TEU Tertiary Update Vol 13 No 45

Government cuts $250 per student

A Ministry of Education report published this week shows that funding per equivalent full time student fell 3.2 percent between 2008 and 2009

The report, Outputs and outcomes of the government’s tertiary education expenditure 2005-2009, shows that while the government's student achievement component funding increased between 2008 and 2009 by $70 million or 6.3 percent, this failed to match the combined effect of inflation and a rise in equivalent full-time students of 7.5 percent

The large rise in students meant that government funding increases were only enough to cover about half of the extra students.

TEU national president Dr Tom Ryan said that the report clarified the debate around tertiary education funding. 

"The minister has repeatedly argued that funding is increasing, while those in the sector say all they see is budget cuts, redundancies and increased staff/student ratios.  The fact is that the minister's new money barely goes half way to covering the cost of all the new students who we and the government are both encouraging to get an education. The net result is that there was $250 less for every student in 2009 than there was in 2008."

"Students in 2009 would have needed an extra $100 million to get the same level of investment in their future as students in 2008 had. Students in 2010 and 2011 risk falling further behind as staff at tertiary institutions get by with reduced resources and less support per student," said Dr Ryan.

Also in Tertiary Update this week:

1. Pike River mine disaster stuns Tai Poutini


2. Jobs, jobs, jobs


3. Employment rights erode with passing of bill


4. Lincoln-Telford merger gets green light


5. NZQA given more power over PTEs


6. Other news

Pike River mine disaster stuns Tai Poutini

The Council of Trade Unions has expressed its shock and sadness at the news of the second explosion at Pike River Mine and the likelihood that none of the 29 trapped miners has survived.

CTU president Helen Kelly said: “This is a dreadful event and one which nobody should have to endure in these times. Everyone has the right to go to work in the expectation of coming home safe and well at the end of the day”.

Through the week-long drama, staff and students at Tai Poutini polytechnic have been providing meals to rescuers and families. Some of the trapped men are graduates of the institution’s mining programmes. Many TEU members around the West Coast have family and other connections to the missing miners.

TEU has been offering what little support it can through the miners’ union, the EPMU.  TEU national president Dr Tom Ryan, incoming national president  Dr Sandra Grey, national secretary Sharn Riggs, and Tai Poutini Polytechnic TEU co-branch president Simon Dixon wrote to the EPMU earlier this week to send a special message of support and strength to all involved, and their families.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

While many tertiary education staff around the country have faced restructuring and redundancy this year as tertiary institutions look to cut costs and reduce staff numbers, there is one oasis of job growth in the sector.  The Ministry of Education started advertising this weekend for assistant policy analysts, policy analysts, senior policy analysts, chief policy analysts, a business analyst, a senior manager of tertiary policy, and a student loan programme manager, all positions being in its Tertiary Education Group. 

Given the dramatic redundancies at the Tertiary Education Commission last year, and the government's apparent preference for the Ministry of Education to be its main source of policy advice, rather than the commission, it is not surprising that the Ministry appears to be increasing its capacity to provide advice on tertiary education. 

As recently as August the Public Services Association announced that the Ministry was cutting over 100 jobs, However, Tertiary Update understands that those cuts did not impact on the Ministry's Tertiary Education Group

TEU national president Dr Tom Ryan said it was important that the policy support the TEC was previously funded to provide is replaced.

"The apparent growth of the Ministry's Tertiary Education Group shows how politically-driven last year's attacks on the commission were.  Just as a good tertiary education system needs to pay for good people out in the various tertiary education institutions around the country, so it also needs good people in its central bureaucracy," said Dr Ryan.

"But maybe this means there is an opportunity for some of the many good people who lost their jobs in the sector this year to find a job advising the minister on tertiary education?"

Employment rights erode with passing of bill

The government's employment relations amendment bill, which aims to take away many employment rights from workers, passed its third and final reading in parliament this week.

The new law means that the 90-day trial period for new employees has been extended to all workplaces. It also removes reinstatement as the primary remedy for unfair dismissal, makes it easier for employers to fire workers without following the proper process, and reduces the right of workers to meet their own union at their workplace.

Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly said unions are not sitting back in defeat.

