Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds said the legislation would include the possibility of selling off polytechnics, but the government would be unlikely to use that option. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
In a surprise move, the sale of polytechnics will be on the table when the national institute of technology Te Pūkenga is disestablished.
Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds on Friday announced the government would go ahead with its preferred option of re-establishing stand-alone polytechnics.
She told RNZ the legislation to do that would include the possibility of sale, but the government was not likely to use that option.
"It is unusual. It was just really to have a full range of actions that could be taken but it's not one that I would hope we would be having to move to but certainly if there was a region that wouldn't have a polytechnic then we would want to have all possible options looked at," she said.
Simmonds said though 16 polytechnics went into Te Pūkenga, there would be fewer once the mega-institute was disestablished.
Obvious candidates for mergers were those institutes that had previously had shared governing councils such as Unitec and Manukau Institute of Technology in Auckland, and Weltec and Whitireia in Wellington, Hutt Valley and Porirua.
Simmonds said latest forecasts indicated 10 of the former polytechnics could be stand-alone from 2026 with the remainder in a federation overseen by the Open Polytechnic.
The federation would be a permanent entity rather than a temporary arrangement, she said.
The minister also announced changes for workplace training.
She said the government would replace Workforce Development Councils with government-funded Industry Skills Boards as the bodies that set the standards for different industries.
However, the future of industry training for apprentices and others who learned on the job required further consultation.
She said that was because a new, third option had emerged from this year's consultation which proposed giving industry skills boards responsibility for managing apprentices, taking much of the workload off employers.
The idea was similar to the trusts that already organised apprenticeships in some industries, Simmonds said.
Staff still do not know what's happening, union says
Tertiary Education Union national secretary Sandra Grey said there was too little detail in the announcement and polytechnic staff still did not know what was happening.
"They were going to before Christmas have a clear plan for the future of the polytechnic sector and for vocational education overall. This announcement says stuff we know already. It doesn't give us any more idea of the security of jobs, of the security for courses that have been taught and even for the future of very small, regional polytechnic campuses," she said.
Grey said the only certainty was that the government's plan for polytechnics required major job and course cuts.
"This is a real concern of ours. She's looking to take six months practically to cut polytechnics to pieces and then what ever's left at the end of that which will be a shadow of its former self will be left to be part of a federation or stand alone," Grey said.
On the suggestion of polytechnic sales, Grey said the government had no right to sell community assets such as polytechnic campuses.
Civil Contractors New Zealand chief executive Allan Pollard said the government had listened to industry, but there was still a lot to be decided about workplace training.
"The problem is we're still looking for some certainty and with certainty comes confidence. At the moment the construction sector broadly has taken a real confidence hit and more uncertainty doesn't help things at this stage," he said.
Pollard said he was disappointed the Workforce Development Councils were going because they gave industry more influence over the skills trainees learned.