Tertiary Education, ‘National Development’ and the Public Good

INTRODUCTION

Thank you to the Institute of Policy Studies for hosting us here today. I hope this will be the first of many such talks and discussions on the tertiary education reforms. Over the last three years this government has put in place the most significant changes to the tertiary education system in at least a decade, and I believe they will have a significant impact on our economy and society as a whole over the longer term.

Tertiary education as a topic has not been an area that has attracted a large amount of scholarly or research attention in New Zealand in the past, and it would be beneficial to see that change.

I want to talk today about tertiary education in the context of national development and to discuss to the concept of ‘nation building’.

I will explore recent developments in tertiary policy both in New Zealand and internationally and examine whether or not linking tertiary education to national development is a worldwide trend or unique to New Zealand.

Finally, I will explain how nation building fits in with the traditional commitment New Zealand has to education as a public good as articulated by Clarence Beeby.

TERTIARY EDUCATION AND NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Let me begin by explaining what I mean by the ‘developmental’ role of tertiary education.

When people talk about tertiary education they’re generally thinking in terms of universities, with polytechnics possibly thrown in as an afterthought. The role of these institutions is often seen as self-defined. They are the critic and conscience of society, standing apart, and choosing what to comment upon. Or they are involved in curiosity-driven research, once again in areas of their own choosing.

These roles are fundamentally important, and I am totally committed to their continuation. But they are only part of the mission of tertiary education.

Increasingly, there has been recognition both here and abroad that we need tertiary educators to be in dialogue, not only amongst themselves and with their current students, but with society as a whole.

No matter who you are – a small-medium enterprise, a major corporate, a city or district council, an iwi, a community organisation, or central government – the tertiary education sector can play an important role in helping you meet your aspirations.

The role that tertiary education needs to play should be seen in parallel with the contribution that other areas of Government make to the general project of economic and social development.

This ‘developmental’ approach, seeing New Zealand as essentially a ‘developing nation’ whose circumstances can and must be transformed, is a distinguishing characteristic of this Government. This was made very clear when we released the Growth and Innovation framework for New Zealand last year. This framework identified a well-educated and skilled and adaptable workforce as an essential ingredient in producing a successful economy in the 21st century.

We are developing a Kiwi model of development, which sees the government as a leader, partner, facilitator, and broker, working with other sectors to get results. This perspective is reflected in our determination to ‘open up’ tertiary education to a closer relationship with our economy and society.

NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE KNOWLEDGE SOCIETY

This Government has set its sights on building what we have called a knowledge society. There is a certain amount of resistance in some quarters to the concept of a ‘knowledge society’ with it being viewed as either a shallow buzzword or else code for an economistic approach to government generally and education in particular.

The term itself is not that important. What is important is the incontrovertible economic, scientific and social trends that it has been used to describe. An understanding of, and an effective response to, these trends is fundamental to any attempt at economic transformation in the 21st century.

The factors combining to drive the move internationally towards countries seeing themselves, and striving to function effectively, as knowledge societies include:
·globalisation of the world's economies has fuelled competition and spurred the gathering of knowledge to get ahead;

·the technologies for gaining, sharing and applying knowledge are changing rapidly - for example the rise of computers and the internet;

·the growing role of research, science and technology in creating knowledge to solve business, social and environmental problems;

·knowledge tends to grow at exceptional rates (whereas the resources of the industrial society, for example fossil fuels, tended only to be used once, existing knowledge can be used to create new knowledge -- this speeds up the rate at which knowledge is created).

Common features of a knowledge society include:
·Knowledge and information becoming major sources of creating value;

·Rapid changes in technology;

·Greater investment in research and development;

·Greater use of information and communications technology;

·Growth of knowledge-intensive businesses;

·Increased networking and working together; and

·Rising skill requirements

In practical terms, that means that two things have to happen. We have to create more knowledge in this country, and we have to apply that knowledge within our own boundaries to all facets of our lives---whether business, our families, or our lives in our communities.

To enable that to happen, we need a tertiary system that is different from the one this Government inherited.

A ‘NATION BUILDING’ TERTIARY EDUCATION SYSTEM

The Labour Party recognised this before entering government when we gave our 1999 tertiary education policy the name ‘Nation Building’, taking the term from the work of the Australian educationalist Simon Marginson. We have continued to reflect this in Government. In fact, giving the tertiary sector back a sense of what might be called its ‘nation building’ role has been at the heart of our reforms.

