The Parliament passed a law in 2009 that gutted staff and student representation on polytechnic councils and gave the minister’s own appointees an absolute voting majority.
The rationale that the Government gave was that polytechnics, as opposed to other tertiary institutions, were struggling financially and needed new leadership.
At the time Parliament was debating the bill, the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) noted in its submission that it seemed to be a retrospective response to issues that existed in the past and that had largely been addressed.
Good performance
Although some polytechnics struggled financially during the period 2000-2008, as a whole they performed strongly despite economic pressures.
They, along with wānanga, received increased Government funding between 2005-2010 from the Quality Reinvestment Programme, which was short term funding that aimed to help institutions build their capability, align their provision with national priorities and strengthen their individual contribution to the national network of provision.
However, the then Tertiary Education Minister Anne Tolley described this as “chucking more money at the sector and hoping that it would be all right.”
She said that polytechnics were not living within their means.
“The polytechnic sector can no longer rely on additional funding being made available to address financial viability issues. The Crown and the polytechnics councils should take rapid, innovative, and decisive action to address the educational and financial challenges facing the sector.”
Collectively, polytechnics ran surpluses (before abnormal expenses) every year from 2000 to 2009.
Invalid reasons
Before the law change took effect, polytechnics collectively ran $65 million surplus. That was 6.7% of their total revenue, compared to the 3% required by the Tertiary Education Commission.
In 2009, every polytechnic ran a surplus. All but three of them exceeded 3% of revenue target set by the Commission.
Over 10 years (2000-2009), polytechnics collectively averaged surpluses of 3% or 4% percent of revenue. Collectively over the same period, universities, while also ‘profitable’ ran a slightly smaller surplus as percentage of revenue (3.3%).
Polytechnics made some big changes to their financial performance in those ten years. They increased the number of students (EFTS) they were teaching by 37% over the same period.
Total full-time teaching equivalent staff numbers increased by only 12% (student to academic staff ratio increased from 15.0:1 to 19.7:1).
This financial stability shows there was no reason to change institutions’ councils.
Now, Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce has suggested similar changes to university councils.
The strong financial performances of the tertiary education sector means that he cannot claim that reforms are needed to bring financially struggling universities in line with others.
Therefore, if his desire to reform university councils is not about turning around poor financial performance, he must remove their independence for some other reason.
Source: Tertiary Education Union
