Speech: Street - Tertiary Education, Whose Future?
new-zealand-labour-party
Fri Aug 14 2009 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Speech: Street - Tertiary Education, Whose Future?
Friday, 14 August 2009, 10:36 am
Speech: New Zealand Labour Party
13 August 2009 Speech
Tertiary Education – Whose Future?
Speech to New Zealand Higher Education Summit, Duxton Hotel, Wellington.
Thank you for the invitation to be here today.
I wish to distil my thoughts on the future of tertiary education into three areas: purpose, priorities and prospects.
Today I want to raise some questions about the value of tertiary education, in all its forms, and the priority we attach to it. I intend to take the widest possible definition of tertiary education, meaning everything on offer in the post-compulsory sector. That includes adult community education offered through high school programmes and the community organisations they support, universities, polytechs, wänanga, private training establishments, industry training organisations and all institutions in between.
Purpose
We are all familiar with the statistics around school leavers and the number of students who leave school without Level 2 qualifications. While we achieve extremely well in international literacy and numeracy statistics, at the same time we are still failing a large proportion of our young people in the way we prepare them for their future.
This represents a waste of human capital, an affront to egalitarianism and an impoverished future for the individuals and for our society.
Our policy to address some of this at the time of the last election was Schools Plus, which sought to blur the boundaries between compulsory and post-compulsory education, with a particular emphasis on attracting students early on in their school life into pathways which kept them in education and training, leading to richer employment.
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That was and still is only part of the effort required.
Outside the school gate is the myriad of opportunities which exist in our system, from PTEs to ITPs, night classes to block courses, diplomas to doctorates. Each of these is valuable and contributes something important to the development of New Zealanders.
But extraordinary times call for more creative measures. If we go back to first principles and consider what tertiary education is for, I would offer the following:
• To give individuals the opportunity to realise their full potential;
• To create an informed, diverse, cohesive and productive polity;
• To create new knowledge and productive application of that knowledge;
• To add richness and capability to every aspect of our existence.
All of that comes at a price. But when those fundamentals are threatened, as they are right now by the constraints of a recession, more needs to be put in, not less.
How are we to train and retrain workers if there is not some movement in a recession to accommodate those who are being turfed out of the workforce? What kind of future are we sentencing them to?
And here we come to the priorities.
Priorities
Nothing crystallises priorities quite like a recession. The pressure which is put on decision-making is extraordinary but useful for exposing fundamental values and principles.
What is clear to me is that at a time of downturn, when people are being made redundant at a rate of some 300 a day or 2000 a week, as has been the case every week over the last three months, investment in education is a critical priority. This is the moment when a government has to invest in its people, not shut down opportunities to retrain and upskill.
If we are to emerge quickly and successfully from this recession, then investment needs to be made now, right across the tertiary education sector. The United Kingdom is considering creating another 10,000 places at British universities; Australia has delivered a multi-billion dollar package to its tertiary education sector.
This is the moment in our own country when the caps on enrolments need to be revisited, in a way which is agreed and negotiated between institutions and the government. Uncapped enrolments are not viable for a government and unfunded increases in enrolments are not viable for institutions.
Of course there is always room for improvement in any part of the tertiary education sector. Any government should constantly seek improved teaching and learning outcomes from the sector, along with lower cost structures. In return, there should be responsive investment from government.
What we have right now is a $40 billion investment in infrastructure over the next ten years, $32.5 billion of which is to be spent on roads. There will be jobs created but will the businesses involved be encouraged to develop their workers and reward them with portable qualifications? What if we were to have one road fewer and that money spent instead on tertiary education – perhaps funding more places at universities, polytechs and wänanga?
We have $50 million going into a cycleway which will produce 270 jobs perhaps. Why could that money not be put into high performing and essential industry training organisations to allow them to continue to educate apprentices and support employers who might otherwise lay off these young people?
Why spend $35 million over four years to prop up private schools on the pretext that this will give more parents greater choice when a reconfiguration of that money could save one of the lowest-cost, highest-benefit sectors in education, the Adult Community Education sector, from destruction? Taking $13 million out of this sector neglects its profound importance to the social cohesion and strength of communities large and small throughout the country, not to mention its role in skills acquisition, literacy and numeracy training, and second chance education.
Why provide $523 million for school buildings and neglect the people inside, both teachers, through cutting professional development funding and pupils through cutting funding to support students with disabilities? Some of that money could have been used to advance trades training across every single secondary school instead of setting up five trades academies which will be distant from and inaccessible to many of the target group of young people.