Nation building means that the tertiary system and the government together build and reinforce national identity. As Simon Marginson points out, governments in the past saw building up the universities as an important investment in the nation’s identity and prosperity. We see this too.

And we go further than that because we see the strength of a broad and interconnected tertiary system. Our goals are not just national identity, but also economic and social well-being.

I would argue that achieving these goals without strong national identity is all the more difficult. Knowing our place in the world and being clear about our aspirations leads to being a more confident nation. Government is not the only investor in identity, just as we are not the only player in the new tertiary environment. Nonetheless, it is important for the government and the tertiary system to be committed to each other as they both engage on the global stage.

Paradoxically, globalisation challenges the system to be even more local. In a globalised world we need to have a comparative advantage, but this does not mean beating Harvard at Harvard’s game. It means making the world realize that there is no point in trying to beat New Zealand’s tertiary system in areas where New Zealand excels, because we concentrate on our strengths and invest in areas of importance.

To take just one example, for us, the focus for e-learning is on extending New Zealand e-learning through-out New Zealand, so that e-learning is available to New Zealanders no matter how remote and that e-learning must belong to New Zealand. So that it meets Maori development aspirations, is of this place and appropriate for/relevant to our people.

We must do it this way, because the alternative is to rely on globalised e-learning initiatives that may offer our people individual benefits through mass and undifferentiated offerings, but do not serve to further build the nation. I am looking forward to the e-learning portal and seeing the effects of the Innovation and Development Fund on our e-learning.

ARTICULATING THE DEVELOPMENT ROLE OF TERTIARY EDUCATION

For the first time in the history of this country we have a strategy related to our tertiary education system. We are thinking through what we need to achieve, and over the next 5 years we will make use of that strategy.

The strategy has been developed after widespread consultation with stakeholders throughout the sector. The strategy focuses on six key goals.

1.We’re going to build a more strategic and more capable tertiary education system, aligned to national goals.

2.We’re going to ensure the system we create contributes decisively to Maori development aspirations.

3.We’re going to ensure all New Zealanders have the foundation skills they need to participate in our new knowledge society.

4.We’re going to place stronger emphasis on higher level creative, specialist and technical skills.

5.We’re going to do more to ensure success for Pacific learners and communities.

6.Finally, we are going to boost research and knowledge creation to ensure that research and innovation are key drivers of our economy.
THE NEW TERTIARY POLICY FRAMEWORK IN NEW ZEALAND

A lot of the architecture that we need to drive the implementation of this strategy is now in place, or being put in place.

A Tertiary Education Commission, an intermediate body very much like the bodies that will be found in many other countries around the world, will ensure that there is independence of the sector while enabling the Government to have a dialogue with that sector about where teaching and research need to go.

Where the design of the Commission leads, rather than follows international practice, is with the important inclusion of training. The TEC folds together Skill New Zealand with the tertiary operational functions of the Ministry of Education. The uniting of government’s tertiary education operational functions in TEC will allow the tertiary education system to actually be treated as one integrated system.

Let me briefly outline the elegant coherence of the new system that the Commission will oversee.

Government sets the overall strategy and goals every five years. Advised by the TEC and the Ministry, government also issues statements of priorities every two or three years.

Tertiary organisations seeking funding from the Commission use the Assessment of Strategic Relevance to align their annual profiles to the strategic instruments, and the funding then flows into those activities which are going to achieve what the country needs.

The charter is the long-term overview of what a tertiary organisation is all about, developed in consultation with its stakeholders. The profile is the other basis for dialogue with the TEC as funding provider, as well as a rich source of information about the focus, capabilities, and direction of changes across the system.

The Commission deploys the Integrated Funding Framework to fund teaching, learning, research, and strategic development right across the new system.

What we’re going to have is nothing less than an entire integrated system, involving all post-school education and training in universities, polytechnics, colleges of education, wananga, PTEs, foundation education agencies, ITOs and adult and community education providers... all of them working to a shared strategic vision, and that shared vision will stem from our broad goals as a nation.

More than that too... because charters and profiles are being developed through community and stakeholder consultation. This means the shared strategic vision will embrace the results of local linkages and connectedness as well as the high level national goals.

Put simply, we want firm but unobtrusive steerage of the whole system towards relevance, excellence, access, capability, and collaboration.

BALANCING STRATEGY AND AUTONOMY

Steering the system more decisively so that tertiary education is more aligned to the broad national goals of New Zealand, is a fundamental reason for the development of the Tertiary Education Strategy, and the establishment of the Tertiary Education Commission.

