Tertiary Wiki ~ Tertiary Analysis | Main / Issue Ten April 2009

Industry training and modern apprenticeships

At the New Zealand Vocational Education and Training research forum [1] this week the Minister for Tertiary Education highlighted results from two important new Ministry of Education analytical reports on industry training and modern apprenticeships.

The industry training report provides a wide range of contextual and statistical information on industry training, including participation and completion analyses, and describes the results of statistical modelling on the influencers of success. It reports that: industry; duration; and volume of learning are the most useful variables within the administrative data for predicting the outcomes of industry training programmes.

A companion report, Modern Apprenticeships - completion analysis extends this approach to the Modern Apprenticeships scheme. The analysis looks at apprentices starting for the first time in 2002 and 2003, and follows their progress until their final exit. As well as participation and contextual information, it provides five and six year completion rates for these modern apprentices. Statistical modelling of the data also provides insights into the useful predictors of completion; and these are compared with similar indicators used in the industry training analysis.

The reports are available on the Ministry of Education’s Education Counts website:

Industry Training - Exploring the Data [2]
Modern Apprenticeships - Completion Analysis [3].

Promoting quality research

This report used data from the Performance-Based Research Fund Quality Evaluations to analyse the factors associated with the likelihood of university academics being promoted between 2003 and 2006. The study found that:

Staff with higher levels of research quality had a greater likelihood of being promoted.
Staff with higher levels of submitted research outputs had a greater likelihood of being promoted.
While research quantity decreased in importance as a factor at higher academic ranks, research quality had an increasingly important relationship to the likelihood of promotion at more senior academic ranks.

The report is available on the Education Counts [4] website.

Ministry presentations at the NZVET research forum

Ministry staff made several presentations at the recent New Zealand Vocational Education and Training research conference. These covered:

Literacy and numeracy or qualifications - which matter more in employment?
Does participation in up-skilling differ by industry group?
Factors associated with success in industry training and modern apprenticeships - what the data tells us

A poster on regional differences in adult literacy and numeracy was also presented.

These presentations will be available on the conference website [5] shortly.

Upcoming reports from the Ministry

A number of reports are nearing completion and are likely to be released within the next month or so. These include:

a short report on 2008 tertiary enrolments
updated fact-sheets on Pasifika participation and achievement
a report on the relationship between qualifications, skills, occupation and income (highlights of which were presented at the NZVET conference).

We have also been working hard on a new approach to coding field of study of qualifications. In the past, we have reported the field of study that the qualification is coded to. However, this provides limited information on what students actually studied, particularly for qualifications such as Bachelor of Science, Bachelor of Arts and doctorates. The new approach uses information on the courses taken by completing students to assign one or more fields of study to each completed qualification. We plan to publish new data tables shortly, accompanied by a brief analytical report.

Ordering hard-copy reports

We are encouraging greater use of the on-line copies of our reports and limiting the number of people we mail hard copies to. Hard copies are still available on request for most reports. If you would like a hard copy of any of our reports please email Kate Andrews [Kate.Andrews@minedu.govt.nz].

Upgrading the newsletter

We are investigating some options for upgrading the newsletter. So watch out for changes in the next issue. Some of you may be asked to test the new system.