Dissolving of Te Pūkenga will allow separate polytechs be 'the masters of their own destiny'

The dissolving of the mega-polytech Te Pūkenga will give certainty back to the the separate institutes to run their own ship, the tertiary education minister says.

The individual polytechs have made a collective loss of $185 million this year.

Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds told Morning Report with the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga, decisions about redundancies will be made at the local level.

Simmonds said the polytechs have had a "dreadful time" over the past four years and it had been a long period of uncertainty for them.

"I think it will be giving quite a lot of certainty back to the institutions that they are going to be masters of their own destiny," she said.

"It's a very difficult situation to be sitting out in an ITO or a regional polytechnic, not knowing what decisions are going to be made at head office on your behalf.

"That ability to make decisions, and in some instances that will be to downsize certain areas or to increase certain areas, that's giving them, again, the ability to be the masters of their own destiny."

Despite some staff telling RNA they were not on board with the plan, Simon's said "the vast majority" were "absolutely on board" and wanted to get back to a system that was much less centralised.

Simmonds said any decisions on redundancies would be made at a local level.

She also denied the changes would be more costly - as it was a "very expensive" head office.

The institute's 2022 report showed 5 percent of its 1285 staff worked for its head office.

Simmonds said she hoped none of the polytechs would close down. There was "likely to be some consolidation", with some working with others as "back office support".

The Tertiary Education Union Et Haiti Kahurangi has portrayed the disestablishment as abandoning hundreds of millions of dollars of work with no plan for what comes next.