‘Tell us how we can survive’: Polytechs on the brink

Saturday, 5 July 2025

On a crisp Saturday in May, metres from the icy Timaru Port, Jill Milburn is at the artisan farmers’ market walking from stall to stall, armed with a clipboard and a stash of printed papers.

The petition to “Save our Polytech” demands “a strong, independent and properly resourced polytechnic campus that meets the needs of our region by providing local, public and quality training for our kaimahi (students)”.

It doesn’t take long for the signatures to flow.

“They had no idea that we may not even be able to deliver courses here because of what the Government is doing,” Milburn says.

The long-time South Canterbury resident, hospitality tutor and union delegate is on a mission to save vocational training in her patch.

She is now waiting for a time to meet South Island Minister James Meager and present the petition with 400 signatures.

Last week, Milburn took her plea directly to Minister for Vocational Education Penny Simmonds at an online Q&A hosted by the Tertiary Education Union (TEU).

She wanted to know how courses in small regional centres like Timaru would survive when they would never be able to enrol 18 students – a minimum measure Simmonds said would be needed in the Government’s new structure.

The cooking, baking and hospitality courses at Ara Institute of Canterbury’s southern campuses would only ever have a maximum of 16 students, she said.

“Please can you tell us how we can survive and serve our communities?” Milburn asked Simmonds.

The exchange that followed illustrates the widespread confusion over the Government’s reform of the sector.

Unperturbed, Simmonds said an institution that wasn’t financially viable to stand alone could be in a federation with support from an anchor polytech – and this was likely to be the Open Polytechnic.

The anchor polytechnic would enable “blended delivery” of courses, with a proportion of study online and reduced hours of on-campus teaching, Simmonds continued.

Milburn thanked the minister but pointed out that blended delivery of a practical class would be very difficult. Open Polytechnic doesn’t offer cookery, baking and hospitality courses.

Simmonds agreed that practical classes on campus do have to be face-to-face.

Milburn saidthe minister’s responses were confusing.

“We're very worried for our future and for our community and industry’s future really, because we don't know how we can survive with numbers like that.”

State of play

Te Pūkenga was formed five years ago to run the country’s 16 polytechnics and nine ITOs (industry training organisations) but has been in the process of disestablishing since the newly elected Government said in December 2023 it would be getting rid of it.

It is part of a massive overhaul of the vocational education sector with the Education and Training (Vocational Education and Training System) Amendment Bill passing its first reading in May.

However, the sector has largely been in limbo, with each polytech going through cost-cutting measures in a bid to become financially viable while waiting to hear from Simmonds about which will stand alone, form part of a federation or face closure.

Before Te Pūkenga, five polytechs had a surplus. They were Ara, Eastern Institute of Technology (EIT), Open Polytechnic, Otago Polytechnic and Southern Institute of Technology (SIT). The other 11 divisions were in deficit.

By the time all former polytechs came under one single entity as Te Pūkenga in January 2023, two divisions were in surplus and the rest were in deficit.

And at the end of 2024, EIT and Manukau Institute of Technology (MIT) were the only divisions to post a surplus, Te Pūkenga said.

According to TEU national secretary Sandra Grey, six of the 16 are in “real jeopardy”. These include Tai Poutini on the West Coast, NorthTec in Northland, Toi Ohomai on the East Coast, WelTec and Whitireia in Wellington, and UCOL in Palmerston North, Whanganui, Masterton and Levin.

Grey said a proposal to close two of four campuses ‒ Taupō and Tokoroa ‒ of Toi Ohomai, a polytech serving Waikato and Bay of Plenty, had been presented this week, including the disestablishment of 64 roles. UCOL is relocating one of its four campuses in the central city, while WelTec and Whitireia face what she describes as “massive financial problems”.

Meanwhile, a merger between Auckland’s Unitec and MIT is being discussed as a way to remain viable.

Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki (WITT) is undergoing its second restructuring.

WITT’s operations lead Nicola Conley says enrolments have declined for some time and the organisation expects to end the year with a $3.2 million deficit.

Despite these challenges, Conley is hopeful that the recent proposal will return the institution to financial stability by 2027.

Initiatives include cross-network delivery, where students remain enrolled at WITT but complete courses online through other institutions, with face-to-face support sessions provided locally. However, international enrolments have not recovered and are something she hopes to work on in partnership with other organisations.

The restructuring proposes cutting 67.5 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions and creating 34.6 new ones, resulting in a net loss of 33 roles. Staff have five weeks to provide feedback.

TEU organiser Lawrence O’Halloran warns the impact will be substantial, with entire programmes in engineering, construction, agriculture, hospitality, and business proposed for disestablishment.

“These cuts are part of a broader political agenda being driven by the minister of tertiary education,” says O’Halloran. “Our members and communities deserve better.”

Meanwhile, in the east, EIT was one of five polytechs to enter Te Pūkenga in a surplus.

