Dr. Michael Johnston

The government is set to scrap the fees-free policy for third-year university students.

New Zealand First Leader Winston Peters announced the fees-free policy would end in an interview last week.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis confirmed this.

If you look at the registry of apprenticeships, there's about 250 different things that you can do.

So we mustn't get trapped in this antiquated notion that it's just the kind of guys that turn up to your house to fix your pipes or relay your roof or whatever.

So a couple of years ago, I went to Germany to look at their dual training system.

Now, the Germans do some things that I'm certainly not advocating for New Zealand schools.

In particular, they split kids into two different tracks from the age of about 10.

So some of them go into a university track, which they call gymnasium, and others into a vocational track that they call Hauptschule or Realschule.

So I'm not advocating we do that.

But what's really great about the German system is at the other end, you have young people coming out and about half of them go into apprenticeships when they leave school.

And it's an extremely high quality apprenticeship system.

It's called dual training because both employers and the tertiary institutions take joint responsibility for the apprenticeships.

They coordinate pretty well together and they're overseen by chambers of commerce, which help that coordination.

And they also levy businesses to provide funding for the scheme so that young people don't pay for the tertiary component of their apprenticeships and they're paid a modest wage while they complete those.

So I do think that one of the components, and there are many, that makes the German system so successful is

is the focus at school level for some students at least on apprenticeships now something that actually mitigates the uh the problem of people being misallocated when they're younger is that after you've completed apprenticeships you can go to university as of right and a lot of people do you can also complete an apprenticeship alongside university

So we have in Germany many engineers, for example, who have studied engineering at university, but who are also qualified builders or electricians and so on, which may explain why the Germans are known for outstanding engineering.

No.

I mean, for one thing, New Zealanders would never wear that and neither should they.