1. What’s the biggest challenge on your desk right now?

Rethinking the education-employment nexus. There are some really interesting models of work-integrated learning emerging around the world (check out this story for example). We intend to make a habit of exploring and validating these sorts of approaches in the NZ context. Watch this space.

2. What made you smile about your organisation this week?

Coming back to the office after a nice break and seeing the pukeko grazing in the grass in front of the marae, the Auckland Blues training on the sports fields, and summer school student cars in the car park. Welcome to Unitec!

3. Unitec has had ads following 3 students through their studies over the last year. What have the ads achieved for Unitec?

A number of ED blog followers will be well aware of Unitec’s 10+ year history of university aspiration. One of the outcomes of that was to confuse our community about who we were and what we stood for. The campaign is in support of a significant repositioning of Unitec into the applied and work-integrated learning arena (back to the future if you like),  told through the experiences of our students. The feedback we are getting so far from our research is that this is working quite nicely. By the way, a documentary is also in production that will show later on this year.

4.What’s the key priority right now for the Metro Group of ITPs, which you are now chairing?

It’s pretty hard to argue right now that NZ has a particularly coherent vocational education and training sector. Through a combination of legislation, policy, funding, and the actions of various players in the system itself we have allowed a somewhat fragmented and  competitive model to evolve. This is not in the best interests of NZ. We think it’s time to rise above that and deliver a coherent and aligned VET sector that is focussed on delivering our students and trainees an excellent platform for their future careers, and on helping NZ businesses to succeed.

5. You’re looking to redevelop the northern part of your Mt Albert campus. Will there be a roller coaster?

Interesting thought Dave – while roller coasters are so last Tuesday, given that we’ve got MOTAT and Auckland Zoo just down the road, maybe we have an opportunity to develop a theme park cluster to rival the Gold Coast (the Pt Chev beach is really quite nice!!). Seriously however, we have more land than we need at our Mt Albert campus and we think there is an opportunity for a really smart mixed-use development, which enhances our community, improves the experience our students receive and provides an endowment to support our core learning activities. Come to think of it, maybe the roller coaster is a good idea!

Unitec’s CE Rick Ede is the new Chair for the Metro Group of ITOs (whoops! Should be “ITPs”, as Rick pointed out in comments…). He’s picking up from WelTec’s CE Linda Sissons, who has chaired the group since 2009. The note I got said that the Metro Group’s aim was unchanged, being “contribute to the overall improvement in the country’s economic performance through being an efficient, effective and relevant driver of economic success”. Now I’m actually not sure what the Metro Group does to achieve that – the individual ITPs certainly do contribute, but I thought the Metro Group was just a lobby group for its members. I’m happy to be proven wrong. Anyway, I’m sure Rick will do a good job with the lobbying.

Mark Oldershaw is the new CE of the Industry Training Federation. He started on Monday and has formerly been involved with Network PR, the National Party and the NZ Hotel Council. As a sidebar, I had been providing some assistance to the ITF during their gap between CEs, but that’s now done (bar a last couple of things by the end of the week). Given my involvement over the last couple of months, I’ll be unable to speak freely on some ITO matters for a while yet.

Victoria’s VC Pat Walsh is the incoming chair of Universities New Zealand. He’s starting on 1 January, taking over from AUT’s VC Derek McCormack. Pat will focus on the serious underfunding of NZ’s universities and threats to their autonomy, if he’s like all his predecessors…J

• 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.

This new initiative shows that the Metros are starting to fulfil some of the promise they had when they broke away from ITPNZ (which I worked for at the time), which then represented all 20 ITPs, to form their own group. NZITP (which now represents the other 14 ITPs) has not done much in public to date, but this latest announcement and the joint BEngTech degree certainly puts the Metros on the map. Other ITPs will be able to join Innovating New Zealand from 2011.

This is a very important development in the ITP sector, as ITPs have struggled to work cooperatively on national initiatives. The Metros’ Group now has two such initiatives under their belt and this latest one has considerable potential to reposition the sector as a credible national partner for business, rather than a set of individual regional institutions. The negative views about ITPs amongst national business groups cannot be underestimated – there is real goodwill there, but an exasperation that ITPs can’t offer a credible common response to business concerns. In that environment, the new site has real potential – it just needs to work now.

I’d also like to recognise TEC’s role in all of this. TEC funded the Metros to link up their commercialisation/research arms last year and this project is an outcome of that. For too long, ITPs have had an applied research role, but have not really had any funding or encouragement to pursue it. The ITPs have also been quite uneven, offering strong support in one area but no support in another. This TEC-supported project seems like a sensible way to build scale and coverage by leveraging the expertise of ITPs around the country, so that expertise in one area can be shared across NZ. It is the sort of cooperation that will be needed to make the new qualifications approach work too – and that will be much harder as teaching makes up about 99% of ITPs’ activities, while commercial research is less than 1%. But this is a bloody good start.

PS The universities have done a good thing too, but I encouraged them back in May about cooperative commercialisation work.