It does not---and this, I think, has been the only really persistent criticism of any substance during this debate on the reforms---mean that we want to build a centralised, dictatorial system. We will not lessen anyone’s institutional autonomy, or impinge anyone’s freedoms to act as the critic and conscience of society.

Let me be explicit about that. It cannot, will not, happen. Those freedoms are as protected by statute now as they ever were in the past, and will stay protected.

To those who are concerned about the government becoming too involved with the direction and management of your affairs, I remind you of what we built into the legislation in late 2002.

We’ve enacted a set of objects for the tertiary system that go way beyond the managerial and the mundane. This and subsequent governments must now maintain a tertiary education system that can:

·foster high quality learning, research and innovation;

·contribute to cultural and intellectual life;

·respond to the needs of learners and the nation;

·contribute to sustainable economic and social development;

·strengthen New Zealand’s knowledge base and enhance research;

·provide for diversity of teaching and research, and achieve international standards of scholarship.

If you add sections 160 and 161 of the Education Act to all that, you have legislated protection of academic freedom, respect for institutional autonomy, and promotion of the “critic and conscience” role….all balanced with the obvious need to be accountable for the efficient use of a massive amount of public resource.

INTERNATIONAL TRENDS

What we are looking for is nothing that is different from what exists in most countries around the world. They did not go down the road of simply releasing market forces into the tertiary education sector.
All countries have a sense of purpose, of direction, of where they are going, and they want to ensure that their education systems, their tertiary education systems in particular, enable them to go in that direction.

Over recent years we have seen a number of important trends internationally in the approach that governments take to tertiary education:

·Firstly, there has been a greater recognition of learning as a lifelong endeavour, along with a tendency to look at tertiary education as encompassing the full continuum of post-secondary learn experiences;

·Secondly, there has been a growing awareness of the pivotal contribution that knowledge and skills can now make to a country’s economic prosperity in particular, but also its social development;

·Thirdly, there has been convergence in the approach governments take to the relationship with their tertiary education institutions, away from the extremes of both radically hands-on and a radically hands-off approaches.

INTEGRATED LIFELONG LEARNING

As the OECD has pointed out, tertiary education is now a

a broader notion than it used to be, incorporating most forms and levels of education beyond secondary schooling, and including both conventional university and non-university types of institutions and programmes. Tertiary education also means new kinds of institutions, work-based settings, distance learning and other arrangements.

Recognition of the growing importance of knowledge and skills to individual and collective success, together with an awareness of the dynamism inherent in modern knowledge societies, lends considerable importance to the principle of lifelong learning.

In knowledge societies, information can lose currency with much greater speed and individuals can expect a greater variety of career roles throughout their life. Learning therefore cannot be seen as a phase prior to entry to the workforce, but rather an ongoing process from 'cradle to grave'.

New Zealand was an early adopter of the principle of 'learning for life' in its 1989 reforms of tertiary education . Lifelong learning has more recently been advocated by the 1997 Dearing Inquiry in the United Kingdom and the 1998 West Committee in Australia. Furthermore, in 1996 and 1997 a commitment to "lifelong learning for all" was adopted by OECD education and labour ministers.

The ‘learning for life’ reforms also introduced the National Qualifications Framework, which put New Zealand at the forefront of an integrated approach to lifelong learning. Over the last decade many countries have begun to follow New Zealand’s lead.

Alongside the development of the National Qualifications Framework, supervision for training programmes was moved from the Department of Labour to the Education portfolio under the Education and Training Support Agency, later known as Skill New Zealand.

For just over a decade, this agency successfully administered and developed both foundation education programmes, such as Training Opportunities and Youth Training, and the Industry Training Strategy. They located these programmes within the education system, as key users of the Qualifications Framework, while maintaining their vital labour market connection.

The integration of Skill New Zealand into the Tertiary Education Commission is the culmination of the process of bringing what has traditionally been seen as vocational training within overall network of a person’s learning throughout life – while continuing to maintain the distinctive characteristics that make industry training and foundation education programmes unique.

In this way, the establishment of the Tertiary Education Commission takes New Zealand’s integrated approach to the next level, and once again provides the lead for other nations to follow.

INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON ROLE OF TERTIARY EDUCATION

If we are ahead of other nations in integrating our tertiary education system, we have if anything been slower than most to recognise what a critical strategic asset tertiary education is for national development.

