Chapter 1: What changes are being made to university fees in New Zealand?
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.
University students are lamenting the disappearance of the fees-free policy.
It's just really disheartening to see that, as usual, students are the first in the chopping block. If there is changes to be made to the budget, you know, this is a huge... benefit for students not to pay an extra $12,000 in debt.
But the government says it wasn't working and there's a better place to put that money.
It's been quite a failure and we're actually not in the business of untargeted subsidies, we're not in the business of poor economic management supporting a failed policy and so we're better to stop it and certainly redirect some of that funding into trades training.
For decades, there's been a cultural and systemic prejudice that favours university education.
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Chapter 2: How is the cultural perception of vocational education shifting?
So is that finally shifting?
This fascination, if not obsession, we seem to have had with university has been ruinous for far too many. Being a tradie is actually to be admired. It is not a second prize. The snobbishness. around a university degree has got so absurd you've ended up with any number of bewildered teenagers chasing arts degrees and BCOMs for no discernible reason other than they thought they should do it.
I'm Alexia Russell and today on The Detail, a look at where that vocational money could go and why we still treat university as the gold standard when actually a tradie can earn as much as a policy analyst.
We need to make really clear what the other pathways are. Because at the moment, we're sort of pigeonholing young people into it's university or not university. Well, what's in the not?
This is the principal consultant for the skills development group, Josh Williams. And we'll get back to him later about the concept of esteem parity, improving vocational guidance at school, and why parents still want to tell their friends at a barbecue that their kid is going to uni.
But first, Think Tank, the New Zealand initiative, has put out a report on this, arguing the country has a rare opportunity to correct an imbalance that has long undervalued vocational education. Think trades, health care, jobs you need to be trained to do but don't necessarily have to get a degree for.
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.
There's a whole world of things that people can do. Dr Michael Johnston wrote that report, which is called Working Knowledge, Designing Industry-Led Subjects for Students and Schools. He's a senior fellow at the initiative and does its education work.
So a couple of years ago, I went to Germany to look at their dual training system.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges faced by vocational training in schools?
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.
But that kind of early people manipulating, in other words, a 10-year-old, assuming you know a 10-year-old is fit for one vocation or another, you don't see us doing that, going to go into that level?
No. I mean, for one thing, New Zealanders would never wear that and neither should they. It's much too young to be sorting people in that kind of way. I do think that we benefit from a bit more specialisation at the other end of school, say in the last two years. when young people are a bit more well-placed to make decisions about their futures.
And I think that we have a problem at the moment because the entire school system, with the notable exception of some schools who really put a lot into the vocational side, is very much geared towards getting students to university.
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Chapter 4: What lessons can New Zealand learn from Germany's vocational training system?
No, there hasn't. So we've had technology for a long time, but not subjects that are so completely geared towards getting young people into apprenticeships and tertiary training, where these subjects will be very responsive to the needs of industry. So it's the first time where we will have had formal curricula for that kind of subject.
One of the inequities here is that when it comes to becoming a qualified tradie, it's worth far less on the New Zealand Qualifications Authority's ranking system than those three years at university.
When you look at the qualifications framework, we see bachelor's degrees at level seven and most trades qualifications at level four. Why is that? Do we really think that to be a skilled electrician is trivial compared with getting a Bachelor of Arts?
I can tell you that as somebody who's recently or relatively recently worked as an academic in a university, let's just say the standards are not what they were. So I think there's no justification for that at all. And when you look at the outcomes in terms of income and job security and things like that, the the tradies very often have it better and they can go on to start their own businesses.
If we were to tell a 15 year old, you know, if you did a trade by the time you're 25, you might be earning a salary like this and you could start a business and you won't have any student debt. They may choose differently.
Yes, but we have been saying this for a long, long time and nothing changes. What makes you think we have an opportunity now?
Yeah, well, because I'm an eternal optimist. I mean, you're right. We have been saying this for a long time. Well, some people have been saying this for a long time and it comes down ultimately to a cultural prejudice. And I think that is born of a time when, first of all, I would say university education was of higher quality and when far fewer people went to university.
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Chapter 5: Why is there a disparity between vocational and university qualifications?
And so it had this elite status. And to be fair, in those days, it probably did lead to the higher incomes on average. But I think those days are gone.
Yes, we had quite a lot of studies saying that now, by the time you get to 60, 65, those people are earning the same amount of money.
Yeah, that wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. And I know starting salaries can be pretty similar too. So, and you don't have the debt if you do a, typically apprentices graduate without much debt of any.
So the university track, if we're conceiving of it in purely financial terms, which by the way, I don't intend to reduce education to purely financial outcomes, but a lot of young people will focus on that. And if we told them, the truth about what various pathways could lead towards, then again, I think some of them would make different choices.
I'm hoping that the industry-led subjects that will be developed for the new qualification that will replace NCEA will be a game changer. And they could be. There's no guarantee of that. But if we get the settings right, it will be a really good start. The Ministry has already proposed industry-led subjects for the new curriculum and for the new qualification.