"We will continue to campaign against this government's attack on work rights and its continuing failure to take adequate action against unemployment."

"There are 150,000 New Zealanders officially unemployed, yet the Government's response is to weaken everyone else's job security as though that was the root of the country's economic problems," Ms Kelly said.

"It seeks to weaken wage bargaining when our wages are falling further and further behind Australia's."

The government also passed changes to the Holidays Act, which now means that one week of annual leave can be bought back by employers from workers. 

It also means that employers can now require a doctor’s certificate for even one day’s absence. Until now an employer was supposed to have reasonable grounds for believing a worker’s sickness was not genuine if a sick note was to be required in the first two days of illness.

Lincoln-Telford merger gets green light

The minister for tertiary education, Steven Joyce, last week advised that Cabinet has accepted the Lincoln University-Telford Rural Polytechnic merger proposal.

The merger, which will now take place on 1 January 2011, will see Lincoln's roll swell to about 3,600 equivalent full-time students, up from 2,700 this year. Lincoln vice-chancellor Professor Roger Field said that he expected that there would be no job losses or immediate course changes.

Professor Field and the chief executive of Telford, Jonathan Walmsley, told staff at their two institutions last week that the fundamental reason for the merger is to protect and improve land-based education delivery and increase student opportunities for access to quality land-based education.  Their memo to staff notes:

"For both institutions, 2011 will largely be business as usual in terms of day-to-day activities and student experience. However, we will be working to achieve full integration of both institutions as Lincoln University, with Telford retained as a Division of the University as?? a sub-brand."

The memo states that the merged entity will be making offers of employment to Telford staff within the next 2 weeks.  Lincoln has told the Press it is committed to retaining Telford's sub-degree courses, but also wanted its students to study at a higher level, especially in agriculture and agricultural science.

NZQA given more power over PTEs

NZPA reports that the National and Labour parties are both supporting measures aimed at providing greater accountability and higher standards for private training establishments (PTEs) involved in export education.

The minister for tertiary education Steven Joyce announced last week that the government is introducing changes in the Education Amendment Bill (No 4) next year, which will give the New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA) greater powers to monitor, investigate and enforce compliance PTEs, and raise the threshold to register as a PTE.

Mr Joyce said legislation around PTE registration has not kept up with the changes and growth in the sector over the past 20 years.

"The current measures available for managing performance in this sector are insufficient in today's conditions. NZQA's work to drive improvements in the lowest performing PTEs is currently hampered by the out-dated nature of the legislative provisions and inconsistencies within them."

The legislation will also allow PTEs to keep more money when refunding international students who withdraw from a course. Mr Joyce says this will remove the financial incentive for students to downgrade their courses once onshore and change to other providers who provide much cheaper courses which may be of lower quality. 

Labour's tertiary education spokesman, Grant Robertson, welcomed the changes and said some PTEs were not up to scratch.

"While there are some high quality PTEs working with international students, there are others who are not meeting standards and a few who are just ripping people off," he said.

Mr Robertson said that if the NZQA was to be given an increased role in ensuring higher standards were met, it would need a boost in resources and capacity.

Other news

Tertiary Education Union national industrial officer Irena Brorens said she was outraged and shocked council members voted yesterday to double their fees. Tutors have had nothing in two years, except a one-off payment of $700, she said. At yesterday's council meeting in New Plymouth, councillors voted 6-2 for an increase which works out about double the current rate for council members. "How can they justify doubling their pay and giving us nothing?" Ms Brorens asked – Daily News

A cautionary tale about ranking institutions: Alexandria University in Egypt had been placed a surprisingly impressive 147th on the Times Higher Education Supplement's list of top universities (only two places behind the University of Auckland). But, behind the headlines, Phil Baty, deputy editor of Times Higher Education, acknowledged that Alexandria’s surprising prominence was actually due to "the high output from one scholar in one journal" — soon identified on various blogs as Mohamed El Naschie, an Egyptian academic who published over 320 of his own articles in a scientific journal of which he was also the editor! –New York Times

In the wake of the military, shopping malls, and mosques, universities have become the latest target of the Pakistani Taliban, sowing terror among faculty members after a number of killings and kidnappings of prominent academics in the north-western region of the country - University World News

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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