Alan Wagner of the OECD has observed that tertiary education,
“figures prominently in th[e] vision of knowledge-intensive networks as the pathway to an improved competitive position at home and abroad”
and that
“the general trend is for countries to take a more strategic approach, relying on incentives to influence the choices of learners and the actions of more autonomous postsecondary education institutions and other providers, as well as third parties.”
The European Union has set a number of “Concrete Future Objectives of Education and Training Systems”, which it sees as vital to the Lisbon goal for Europe:
to become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion.

The range of these EU objectives will be familiar to readers of New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Strategy. They include:

·Developing skills for the knowledge society

·Increasing the recruitment to scientific and technical studies;

·Supporting active citizenship, equal opportunities and social cohesion; and

·Strengthening the links with working life and research, and society at large

In Australia, Learning for Life, the report of the 1998 West Review stated:

"The most important contribution that the higher education sector should make is to provide a learning environment that will enable its graduates to emerge with the skills and knowledge that will meet the economic, social and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century. (p. 47)

These themes are also evident in the most recent policy releases across the world. The recent United Kingdom White Paper, The Future of Higher Education, states,

In a fast-changing and increasingly competitive world, the role of higher education in equipping the labour force with appropriate and relevant skills, in stimulating innovation and supporting productivity and in enriching the quality of life is central. The benefits of an excellent higher education system are far-reaching; the risk of decline is one that we cannot accept.

Its Australian counterpart, Our Universities: Backing Australia’s Ability, seeks

a sustainable university system able to drive the future economic and social success of this country, and support future generations of Australians (p. 8)

CONVERGING RESPONSES

If there is consensus on the contribution tertiary education can make, is there also consensus on how to harness that potential? I would argue that there is, at least, convergence.

Recent moves in the United Kingdom and Australia towards deregulation, for instance, bring those countries more closely in line with New Zealand, not further apart.

This is because we are seeing a process of convergence from different directions. New Zealand in the 1990s had the most deregulated tertiary education of any first world country. We are moving back to the midpoint of the continuum just as other countries are also moving towards the midpoint from the more regulated end of the spectrum. Backing Australia’s Ability calls this a ‘partially deregulated system’.

A case in point is the regulation of tuition fees. An Australian Productivity Commission draft report on the resourcing of tertiary education released last year found that all of the countries surveyed except New Zealand regulate domestic undergraduate student tuition fees.

With the introduction of fee maxima, we have moved to a light-handed form of regulation. At the same time, the United Kingdom is proposing to allow institutions to set fees up to a fixed amount (£3,000) – but they must have an Access Agreement approved by the independent Access Regulator before they are allowed to introduce a contribution higher than the current standard fee.

And Australia is proposing that institutions be allowed to set their own student contribution levels, up to a maximum set by the government.

The Tertiary Education Commission will also have the power to decide to manage, on an exceptions basis, the number of enrolments it will fund in a particular programme and/or at a particular provider.

This also brings us closer to the international norm. In Australia’s ‘partly deregulated system’, for instance, every additional funded university enrolment will continue to be allocated by the government “on the basis of Commonwealth needs, taking into account the outcomes of discussion with State and Territories on labour market needs” or to National Priority subjects (Backing Australia’s Ability, p. 17).

Indeed, if there is one important difference between policy in New Zealand and elsewhere, it is probably a greater level of detail in trying to articulate our strategic objectives before using policy to steer the system towards them. This reflects the unique challenges of trying to move back from an environment as unregulated as the one we had in the 1990s.

The Centre for Higher Education Policy Studies (CHEPS) in the Netherlands has in many ways summed up the context for this sort of policy convergence in identifying as their research theme, ‘Higher Education and the Stakeholder Society’. This theme, in their words:

addresses itself to the notion that present day higher education institutions are forced to be in constant dialogue with their stakeholders in society. This idea reflects a number of fundamental changes in the relationship between the institutions of higher learning and their environment . . .
Accountability will manifest itself in new and complex forms. In their education and research tasks, the providers of higher education will continue to have an obligation to demonstrate quality, efficiency and effectiveness, not just to those in national administration which have the legal and historic responsibility for exercising official oversight, but increasingly so to a wider range of interests, i.e. stakeholders.

In the charters and profiles process, we have tried to create a system that appropriately reflects and reinforces this dual responsibility both to the government as funder and to diverse stakeholders.

NATION BUILDING AND THE BEEBY IDEAL

The process of change for us in a sense has a history. I just want to go back briefly over that. When I look at education I always go back to a person who is a kind of touchstone of what I think education has been about over the past century.

