Tertiary Education Minister Steven Joyce’s recent policy announcements  have received a generally positive welcome.  Tying an element of institutional funding to students’ course and qualification completion, requiring a reasonable pass rate for continued access to student loans, and rationalising the many redundant or overlapping qualifications; all seem to have gone down well.  Even the usual naysayers have been muted in their response.

I find all this both gratifying and somewhat ironic. In 2001/2, the reports of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission effectively recommended doing the same things.  In July 2002, the people named to be the board of the Tertiary Education Commission (including me) reiterated their support for such initiatives.  However, some were ruled out of bounds for TEC, eg. student support was deemed to a welfare issue not an education issue. Some we didn’t have the funding mechanism to implement (and for nearly 3 years we weren’t allowed to address that either, even though we rated it the number 1 problem to fix). Some the institutions weren’t ready to concede there were problems - eg. qualification rationalisation and completion rates.  Some, like polytechnic governance, were, frankly, just too politically difficult for the then Labour-led government.  However, we’ve been jawboning away on this stuff for all of the last decade and, like water on stone, we’ve worn down the obstacles.

Given the name of this weblog - Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s personal motto En Avant or “Get Going” - you’d be right to assume that I have been very frustrated by the time taken for all this. Smart policy development and implementation seemed often to have been trumped by the need to not upset anyone.  To be fair, all the ministers I’ve dealt with have had their merits, and we’ve made increasingly faster progress.  However, there’s a palpable difference when dealing with confident and capable ministers who understand the big picture and can drive through policy change, despite the naysayers inside and outside government and the bureaucracy.  Governments can implement sweeping change quickly if they so chose and have the right people on the job.

There are still some big issues to address, not least being pricing - how much, how it’s presented, and who pays what to whom.  Any good marketer knows the importance of price presentation.  The new minister has already stated he’s interested in price as an issue, although he acknowledges this might take a little more time to work out.  Given the current pace, that shouldn’t be another decade.

Declaration: I am a non-executive board member of the Tertiary Education Commission, and was recently reappointed for a third term.