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Overseas academics won't take the risk

Rather than increase labour mobility, as the government intends, the 90 day fire-at-will law will make people more reluctant to change jobs. That is the view of the TEU national secretary Sharn Riggs, in her submission to the Industrial Relations Select Committee this week.

Ms Riggs believes that the 90 day fire-at-will provision in the government's proposed new employment laws will scare some of the world's best academics off taking the risk of working in New Zealand.

"Tertiary education employees will be at their most vulnerable when changing jobs, and this will make them more reluctant to move here. Many New Zealand academics may decide it is safer to take an overseas job offer as their next career step, leaving New Zealand for better job security overseas."

Ms Riggs is also worried that many immigrants will be reluctant to undertake considerable risk and upheaval to come to New Zealand if they are aware their new employment may be subject to a 90-day no-rights trial.

"New Zealand recruits a significant proportion of academics from overseas – we actively seek to learn from their knowledge and experience.  However tertiary institutions will find that their opportunity to recruit excellent overseas candidates diminishes, because academics will be unwilling to risk moving here with such uncertainty around their continued employment."

Among the quotes from TEU members who submitted to the select committee were comments such as:

• "Coming from Europe, I would have never risked coming to a country where I could have been fired for no reasons less than 90 days after starting."


• "Since salaries are lower than in Australia, New Zealand has to demonstrate better working conditions than other countries to attract or retain skilled employees."


• "I may be looking for a new job as a result of this restructuring, and it will be more stressful if I know that I can be dismissed without reason during the first 90 days."


• "We rely heavily on attracting world-class academics from overseas universities.  But who would uproot their whole family and move half way round the world when there's the chance of being sacked without reason within the first 90 days?  That's not a risk any sensible person would take."

Also in Tertiary Update this week

1. Musical chairs for remaining Massey jobs


2. New Aussie govt to focus on skills


3. Commission set to release league table for rugby teams


4. Student-teacher ratios higher than OECD average


5. Other news

Musical chairs for remaining Massey jobs

More than 25 Massey staff will lose their jobs saving the university $1.5 million. Massey released the final decision on its Shared Services Review late last week in which it announced it would disestablish 63 jobs, and expect current staff to contend for 38 new positions. It has also not filled other positions during the review, making a total reduction of 30 positions.

The Manawatu Standard reports that most of the job losses will be in Palmerston North, with administrators, teaching consultants and student advisers among those being made redundant.

The changes are being made under the 'One University' initiative, which will see 184 staff reshuffled as the university's support services are centralised. Previously, administration was done individually by each of the five colleges.

TEU branch president Harvey Jones told the Standard that Massey initially talked of disestablishing 120 positions, but pressure from the union and more than 200 submissions from affected parties brought this down to 68. However he said the final decision had still come as a shock to staff.

"Many of the staff were trying to put it off or pretending it wasn't there, so they would have received the final letter today [Friday last week] and it all makes it quite concrete for them over the weekend," Mr Jones said.

"There will be too many to fit into a reduced number of roles, so  they will be in competition with each other, or looking elsewhere. Either way it's going to be difficult over the next few months."

Massey communications director James Gardiner said the job cuts weren't about savings, but about getting the university structure right.

"We are confident this is a much better structure and has put us in a much better position," Mr Gardiner said.

New Aussie govt to focus on skills

The Australian National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is concerned that the new Australian government's narrow focus on skills risks undervaluing the sector.

"Like many others in the higher education sector, NTEU is concerned about the message being sent to the Australian community and the rest of the world by including higher education under the 'skills' banner," NTEU Victorian Division Secretary Matthew McGowan said.

"There are significant challenges facing the sector in the immediate future with increasing demands for greater participation and a fragile international student market.  With a heavy skills focus, the government must be conscious of the broader responsibilities of the sector to the critical engagement with society and the world rather than merely skilling the labour force."

Vice chancellors in Australia are however, for the most part, expressing relief at the election result and the new government.

Professor Peter Coaldrake, chair of Universities Australia, the vice-chancellors' lobby group, told The Australian newspaper: "It means stability and continuity because the government's higher education reform package is a known quantity."