Of course I am talking about Dr. Clarence Beeby, the legendary Director of Education from 1940 to 1960. It was he, and Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser who advanced the proposition that no matter who you are, you should have access to education so you can fulfil your own personal potential:

"The Government's objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind for which he is best fitted and to fullest extent of his powers. So far is this from being a pious platitude that the full acceptance of the principle will involve the reorientation of the whole education system."

This is a wonderful statement. It's a statement that should be at the heart of any vision of where education should go because it is an equity vision. It's a vision about a democratic society. No matter who you are or what kind of education you want to be involved in, whether you want to be someone who is upskilling, whether you want to be a PhD research student, you should be able to go as far as that potential will take you.

That's a vision I want to hang on to.

As we work our way through these changes we need to remember that every New Zealander should be able to have access to the kind of education that suits them and it should be responsibility of the society that we live in to make sure it happens. Clarence Beeby’s vision of a broad and generous education for all New Zealanders is as valid now as it was at its conception in the mid-20th century.

But when you move on to where we are today, you will say that things have changed in the sense that we want to add to the vision. If the vision was about equity and democracy and those kinds of issues in the past century, we need to add to that a vision of where education can help contribute to building this nation for this new century.

Economic transformation, led by innovation and knowledge creation, and made applicable by inclusive social development, is our path to the future. What’s more, we’re going to go down that path and at the same time preserve and enhance the things that make us unique in our history, culture and environment.

As the inheritors of the Beeby/Fraser vision, we have the privilege and we have the opportunity to reassert and build on that vision as we approach new challenges in new times.

Essentially we are bringing about a paradigm shift in education. We are moving from the notion of people being educated merely as a citizenship right---which we should surely carry on with---to saying that the developmental role of education is so important that we must make these changes, and ensure that we go forward.

Now what this actually turns out to be, in a sense, is going to be a lively discussion. This is the nation building project we are involved in now and that combined with the Beeby vision is pretty much where we want to go.

A BROAD VIEW OF EDUCATION

If we therefore see these reforms as “Beeby-Plus” rather than a substitute for the Beeby ideals, it becomes clearer that the system still has at its foundation a broad-based system where universities in particular are still storehouses of the range of human knowledge which students can access.

The construction of mechanisms to allow and encourage the system to respond to pressing needs from industries and communities is built on top of that foundation. There is no intention to replace the enduring role with the current priorities in some sort of intellectual ‘urban renewal’ project.

This is reflected in the contrast between the ongoing nature of the ‘objects clause’ in the legislation, which I mentioned earlier (and which includes “contribute to cultural and intellectual life”), and the five-year period of any Tertiary Education Strategy. This doesn’t make the Strategy any less important, but it recognizes that the Strategy reflects our current areas of emphasis rather than the entire breadth of everything the sector should be doing.

Furthermore, “relevance” and national development are by no means the exclusive province of the sciences and the professions. We need plenty of graduates in the Humanities and Social Sciences too, and we need to retain a viable capacity for research and scholarship and teaching in these disciplines in any university that wants to claim the mantle of being a world-class institution.

We are living in a time of dramatic change and many of those changes are technologically and economically driven. However, they will affect us more than anything through the way that they change our society, and alter our place as citizens in it.

The effects will be social, impacting on people, shaping and reshaping our culture and our social structure – bridging individuals, families of different shapes and kind, communities – physical and virtual – and our sense of nationhood in an inter-national and inter-dependent world.

When I first started in the social sciences we studied overseas social issues because it was thought that we had none of our own. We have social issues of our own to address, and we need our own home-grown social thinkers to help address them.

CONCLUSION

And that is as good a note as any on which to conclude. The government has set up the structures but it will be teachers on the one hand and managers on the other who breathe life into them.

And it is on supporting them that our attention must next turn. Yesterday I released the independent review of tertiary governance carried out by Professor Meredith Edwards, Director of the National Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra. Professor Edwards is one of Australia’s most cutting-edge thinkers on governance and her recommendations take us into some very different territory from some of the stale dichotomies set out in the 1998 White Paper. I look forward to a lively discussion ahead of the government taking any decisions.

We also have our second Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards presentation on 23 June and have begun the process of setting up a Strategic Review and Plan of the Tertiary Education Workforce.

In closing, let me once again welcome your attention, as policy thinkers, to the tertiary education reforms. I believe we have embarked on a significant endeavour which both warrants and will benefit from ongoing discussion and analysis.