’ work up at UCOL. He’s built up a following of 3,700 fans on Facebook and he and the team are still working on new ideas.
• Ministerial Assessment Well, I liked Steven Joyce’s work this year and since I wrote about his appointment in my second post of the year, I’ve covered all of his time in the role. He hasn’t presented an awe-inspiring vision for the sector but he’s pushed through some important issues , (like performance reporting and performance funding), appointed a strong chair to TEC, encouraged NZQA in its review of quals (Anne Tolley started that), approved sensible TEI mergers and generally done a very effective job. He gets 8/10.
• Opposition Assessment Grant Robertson picked up Labour’s tertiary education role in June and he’s been reasonably effective over that time. He stepped away from Maryan Street’s focus on ACE and has spent more time on issues like caps and student support changes (these became bigger after the May budget too). He hasn’t landed any blows on Joyce and I think that’s partly because it is a big hurdle to take over a new portfolio, but also because it is hard to get traction essentially pushing for more spending when the deficit is so high. He gets 5/10. He’ll improve next year as he’s very capable, but tertiary education won’t be an election issue unless National puts loans on the table, so you may hear more of him in his other (or new) portfolios. (In terms of the Greens, I’d give them 2-3/10 for being there, but they made no impact.)
• CEs in the Media The straight talking to the universities and the TEU about why graduate outcomes matter by Unitec’s Rick Ede was great. On the other hand it would have been good to hear more from Massey’s Steve Maharey on campus/course closures and the cleaning staff dispute.
• Worst Last Minute Document Drop This one goes to NZQA, which released its detailed guidelines for L1-6 qualification approval late on 21 December, two days after their last newsletter of the year! I’m sure you’ll all read that on the beach…

By the way, we didn’t trawl through every blog post, shortlist finalists and invite in neutral judges to help in the decision. Marina and I spent a few minutes chatting at the end of a cafe meeting (yup, that’s what consultants do all day), so feel free to add your own take on the year below!

This post will probably be the last until the 10th of January, unless something really exciting comes up. If it’s just exciting, I’ll pop something on Facebook or Twitter – sign up on the site, top right. And if your media team just put out a puff piece to get some easy coverage in the news dead period, I’ll get back to reading my book.