Dr. Michael Johnston

Well, I'm a little more confident than I was last week, actually, because you may have noticed that Winston Peters

gave a budget teaser a couple of days ago saying that the fees-free year for university is going to be disestablished and the funding will be put into vocational education.

If they put the lion's share of that into schools to support the new industry-led subjects, I think there's every reason to be optimistic that they'll succeed.

One of the big obstacles would be that most schools are not geared to deliver them at the moment.

They'll have a technology teacher, but that's not the same as having somebody who can do pre-trades training kind of education in, say, building and construction or robotics or whatever it might be.

So schools are going to need some extra resources, either to hire new teachers or perhaps to partner with a tertiary institution or some employers to provide those opportunities.