Thank goodness we finally have a minister of tertiary education who really understands vocational education.
Penny Simmonds has always been a modest leader, but she is very well known in the deep south where she single-handedly not only grew Southland Institute of Technology into a remarkable success story, but also pretty much helped save the city of Invercargill to boot.
In Southland Penny is a folk hero. And so she should be. I am not undermining the political leadership shown by Sir Tim Shadbolt, for reviving our largest city in the deep south, but even Sir Tim has always been quick to acknowledge that it was mostly through Penny’s work that we have seen the remarkable community and economic success that has occurred throughout Southland.
Invercargill in the mid-1990s was in the doldrums. Long-term population decline was causing its local GDP to be falling in real terms. Housing prices were equally in decline. To put it bluntly, the ship was sinking and the trend looked like Invercargill and Southland in general were going to spiral downwards.
But Penny became chief executive at Southland Institute of Technology in 1997, a role she held for 23 years. She was creative. She understood the tertiary funding model. For years polytechnics had fought for parity of esteem with universities for equal student component funding.
She understood that first and foremost a polytechnic is a community college. Those are the foundations on which vocational education was built.
It is a model of success. Small community colleges which stayed in touch with the skills needs of their local economy have flourished in diverse economies everywhere, whether in the US, China or India.
She brought in free fees for students and immediately there was an uplift of student numbers. She was ahead of her time in e-learning and started a huge and equally successful model of distance education, competing effectively with the NZ Open Polytechnic.
She understood competition. She understood business. And most importantly, as a true leader she understood how to get the community behind the once struggling institute to becoming the model and template for vocational education success.
She fought the Wellington bureaucrats who wanted everything to look and feel the same (a significant failing of bureaucrats not understood by the previous Labour-led government at their peril).
They could not (and still cannot) cope with regional variation, irrespective of the obvious success Penny’s entrepreneurial streak was having for the Southland economy.
The funding she lost through student fees (which usually makes up about 33% of an institute’s funding) was compensated through local community and business funding. Penny had worked out that if she could get that early support from the local community, she could come up with a viable and sustainable business model for the future.
And she was right. In fact, virtually everything she tried proved successful. Her staff worked hard for her. SIT became one of the largest vocational institutes in New Zealand, and Invercargill started turning the corner
When I was CEO at Waiariki Institute of Technology from 2006-11, we copied Penny’s SIT model.
Now we have that same vision and leadership (and stubbornness to being successful) within our new government. And I for one am so relieved.
Te Pukenga was a stupid and failed model. I was CEO myself (Southbank Institute of Technology in Brisbane) when the same model was introduced in Queensland in 2013.
I watched with dismay as successful community colleges across Queensland were decimated through students disappearing in droves. Before three years were complete Tafe Queensland, as it is called, had lost half its students and sacked half its staff. Te Pukenga was going down the same path.
I can give you so many examples of diseconomies of scale caused by Tafe Queensland and already being felt across Te Pukenga (IT costs and systems costs alone have caused a huge deficit and are just one example).
Te Pukenga is a failed model. The only country in the world that has tried it is Australia and it has failed miserably for all the reasons described above. New Zealand desperately needs to get back to multiple community colleges which have proven so successful here and everywhere else overseas.
That local brand value is extremely important. People are proud of their SIT qualifications. They don’t want a "national" qualification which has no local brand value in the local business environment. Another example of the complete lack of commercial awareness among the Wellington bureaucrats.
So thank goodness we have a tertiary education minister who understands vocational education so well, because the New Zealand economy desperately needs skilled labour.
And as we have seen a decline in vocational education standards and graduate numbers it has mirrored the significant increase in the costs of providing those very services (e.g. construction) and resulting shortages in built housing etc.
I wish Penny well as she once again shows her remarkable leadership and ability for innovation as she turns around the Titanic that was fast sinking with most of our wonderful vocational institutes and staff drowning alongside.
She is absolutely the person for this job.
— Pim Borren is the former Waiariki Institute of Technology CEO and one-time interim CEO at the Otago Regional Council.
