'Change fatigue' hits vocational education

RNZ News

11-05-2025

Trades training and vocational education is bearing the brunt of political to-ing and fro-ing, some industry figures say (file photo).
Photo:
Supplied/ UCOL
It's been called 'change fatigue' and the tertiary sector covering vocational education is exhausted by the meddling of successive governments.
Since 2020 there have been major upheavals with vocational training and polytechnics, and the key word for those in the industry is uncertainty.
There's also frustration at the amount of money spent rearranging the deckchairs for ideological reasons, instead of just getting on with the job of equipping students for work.
"In effect what we are doing is, we are holding hostage the adequate, in favour of the perfect," says Professor John Tookey. He is an AUT academic who deals with construction industries in developing advanced trades training. He talks to
The Detail
today about the dangers of throwing away a workable system and replacing it in haste.
"You're going to burn through an awful lot of good will in the trades training world to a point where those journeymen type of operators who've been around for a long time are just going to throw their hands up and say, 'enough. Not going to play any more'."
The disruption started
in 2020
when Labour decided to centralise and standardise polytechnics, and bring trades training in under one umbrella, with a mega-organisation called Te Pūkenga.
Workforce Development Councils were established to ensure training courses were fitting students for industry jobs, to set standards and develop qualifications.
The transition was messy, half the CEOs of the polytechs resigned, staff were being made redundant, enrolments dropped and courses started to close.
But before the new body had time to sort itself out, National kept an election promise to dismantle it.
Workforce Development Councils will be
gone by the end of this year, to be replaced by
around seven Industry Skills Boards.
None of those boards include the creative or digital technology industries, which frustrates Paula Browning, the chair of WeCreate, an alliance that covers all sorts of creative and tech industries, from music to publishing to interactive media and fashion.
Creative industries contribute more than $17 billion to the economy, generate $4.1bn in export revenue and support more than 117,000 jobs. Digital technology is a sector that Kiwis are excelling in globally. It's worth $13.4bn in exports a year, and contributes more than $17bn to GDP.
Browning says they're being sidelined by the new changes, and Workforce Development Councils haven't been given a chance to work.
"We had to, along with the digital sector, fight tooth and nail to get creative and digital as part of that system," she says.
"In the proposed model that the government's looking at now, creative, tech and business skills are going back under NZQA, so they won't have one of the new industry standards boards that are proposed.
"What we are doing with these proposals is looking to put those industries of the future, back into the past, and it just doesn't make sense."
The government promises that every effort will be made to make sure that learning is not disrupted, but Paula Browning questions how that will happen without a transition plan and just seven months to get the work done.
"And for some of us there is no transition ... it's just, 'you're out of here'. And it just feels like we're doing something in haste that we are going to regret in the not too distant future."
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