Polytech reforms need critical analysis
There is much that is good about the operation of the Southern Institute of Technology and must be protected. But it has not reached such a state of exquisite perfection that it should be preserved in amber.
Living things, including essentially healthy ones, cannot exist in that state. They must also be part of a sustainable environment.
Education Minister Chris Hipkins will come to Invercargill tomorrow with the strong message that the country has a malfunctioning system of vocational education and it must change. Nobody much will dispute that.
But the minister will get the emphatic assertion of a protective province that the SIT isn’t part of the problem.
And the proposed solution – corralling all 16 polytechnics and training institutions into a single pen – will lead to what the risk, if not the inevitability, that one of the province’s most celebrated success stories loses the capacity to exercise the independence of thought and action that has served it well.
Hipkins will repeat what he will regard as the assurance, but his audience may hear only as an assertion, that far from being another godawful monolithic bureaucracy, the proposed New Zealand Institute of Skills & Technology will still allow scope for regions like ours to recognise our own needs, react to them, and reap the benefits.
And in a system coherent enough that others can benefit from the example. (Internecine competition not being such a factor, seemingly)
Moreover, he’ll say, there will be provision for expansion through the takeover of the roles of Industry Training Organisations and the creations of Centres of Excellence.
So what’s the message to be from Southland? Leave us alone – make this idea go away? Or, as the Government is almost pleading, should we be rolling up our sleeves and asking ourselves how can we make this work?
History isn’t entirely on either side.
Just consult your own experiences for examples where centralisation has produced the sort of morass that has proven particularly detrimental to the regions.
But you won’t have to look far to find flipside examples of problems arising from Canute thinking, where little temples of splendour find to their ruinous disappointment that they haven’t been able to divorce their fate from all that goes on around them.
To be part of a coherent, sustainable system isn’t as much an option as it is an imperative.
The SIT is taking a fairly cautious, not untroubled, stance at present. One soothing message is that its $36 million reserves will stay its own; not be thrown into a pot. One far-fromsoothing requirement is that the industry – really the community – was given six weeks to make its assessments and provide its feedback. It is hard to square that with an openly consultative mindset.
Well, feedback will come all right, and there will be plenty of it from the south. But there’s a job of work to be done unless we’re game to reject, or embrace, the proposal based only on a combination of instinct and whichever part of history we choose to consult.
We must be more diligent than that.
So what’s the message to be from Southland? Leave us alone – make this idea go away? Or, as the Government is almost pleading, should we be rolling up our sleeves and asking ourselves how can we make this work?