As part of the deal to persuade independent MPs to support her government Prime Minister Gillard, has announced that AU$500 million from the Education Investment Fund would go to regional Australia over the next four years.

That is likely to mean at least one or two new universities will be built in the main regional cities as well as branch campuses of existing universities. The University of Canberra has already indicated its interest in setting up satellite offshoots elsewhere in New South Wales.

How the additional allocation to regional Australia will affect the government's previous commitments to higher education across the rest of the nation is unknown.

Commission set to release league table for rugby teams

Following the Tertiary Education Commission's release of a league table ranking polytechnics, universities and wānanga according to how many students complete courses, graduate, remain in study and progress to higher study, comes news that it is looking at releasing a similar league table for rugby teams.

Tertiary Update's sports correspondent Paki Taunuhia reports that the commission is looking to release a table that will rank rugby teams according to how well players complete games, how long they remain on the field, remain playing rugby and progress onto higher levels of rugby.

Unsurprisingly Scotland tops the commission's league table as the best rugby team in the world. It focus on playing old, experienced players for the full 90 minutes, and helping them graduate on to higher paying jobs on the European circuit helps them top the league table.  South Africa's experienced pack also performs well on the table.

Some sporting critics have suggested that the tables don't actually measure what is important; whether the players are playing rugby well or not. But the commission is defending its table saying it is important to note that this information is just one of many sources of information available to rugby players and supporters as they make decisions about which rugby teams to support or play for.

TEU President Dr Tom Ryan (2nd five-eight) says the table shows that more information is not necessarily the same as better information.

"Rugby teams are more appropriately placed in league tables than tertiary institutions, but if you rank them according meaningless information you still get meaningless results, no matter how much information you put in."

Student-teacher ratios higher than OECD average

The OECD's recently released Education at Glance 2010 statistics show that New Zealand tertiary education teachers face significantly higher student-teacher ratios than many others in the OECD.

New Zealand academics lecturers and tutors have an average ratio of 17.8 students compared to the OECD average of 15.8.  New Zealand's ratio is also higher than that of other English speaking countries with which it often compares itself, including Britain (16.9), the USA (15.0) and Ireland (15.9).

The TEU's national secretary, Sharn Riggs, says that having 13 percent more students per teacher than the OECD average is likely to mean 13 percent more workload for tertiary teachers and general staff.

The OECD figures also show that tertiary teachers in New Zealand also have a higher student teacher ratio than their secondary (14.5) and primary (17.1) colleagues.

"Just as we now acknowledge that lower student-teacher ratios allow teachers to in primary and secondary schools to focus on high quality teaching and learning we should also acknowledge the same is true for tertiary education," says Ms Riggs.

Other news

The pain that many higher education sectors are facing today was felt more than a decade ago by universities in Canada, and the country's harsh budget cuts of the 1990s are now being touted as a model of best practice for those enacting similar reforms today. The slashing of funding across the board hit the Canadian higher education sector hard: the proportion of federal funding fell from 80 per cent of universities' operating revenues in 1990-91 to 57 percent in 2007-08, according to the Canadian Association of University Teachers  - Times Higher Education Supplement

The British government's business secretary, Vince Cable, is defending cuts to university research, saying research funding should "screen out mediocrity" in the projects backed by the taxpayer. He also asserts that only research that was commercially useful or academically outstanding should be funded. His colleague, education secretary David Willetts, says public spending was "running way ahead of what we can afford" and taxpayers should only fund the highest quality research. - BBC

Nine out of 10 British vice chancellors believe a UK university will shut down because of financial pressures in the next decade, suggests a survey  - BBC

New Zealand has a high percentage of its population that enters tertiary study, particularly at older ages. The entry rate to diploma level study, especially, is one of the highest in the OECD. While entry is high, New Zealand also has one of the highest rates of part-time study. While those studying full-time are as likely to complete their qualification as full-timers in other OECD countries, fewer part-timers complete their qualification. - Ministry of Education analysis of Education at a Glance 2010
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TEU Tertiary Update is published weekly on Thursdays and distributed freely to members of the Tertiary Education Union and others. You can subscribe to Tertiary Update by email or feed reader. Back issues are available on the TEU website. Direct inquiries should be made to Stephen Day, email: stephen.day@teu.ac.nz

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