However, EIT operations lead Glen Harkness said the impact of Covid-19 followed by Cyclone Gabrielle had a significant impact on international and domestic learner enrolments. The cyclone damaged more than 80% of buildings, Harkness said.

It was forecast to end the year with a deficit of $900,000, before one-off items, including insurance proceeds for cyclone recovery.

Consultation, which ended in June, proposed a cut of 42 jobs and three programmes. The outcome would be announced in August. He was hopeful it could stand alone from January.

State of limbo, fear of job, course cuts

NorthTec is in a state of paralysis with no permanent leader and many courses on hold. The executive director stepped down this month after the co-leadership of rohe 1 (NorthTec, Unitec, MIT) was disbanded in June.

Sharlene Nelson, TEU co-branch president and former construction pathway manager, lost her role two months ago. Construction and forestry programmes have been paused since February, with proposed teaching staff cuts delayed and further non-teaching cuts expected.

“Everyone’s quite despondent. It’s not a happy place to work,” says Nelson.

Teachers are stuck waiting to see if their jobs still exist, while students had signed up to courses only to find they had been put on hold.

Nelson, who has worked at NorthTec for 13 years, is reluctant to leave but acknowledges many are considering it.

“I've got a mortgage and family to support so hopefully I'll get something because I do love teaching.”

Centralised decision-making, she says, has failed to address regional needs. But she worries online learning won’t be possible for people without stable internet connection in the region.

“It almost feels like we need to start again,” she says. “Look at what our communities' needs are, and then go from there, because we’ve kind of lost our way.”

In the capital, WelTec and Whitireia had a steep drop in enrolments – from 6547 domestic full-time students and 1219 international in 2018, to 3571 domestic and 301.5 international students last year.

They went into 2025 in a deficit, according to a consultation report released under the Official Information Act.

Downsizing is being considered across the campuses at Porirua, Petone, and creative campus Te Kāhui Auaha, due to declining enrolments. Phase two of their change proposal will review academic and library roles, including a proposed loss of 52 roles. Phase three will focus on transitioning out of Te Pūkenga.

It has already cut 12 non-teaching staff.

Te Uepu representative and WelTec carpentry tutor Leo Pirini fears skilled labour shortages in Wellington as a result of the cuts.

“Some engineering and painting courses have disappeared, as well as some of the arts.”

Palmerston North’s UCOL, which also operates in Whanganui, Masterton and Levin, is restructuring and has proposed to disestablish over 40 positions. Wintec declined to comment, and requests for responses from Toi Ohomai went unanswered.

Leaving the mothership

Despite the uncertainty, Te Pūkenga reported a $16.6m surplus in 2024.

In its annual report, tabled in Parliament last Thursday, it showed the organisation made a $122m turnaround within the two years Te Pūkenga existed as a single entity.

It was a result of structural changes, lease reduction, vacancy freezes and programme consolidation. Student satisfaction rose from 90% to 93% and achievement rates improved.

However, these gains came at a cost: $11.5m in redundancies, including $2m at the national office and $9.5m across the network, equating to 288 redundancy payouts. An additional $19m was spent on external consultants in 2024 alone.

Across the network, 2100 programmes were delivered in 2024. As of May, 257 were paused or cut.

Chief executive Gus Gilmore said while campus and online learning grew, work-based learning declined ‒ reflecting wider economic shifts. Open Polytechnic saw the strongest growth, signalling a rising preference for flexible, online options.

Cautious optimism

Bob McNeill, senior consultant with Hague Consulting, says he is 'cautiously optimistic” about the future of polytechs despite in some ways the sector facing the same problems it had before the mega merger.

Te Pūkenga failed – “expensively” – to solve the fundamental problems it was set up to solve including ageing buildings, an expensive delivery system, oversupply of courses and a lack of focus on learner mobility, he says.

But in its wake, McNeill is hopeful there is better understanding of the problems within the sector.

He supports stronger collaboration between government, education providers and industry but not at the expense of learner flexibility.

Questions remained about how work-based learning will be offered.

It was a central problem in vocational education. But there was much more of a drive to include employers and industries. “Given that, yeah, there’s a degree of optimism there.”

The Mainland picture

In Christchurch, Ara Institute of Canterbury’s executive director Darren Mitchell is quietly confident the organisation will blossom after it emerges from the Te Pūkenga fold, but is also cognisant of the ongoing funding challenges.

As the largest campus-based vocational education provider in the country, Ara’s student numbers have dropped, from 14,660 in 2019 to 13,378 in 2024.

This year another deficit is expected ‒ but less than the $1.9m in 2024 ‒ before a forecast surplus in 2026, Mitchell says.

:A change in annual funding increases, tying more funding to the Government’s priority subject areas to grow the economy (health, energy, infrastructure and digital technology), played to Ara’s strengths. Half of the students at Ara are enrolled in nursing programmes.

