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Alignment with TES strategies

Three strategies stand out as consistently addressed:

• Skills for our knowledge society
• Te rautaki mātauranga Māori
• Capability and quality.

The strategies less consistently addressed were:

• Raise foundation skills
• Strengthen research and knowledge creation
• Pacific peoples’ development and success.

Percentage of TEOs with change-focused objectives by TES strategy

Impact of the 2005 Statement of Tertiary Education Priorities

A useful way of summarising the findings is to plot them against areas highlighted in the 2005 Statement of Tertiary Education Priorities (2005 STEP). (This has been done by matching results for TES objectives to the relevant parts of the 2005 STEP.)

Percentage of TEOs with change-focused objectives by 2005 STEP areas

This view shows that the most consistently addressed areas across both years were:

• improving capability
• improving learning outcomes
• workforce needs and skill shortages
• effective teaching.

The least consistently addressed areas were:

• skills for work and life - covering key competencies
• research relevant to New Zealand’s priorities.

Across the four theme areas of the 2005 STEP, from 2005/07 to 2006/08 profiles, there has been:

• increased focus on “investing in excellence in teaching, learning and research”, with significantly more TEOs focusing on effective teaching and high-quality research
• decreased focus on “increasing the relevance of skills and knowledge to meet national goals”, possibly as some processes are embedded into business as usual
• increased focus on “enabling students and learners to access excellent and relevant tertiary education, and progress to higher levels of study and achievement”, particularly focusing on Māori, Pasifika and youth
• increased focus on “enhancing capability to support learning, teaching and research”.

Some underlying issues

These trends need to be understood in terms of the following observations:

• In the area of teaching and learning there has been more focus on monitoring success and providing flexible learning options (including e-learning) and less on development of teaching practice. There is some indication in the 2006/08 profiles of a shift towards the latter.
• In the area of Māori and Pasifika achievement, there is a similar focus on monitoring and support systems. There is less focus on changing the teaching and learning environment to actively support the achievement of these students.
• The degree of engagement and collaboration varies across different groups. Engagement with industry and other TEOs is more likely to involve joint projects, whereas engagement with Māori, Pasifika and communities tends to focus more on relationships and consultation.
• The focus on access tends to be on bringing students into a pathway of study, whether as adults or students from school. While this is a valuable focus and aligns with much of the TES, it misses a focus on provision for those seeking general foundation skills (rather than access to further study) and those who have totally fallen out of the education system, for example students who have left school early.

Patterns of response to the TES

Uniform response to parts of the TES

One of the assumptions in the TES was that there would be a diversity of response to different parts of the strategy. One of the things that this analysis shows is a degree of uniformity of response to particular areas of the TES.

In both years, around 64 percent of TEO responses¹ were in 10 out of the 27 areas used for analysis. While there is variation of response across the sub-sectors, the majority of responses within each sub-sector were within the top 10 areas of overall response.

Following on from this, the top 10 areas of response can then be considered as being the overall messages of the TES that were responded to across the tertiary education sector. These areas are set out in the following table.

At the other end of the scale, there were areas that had very low response from TEOs. In both years, there were six areas that accounted for only 5 percent of TEO responses. These can be seen as areas where the TES has failed to create influence over TEO plans and are set out in Table 2.

Link between funding changes and shifts in responses

It can also be seen from the tables above that there were definite shifts in emphasis across the sector from 2005/07 to 2006/08 profiles. A further look at the areas of increase in response between the two years, shows that the areas with greatest increase were all linked to actual or proposed changes in funding, namely:

• preparation for the 2006 Quality Evaluation for the Performance-Based Research Fund (PBRF)
• the removal of funding for courses with low retention rates
• the proposal to introduce a performance measure to Student Component Funding
• the refocusing of Special Supplementary Grants (SSG) for Māori and Pasifika on higher-level qualifications and retention and completion.

Do TEO objectives reflect their organisational context?

The analysis of the relationship between profile objectives and TEI characteristics begins to explore this question. The results are somewhat inconclusive.

There are areas of the TES where having organisational objectives in those areas does bear a statistically significant relationship to the characteristics of the TEI. These are:

• access to and quality of foundation education — which is more common for smaller TEIs
• research and knowledge creation — which is linked to the extent of degree and postgraduate provision
• Pasifika development — which is linked to the number of Pasifika students, as well as the number of equivalent full-time students (EFTS)
• focus on leadership — which appears to be linked to some financial indicators, especially debt levels
• export education — which is linked to the proportion of international students.

Other areas that were tested seem to be more universally addressed, irrespective of the TEI characteristics. These are:

• focus on improving equality of access
• Māori development
• quality of teaching and learning
• focus on TEO capability
• focus on TEO collaboration.

Sector-wide approaches reflected in profiles

Profiles also reflect general trends in thinking across the tertiary education sector, which are not necessarily driven by the TES.

A notable example is the heavy emphasis in 2005/07 profiles on developing e-learning (which only receives a small mention in the TES). In the 2006/08 profiles this had shifted to a focus on flexible learning, which incorporates e-learning and other ways of making learning more accessible to a range of students.

Another example is the curriculum alignment projects across institutes of technology and polytechnics (ITPs). This is an initiative that grew out of the experience of one ITP and is now becoming standard practice across the sector.

A number of TEIs also have objectives relating to environmental management of their campuses. This is an area outside of the scope of the TES.

¹ That is, counting each time a TEO has one or more objectives in an area as ‘1’. (↑)

← Methodology | Home Page | Alignment across the Six Strategies →

• Contents

• Background
• Purpose
• Methodology

• Overall findings
• Alignment across the six strategies

• Foundation skills
• Skills for a knowledge society
• Research and knowledge creation
• Te rautaki mātauranga Māori
• Pacific Peoples’ development and success
• Capability and quality

*Appendix 1: Mapping of analysis areas to TES and STEP Δ

*Appendix 2: Results of statistical tests Δ