Going from bad to worse. The official start of the national polytech (Te Pukenga) merger was 01 January 2023. As Education Minister, Hipkins promised to take a good look at the dire situation last year as admin and costs ballooned and the new crown entity seemed to struggle to get off the ground.
“I’m fearful that we’ve put all of our eggs into the Te Pukenga basket,” former co-leader of Unitec and Waiariki Polytechnics Keith Ikin said. […]
Ikin was involved with Te Pukenga until the end of last year. He dreads “the ongoing carnage of non-achievement and non-delivery just continues on”, and if it got worse, it would be a travesty, he said.
Merran Davis, who was CEO of Auckland’s Unitec Institute of Technology before joining Te Pukenga in September 2020, said things were getting worse in terms of enrollments, equity, staff morale and student morale.
“That will continue to happen because the trust and credibility is gone,” Davis said.
Steve McCabe, a senior lecturer at MIT who also functions as MIT’s TEU (Tertiary Education Union) Branch President, said people would start pulling out.
“It’s going to be a death spiral,” he warned.
“If we continue to operate in this way, we are going to see the entire edifice just collapse.”
The merge of the 24 polytechs, tech institutes and industry training organisations cost $200 million.
National’s Tertiary Spokesperson Penny Simmonds said, “it would be reasonable to expect that lots of things were happening much better than they were.
“Better services for students, that things were going better for staff, that it was breaking even or running a surplus,” she said.
“But of course, none of those things have happened and it’s running a big deficit.”
At the end of last year, Te Pukenga forecast a $110 million deficit. That was revised down to $63 million, closer to the budgeted deficit of $59 million.
But, a recent leak shows the national school has requested $330 million more from this year’s Budget.
“We know that some of the early requests were for nearly a billion dollars over ten years.
“They will be coming back asking for more money,” Simmonds said.
And, it seems, that four years down the track, the school still doesn’t have an operating model.
Meanwhile, National says it will consolidate the 16 polytechs down to 10.
Read more here. Discuss it on The BFD.