Tertiary

Policy Overview

All New Zealanders must have access to education throughout their life time. Good quality relevant education is the key to participation in society and leads to greater health, well being and sense of self esteem.

United Future believes that tertiary education must be quality education, it must be viable and accountable.

Funding:

Review current cost categories of Tertiary Institutions to reflect the real costs of provision for students to better control the cost of student fees.

Increase base funding for Tertiary Institutions.

Encourage tertiary institutions to form collaborative relationships and share resources in libraries, health services, information technology, services for disabled students, printing and other areas to lower costs and improve services to students.

Encourage Tertiary Insitutions to share more academic resources such as course designs and senior lecturers, with an aim to improve academic quality.

Encourage links between tertiary providers and industry to ensure skills taught are relevant and required in labour market.

United Future Will:

• Retain tertiary institutions in public ownership.
• Establish a tertiary education policy framework specifying government’s objectives.
• Restructure the Tertiary Education Commission to better monitor all tertiary providers and ensure that students are accorded excellence, quality and effective education.
• Ensure that the Tertiary Education Commission has student representation.
• Ensure that the present range of tertiary education providers is always appropriate to New Zealand’s needs and size as a country.
• Introduce national guidelines for capital expenditure in tertiary education with projects costing more than $1 million requiring approval from the Tertiary Education Commission.
• Limit polytechnic expansion to university status, to enable universities to retain their special role as institutions of research as well as learning, while emphasising the vocational focus of polytechnics.
• Require tertiary institutions to include policies on disabled students in their charters and report on these annually.

United Future Parliamentary Office: Bowen House, Lambton Quay, Wellington
Email: Phone: (04) 471 9410