National has vigorously opposed the Government’s Reform of Vocational Education (ROVE) and has confirmed at the Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) in Invercargill this week that it would return regional education back to the regions, undoing a significant part of the reforms.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!“This incompetent Government’s tertiary reforms will gut New Zealand’s regional education. The reforms were already putting polytechnic jobs under threat and now with the Government refusing to work on reopening international education, more will be on the line. A National Government would unwind these reforms within our first 100 days,” said National’s education spokesperson and deputy leader Nikki Kaye.
“While there needs to be some reconfiguring of the polytechnic sector, high performing polytechnics like SIT should be left to do what they have been doing well,” added party’s tertiary education spokesperson Dr Shane Reti.
On the question of what it means, National elaborated, “Polytechnics have been converted into subsidiaries of New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology (NZIST). National will reverse this and re-establish polytechnics as independent legal entities. The employment agreements that were transferred to the new subsidiaries will be transferred back to polytechnics. The new entities that have recently been created or are planned to be created in the coming weeks (NZIST, the Workforce Development Councils (WDC), the Regional Skills Leaderships Groups and Te Taumata Aronui) will all be disestablished.”
– TIN Bureau