Minister of tertiary education Steven Joyce is defending his decision to transfer $55 million of funding from industry training to universities, saying that the money was being poorly spent.

Mr Joyce told the Labour Party’s tertiary education spokesperson Grant Robertson that the cut to industry training funding will have little, if any, effect on industry training because the funding was under-utilised or in some cases not being utilised at all.

“The member may be interested to find out that roughly 100,000 of the registered industry trainees in New Zealand achieved no credits in 2009, 100,000 of them achieved no credits in 2008, and 44,000 of them achieved no credits across 2008 and 2009. I think it is appropriate for the Government to review that situation and spend the industry training budget more wisely.”

TEU national president Dr Tom Ryan says over the last two years polytechnics have been another part of the tertiary education sector to suffer very significant funding cuts.

“Polytechnics have a crucial role to play in skills development, and getting people into employment.  And they have been doing that job very successfully.  Yet they, like ITOs have lost about $50 or $60 million of funding.  If the government wants to meet the goals it set itself in its Tertiary Education Strategy it needs to support polytechnics and others involved in skills development, like ITOs. Through various cuts the government has now wiped away a massive part of our country’s investment in skills and training. While we are pleased some of that has been transferred to other parts of the tertiary education sector that doesn’t lift the growing financial pressure on those who work to give New Zealanders new skills and training,” said Dr Ryan.