When I turn to our university sector in particular, it seems to me that there has been no consideration in the recent budget of the contribution they can make – albeit with improvements – in these recessionary times. Of course the quality of teaching needs to improve – and so do academic salaries. We should be hiring the brightest and best to teach the brightest and best. Perhaps we should consider a coolly calculated, evidence-based assessment of what universities actually contribute before we start shutting their doors to new enrolments. There can be no excuse for closing the doors of universities and polytechs, for the first time in our history, when New Zealand’s answers so clearly lie in higher education, greater levels of numeracy and literacy, higher Maori and Pasifika achievement and more innovative and applied research.
The rescue of many of our primary industries in New Zealand lies in the productive collaboration of universities, Crown Research Institutes, private research facilities and industry. The recently aborted merger between AgResearch and Lincoln University has made me go right back to the drawing board to question whether or not we have structured our research effort in the best way for the future. Are there more efficient ways of organising our research capability that deliver results which can be readily commercialised? This has to be a priority if we are to future-proof our industries and gain maximum benefit from the investment of public (and private) money.
There are always choices to be made in constrained and unconstrained times. What you prioritise depends on what you think tertiary education and training is for. I see tertiary education, in all its forms, as the single most important contributor to our country’s resilience, recovery and renewed prospects.
Prospects
It is not going to be easy to accelerate New Zealand out of this recession. While international consumer demand remains low, our tradable sector will struggle, especially in those areas of commodity trading where margins are low. Newly emerging markets, assisted by free trade agreements, have enormous potential for us but they will only be realised with careful and substantial long term investment, from both government and industry. And while our tradable sector struggles, our basis of wealth creation stagnates.
Climate change and emissions reduction are two other areas of urgent and pressing concern. There is no coincidence that they come to mind immediately after comment on our export sector. Our ability to market ourselves on the basis of our clean, green, 100% pure New Zealand brand is priceless but we must back it with real change and dramatic improvements in our management of natural resources and the industries arising from them. That is a particular challenge for a country with an emissions profile like ours.
Science is one of the answers to these challenges. Recently on the Education and Science select committee, the Crown Research Institutes were appearing in the context of Financial Reviews. My question to each of them was: are we growing scientists? In my pilgrimage around all the Vice-Chancellors and CEOs of polytechs and wänanga so far this year, I have been asking about their major scientific research efforts. I know that Professor Peter Gluckman will add a great deal to the government’s consideration of these matters in the future and I welcome his contribution.
We must create incentives and capacity to produce research which adds to our efficiency, our ability to add value to our primary industries and our stock of clever researchers.
That is why we created the $700 million Fast Forward Fund – aimed at our primary food-producing industries. Even in the one year of its existence, it had returned an additional $15 million. With matching industry funding, it was projected that we would have a fund of $2 billion in ten years to bolster our research effort. Coupled with that, we introduced the Research and Development tax credit which would have been delivering its first dividend about now if it had not been axed.
Recently at the World Conference on Higher Education, hosted by UNESCO, 1000 participants from 150 countries called on governments to increase their investment in higher education. They said this in their final communiqué:
“At no time in history has it been more important to invest in higher education as a major force in building an inclusive and diverse knowledge society and to advance research, innovation and creativity.”
The cynic might say that they would say that, wouldn’t they? They also stressed the need for enhanced teacher training and greater regional cooperation over such things as recognition of qualifications.
These are legitimate calls. New Zealand’s prospects depend on our ability to add value to those things we do well already, to protect our clean, green marketing brand by making a real difference to our greenhouse gas emissions and our husbanding of natural resources, and to innovate in areas where we are not penalised by our distance to market such as high-tech industries.
All of these require greater investment in getting smarter – or tertiary education. From Adult Community Education which provides low cost, accessible upskilling opportunities and second chance education provided through a domestic infrastructure built up over decades, to high-end blue skies research in a university, no opportunity can be overlooked.
Individual human beings have enormous ability to turn a ‘hobby’ class into a small business, algae into bio fuels, antenatal nutrition into higher lamb and calf yields. We can do things better than we have in the past.
We can work smarter to stop young people from becoming disenchanted with education at an early stage. We can alter the compulsory and post-compulsory education interface to keep more young people in education and training for longer. We can enhance trades training opportunities through a range of delivery mechanisms so that we do not get highs and lows of supply of qualified tradespeople.
We can coordinate diploma and degree programmes offered by polytechs, wänanga and universities so that institutions can share teachers and knowledge and step learners through double branded qualifications. We can and are doing these things to a greater or lesser degree around the country.
We need to reform tertiary education through requiring top quality teaching, getting top quality learning outcomes, promoting top quality research and rewarding it in salaries which are not a disincentive to stay here. But this requires investment on the part of government and a willingness to prioritise the sector above other demands.
The best prospects for New Zealand will come out of tertiary education.
We have real challenges in front of us. All of you have your role in meeting those challenges as I have mine. I wish all of us well!
ENDS
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