Penny Simmonds: Vocational Minister on the Government's efforts to bolster flagging polytechs

The Vocational Minister's hopeful students will flood back to polytechs after the model is de-centralised. 

Staff-to-student ratios are still lower than they were in 2016, despite staff numbers being slashed by 8.2%. 

Penny Simmonds says low ratios signal financial trouble. 

She told Mike Hosking student numbers have dropped by 11,000 since Te Pukenga was established in 2020. 

Simmonds says the Government's working hard to get student numbers up and viable again. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now we're back with the polytechs and their various problems.
Staff numbers have been cut by over eight percent due
to surpluses and the labor governments teput, king and mess.
Of course, we still have too many staff, we find
out yesterday relative to how many students are actually enrolling.
Now Penny Simmons as the Vocational Education Minister in charge
of unwinding all of this, and she's with us.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Penny morning, Good morning, Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:18):
Are you winning? Are you making some ground here? Do
you feel like you've made progress?

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Absolutely, we've turned the thing around and we are making progress.
We're getting the costs down. We've made those staffing decreases
as a foot view stool to go. We've got the
legislation in the Select Committee. It'll be back by September.
Cabinets will be making decisions about which polytechnics are stood
up on one January next year. They'll be making that

(00:44):
decision by the end of this month. So we're well
on the way. We've got community advisors back worth each
of the polytechnics, so well on the way. And look,
those staff numbers have had to come down because at
their worst in twenty twenty two, they will one academic
staff member for nine and a half students, So that's
in class average size of nine and a half students.

(01:07):
It's just asn't.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Viable now it does not do we have reputational issues
in terms of enrollment. In other words, when you announce
all of this, will people flood back?

Speaker 2 (01:16):
I hope so, because yes, it's done enormous damage. It's
the student numbers have gone down by eleven thousand in
the polytech sector over the takeooking Fiesco. So we've got
to get that confidence back. So we've got to get
the student numbers up, the right size of staff and
then we'll be viable. And that's the hard work we're

(01:37):
doing at the moment, and that's starting to happen. In
twenty twenty four, student numbers went up by two and
a half thousand, staff numbers went down and we're starting
to move the ratio in the right direction.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Thank the Good Lord for that, Penn, appreciate it. Penny
Summonivocational Education Minister.

Speaker 2 (01:54):
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