Despite this, the vocational education funding outlook was challenging because annual increases had not kept pace with inflation and there was unlikely to be any meaningful increases in the next few years, Mitchell said.

As unemployment has risen, so has demand for vocational education ‒ but with a cap on funding, many institutes of technology and polytechs (ITPs) would struggle to meet it, Mitchell said.

At the forefront of Mitchell’s plan to increase revenue is building up international student numbers.

Before Covid-19, Ara had about 1000 international students per year. This year they have just over half that.

“We’re going to have to be investing into international marketing, recruitment, sending people offshore to make sure Ara is at the forefront of people’s minds when they’re making choices.”

Despite its strong position, even Ara has been through a recent review process that cut 23 roles from Māori and Pacific student support, marketing and recruitment and cut community-based computer courses. Mitchell said the organisation was always reviewing its course offering, but more large structural changes were not on his “radar”.

Small institution for a big region

Across the southern Alps, Tai Poutini Polytechnic on the West Coast is less certain of an independent future and Mitchell says of the four ITPs in the Te Pūkenga rohe 4 (Ara, Otago, SIT, Tai Poutini), Tai Poutini is most unlikely to stand alone.

“I think Tai Poutini is the exception at the moment in so much as it struggles with what I think is a uniquely West Coast demographic — a very big region, small centres, and that would always be a struggle.”

The institution, with 55 staff and 250 students spread across the vast region, has made progress to improve its financial position in recent years with an expected deficit of $4.4m in 2024, down from $6.2m in 2022, Mitchell said.

While Mitchell said “strategic reviews” were “helping Tai Poutini to right-size its operations”, there have been no official proposals for change.

Grey District mayor Tania Gibson said a group of leaders formed a working committee to save the region’s polytechnic.

“It's very important for our young people that we have some tertiary education that remains on the Coast, we don't want our youth having to go away for these opportunities.”

Gibson said face-to-face education provision was vital for young people to learn social skills, time management and how to be in the workforce.

A staff to student ratio of 18-to-one would not be possible for the West Coast, she said.

She expected the group’s proposal would be ready to submit in “one to two months” following a workshop on July 24 but said ministry officials had assured the group their ideas would be considered.

An option for ITPs like Tai Poutini is a merger but Mitchell says such a move would pose risks for Ara.

“There is awareness in the decision-makers' minds, I'm sure, that to take a financially viable institution and a non-viable institution and sort of mash them together, you do risk actually compromising the financially viable one.”

Like Ara, executive directors at Otago Polytech, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology (NMIT), and Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) expressed confidence about their futures as stand alone entities.

Otago Polytechnic executive director Megan Pōtiki’s statement about the institution’s outlook was echoed by her peers at NMIT and SIT.

“We strongly believe the changes we are making this year will ensure a long-term financially sustainable organisation”.

This is despite not providing any specific financial information.

An April special advisory group report released by Te Pūkenga under the OIA showed all three institutions were expecting deficits in 2024 of $5.9m, $4.6m, and $9.9m respectively.

Late last year Otago Polytechnic shed 14 roles and 11 courses in subject areas including horticulture, early childhood education, health, English language and digital media and design.

Another wide-ranging change proposal is under way with more than 30 roles on the chopping block.

“They are feeling really hurt, it’s soul-destroying. People are opting to leave because they’re over it,” TEU organiser Gail Arthur said.

SIT’s review resulted in the loss of 2.6 full-time equivalent roles in the School of Environmental Management.

NMIT didn’t mention any cuts to roles or courses, but TEU organiser Drew Mayhem said this was because many jobs were fixed term, allowing the organisation to “restructure by stealth” in simply discontinuing courses and job contracts.

Upheaval with no plan

Green Party tertiary education spokesperson Francisco Hernandez criticised the Government’s process as “lengthy, disruptive and expensive”, resulting in cuts and huge uncertainty for learners, staff and communities.

It has led to a “desperate scramble for short-term financial viability at the expense of long-term capability to support the skills training that communities need”, he said.

Labour’s tertiary education spokesperson, Shanan Halbert, said the minister has offered no real plan for how apprenticeships and further training will be established or paid for.

“Te Pūkenga is operating at a surplus; it is not the failure Minister Simmonds makes it out to be – yet she persists in a disestablishment,” Halbert said.

“Minister Simmonds’ plan takes the sector back to a model that wasn’t financially viable, she has created a shambles at a cost to students, staff and economic growth.”

Simmonds confirmed a final decision on individual institutions will be made by the end of the month. Broader system changes, including a new vocational education model and funding structure, will follow.

Eight new Industry Skills Boards will replace Workforce Development Councils from January and temporarily manage work-based learning.

The Education and Training (Vocational Education and Training System) Amendment Bill is expected to pass later this year.

Te Pūkenga is set to be disestablished by the end of next year.