Industry Groups To Oppose Government's Preferred Option For Trades Training

Monday, 20 January 2025, 8:54 am
Article: RNZ

John Gerritsen, Education correspondent

"The industry voice is lost in that process and what will happen is more disengagement from industry and that's not what we want to see."

Some industry groups will oppose the government's preferred option for the future of apprenticeships and workplace training.

The government in 2024 said it had not yet reached a decision on the future of work-based training and would consult on two possible options early in the new year.

It needs to make a decision before it dissolves Te Pūkenga, which provides workplace learning and polytechnic courses in a single mega-institute.

The first option was to create eight government-funded industry skills boards to set standards and qualifications, while tertiary institutes or the workplace learning divisions of Te Pūkenga looked after apprentices and provided their training, the government said.

That option was included in the 2024 consultation on the disestablishment of Te Pūkenga.

The second option, known as option C, was new.

It proposed giving responsibility for pastoral care and coordination of apprentices to the skills boards, with polytechnics, wānanga or private institutes providing only the training.

Details had not yet been provided, but James Howatt from the Motor Trade Association said the lack of a decision and the emergence of a new option was disappointing and frustrating.

"From our point of view that could be the end of apprenticeship training in New Zealand.

"It's essentially handing over the work-based learning functions to the polytechs, helping to prop them up, and it's stepping back in time to the 1980s. So option C is a worst-case scenario."

He said industries wanted more control over the training of their workforce but that would not happen if government-funded skills boards (ISBs) organised apprenticeships.

"The the ISBs are present in both options. But in option C they additionally provide national training, and coordination and the pastoral care function and that's not industry-led.

"The industry voice is lost in that process and what will happen is more disengagement from industry and that's not what we want to see."

Hair and Barber New Zealand also opposed option C.

It said giving the skills boards responsibility for looking after apprentices would distract them from their core roles of standard setting and qualification development.

Hair and Barber New Zealand said Workforce Development Councils, which the government was replacing with skills boards, had been successful because they did not have a vested interest in student numbers and training - their role was focused on listening to the industry.

The organisation said skills boards would lose their focus if they were given responsibility for trainees' placements and pastoral care.

It was disappointing that the government did not make a decision before Christmas, Building and Construction Training Fund chief executive Grant Florence said.

The organisation's members wanted a system that kept industry at the heart of decision-making, he said.

"The ITOs, the private training enterprises and the polytechs, they all deliver the training. So whether it's work-based training or whether it's in the classroom training, that's all they should do, just deliver it.

"The other elements around setting standards and developing programmes and all those other things should be industry-led."

Florence said he hoped the government could change the industry training system faster than it was changing the polytechnic sector.

"Some of the infrastructure's already there. The likes of the BCITO and some of those other industry training organisations sort of stayed as an independent group inside Te Pūkenga. We firmly believe that they should just carry on doing the training."

A spokesperson for Tertiary Education Minister Penny Simmonds said a decision on a timeline for the consultation would be made soon.

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