And what's different this time around is that these are specifically geared towards the needs of industry. So they're set apart, or they would be obviously supported by the more traditional technology subject. But for the first time,
those subjects that are absolutely facing towards industry and tertiary training and apprenticeships will have their own fully formed curricula for secondary school so that is a new departure and these curricula will be written or at least written in collaboration with the industry skills boards which have replaced the workforce development councils early this year
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Chapter 6: How can we improve vocational guidance for students?
Are you confident that this will start turning things around in terms of making the trades not just a more attractive option, but a more accessible option?
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.
We're going to reshape it and repurpose it for the trades and a whole lot of industries where we do need it and we're going to get a far better payback for our money and we'll pay a far less money doing it.
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.
The Skills Group has just put out a white paper titled Multiple Pathways to Success, which argues that for too long, schools have pointed their students at one place, university. But only three out of 10 students get there. The paper says that for the rest, the pathways into life and work are much less clear.
And it says the current schemes that support alternative pathways such as Gateway and Trades Academies are fragmented, underutilised and under-resourced, despite proof that they work. Here's Josh Williams from the Skills Group.
I started in the team that developed the NCEA 25 years ago. So what's happening right now is a bit of a career full circle moment. I was also previously a policy manager in the Ministry of Education around the time that Youth Guarantee, Trades Academies, Gateway, Vocational Pathways was a hot topic at the start of the key government, I guess, 2010.
And then I was Chief Executive of the Industry Training Federation. So sort of half my career has been in the government side and half of it in the industry training sector. So that brings a little bit of balance to the force, I think, on these issues around, you know, what the demand side is looking for and what the education system is producing.
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Chapter 7: What role do employers play in shaping vocational education?
So in the time that you've been involved in this, what have you seen develop in terms of preparing kids for trades compared to university?
Well, look, certainly the whole idea behind NCEA and certainly the very real potential was that it could recognise and reward learning from a much wider range of things. Effectively, any credit on the framework could count towards your NCEA. That flexibility was absolutely seen as a strength, but that flexibility was also ultimately a bit of a weakness.
Because the assessment system that came in under NCEA has effectively been grafted onto a schooling system that hasn't changed very much. Picks six subjects, those subjects stay in their lanes. The main game is to chase a thing called university entrance. Because effectively, that's really the only clear recipe in the whole cookbook of school. Everything else is a bit of an add-on.
And so over that time, certainly when we talk about youth guarantee, vocational pathways, trades academies, gateway, these are all schemes. And there's a clutter of them, because they've been added over time, that are trying to provide alternative options and alternative pathways to students. But as I say, they're added on.
They have different eligibility, different funding, different administrative requirements. And at the moment, only about 15% of our year 11 to 13 population access them.
And they're not seen as prestigious as going for a university entrance style qualification.
No, and I mean, that's ultimately the parity of esteem problem that you hear about. Although even the phrase parity of esteem pretends like there's two things, there's academic and there's vocational. kind of reject that.
And honestly, where the situation's going now, I think, when we're talking about a shared curriculum that has curriculum subjects and industry subjects sitting within a shared curriculum, I think is very positive. Look, every young person is on a trip to the workforce.
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Chapter 8: How can we change societal attitudes towards trades and vocational careers?
I was listening to a morning report this morning, listening to university students, many of whom needing to work in order to survive the experience of study. And then, of course, are looking for jobs after their degree. The same goes for every other student, including the seven out of 10 who are not going to degrees when they leave school.
So ultimately, I don't see it as a system of there's the curriculum over here and there's the world of work over here. In fact, the world of work is where curriculum gets deployed. I work out of an electrical workshop, skills, trades, trainings workshop here in Napier. The trigonometry and algebra that our level threes are doing is way, way above my head.
A lot of those young people look like they might not have enjoyed calculus, and yet there they are, completely grasping calculus because they're doing it through the concepts of electrical work and electrotechnology. So what we need is every young person to have exposure to those possibilities.
What we need is an effective ecosystem where more than just the 15% who can get a gateway place or a place in a trades academy can get experience, exposure, get some of those employability skills that serves them all in the end.
Has this system copped a bit of flack for things like people saying, oh, you can get NCEA by picking up litter, you know, and then you get universities saying kids aren't really prepared when they turn up in spite of their admission certificate to do this serious study?
Certainly it was the case, as I say, that the flexibility of NCEA could be misused, that ultimately kids could come out with an NCEA qualification that was made up of an incoherent grab bag of things that didn't really add up to a purposeful direction or a set of foundation skills for employability. I mean, coming to the other part of your question, though,
You and I, Alexia, we're never going to wake up in a world where the employers go, the schools have cracked it. They finally got it right. Every young person can walk into any employer anywhere and they already know what to do. I don't have to train them. They knew where the light switches were. So it's not a reasonable expectation.
But what employers do talk about is some basic skills, literacy, numeracy, and really what are the kind of expected behaviours and cultures of workplaces. Being nice to the customers. turn up on time, meet a deadline. Those kinds of employability skills are super important.
And again, it to me goes to the ecosystem that we need that when we're in year 11, 12, 13, these young people are 16 years old. They're able to leave school and go and get work. Why can't we have a much more permeable interface? That means that young people are exploring things in tertiary providers. trying out a few things, finding their next step and pathway.
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