A submission in response to Number 4 Part 1 of the University Advisory Group’s questions
| Executive summary: Much teaching in New Zealand’s universities is very good, but there is scope for improvement. The UAG should recommend to Universities NZ that they should develop a set of common professional standards for university teachers, similar to those that work in the UK and create incentives for university teachers to work to, and meet, those standards. Ako Aotearoa has little focus on university teaching; the potential for Ako to act as a broker for the exchange of best practice in higher education teaching has not been exploited. The UAG should recommend to the TEC that it require Ako Aotearoa to strengthen its work on higher education teaching improvement, acting as a broker for the exchange of research and best practice. Most research on teaching and learning in New Zealand is focused on the school and ECE sectors. We need more research on what works in lifting student success in higher education to complement universities’ Ōritetanga Learner Success programmes. The UAG should recommend that Universities NZ find ways to encourage education academics to undertake sophisticated research on teaching and learning in higher education. As part of that push, UAG should encourage (or propose that the government require) universities to include each student’s GPA for each year in the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) alongside student demographic and study-related data already supplied to the IDI by government agencies. The UAG should recommend that the government, Universities NZ and the Academic Quality Agency explore ways to persuade NZCER, NZARE and the TLRI to contribute to research on higher education teaching and learning. All institutions’ behaviour is influenced by the tuition funding system. Our tuition funding system is responsive to student choice and that should remain. The UAG should recommend that the government commission a review of the tuition funding mechanism for higher education to ensure that funding incentivises innovation and excellence, looking at questions like: – whether NZ should retain the current demand-led (as opposed to a demand-driven) funding model – the appropriateness of the current field of study funding rate differentials – whether there should be a loading in the funding system for type of student, drawn from research into factors that create barriers to access and success in higher education – whether there should be a loading in the funding system for mode of delivery – distance education, work-integrated learning, traditional F2F, blended (F2F and online) – how to balance the conflicting needs for precision and clarity/simplicity in the funding formula. And the UAG should advise the government that the wasteful fees-free policy should be abandoned once the government is no longer bound by the 2023 coalition agreement. |
The context
Much university teaching is of exceptional quality – innovative, engaging and effective. But some is not. Universities all have mechanisms to improve the quality of their teaching, inspire their students better and help students succeed.
At an institutional level … One of the underpinning principles of management in universities is that university instructors are broadly autonomous, with each instructor responsible for how he/she conducts teaching.
And all the universities have teacher development units that offer support to instructors and that run student evaluations of teaching. These units manage professional development programmes to support academics, especially new academics. Heads of departments look at student evaluations and encourage/require staff with poor evaluations to undertake additional development. Some universities[1] make use of expert instructors on their staff to mentor and support less experienced staff.
All universities now operate sophisticated learning management systems (LMS) that help academics manage their teaching and assessment and that ease the burden academics face in administering their teaching. LMSs can be used to help teachers identify what parts of their teaching and what teaching approaches succeed in engaging students; they also allow teachers to identify students who are disengaged or failing, enabling them to intervene and support those students.
Academics can – if they choose – take tertiary teaching qualifications to improve their teaching skills[2].
Nationally … the government has established and funds Ako Aotearoa, the National Centre for Tertiary Teaching Excellence, which is intended to act as a focus for improving standards in tertiary education teaching. It funds research into tertiary teaching, and it runs the tertiary teaching excellence awards which help raise the profile of teaching and which provide a vehicle for dissemination of good practice.
As part of its Ōritetanga learner success programme, the TEC requires institutions to have a learner success plan under which universities are expected to develop interventions (mostly using learning analytics) and set targets for improving learner achievement and reducing disparities in achievement levels. The TEC manages competitive funds that can co-fund institutional initiatives that are designed to advance learner success. The Ōritetanga work will produce gains in learner success and will reduce disparities in success rates over the next five years[3].
The Academic Quality Agency conducts independent evaluations of the work of universities against a range of guideline statements, many of them focused on management, quality and development of teaching[4].
But there is much more that could be done to lift teaching quality…
The universities should develop a set of common professional standards for university teachers and create incentives for university instructors to work to and meet those standards
In Australia and the UK, experts have codified sets of standards for teaching performance. Those standards lay out the criteria that appointees at each rank should strive to meet, together with suggestions as to what evidence would be suitable to demonstrate performance at each level[5]. In the UK, those who can demonstrate that they meet the standards can apply for recognition as a fellow of the Higher Education Academy[6].
Ako Aotearoa commissioned a report on the possibility of adapting that sort of model to the New Zealand context[7], but the initiative appears to have stalled.
A set of professional standards would help focus university teachers on what is needed to master the craft of university teaching. It would provide a reference point for teaching development units in the universities as they seek to support and mentor new teachers. Creating an academy, similar to the UK Higher Education Academy (or else, supporting staff to apply to the UK Academy) would provide recognition for achievement in teaching, countering the inclination among academics and university managers to “coast” in their teaching so as to pay greater attention to achievement and milestones in research.
Ako Aotearoa has a minimal focus on university teaching
Ako Aotearoa was created as a vehicle for supporting improvement in the standard of tertiary teaching across the system. Yet in the last five to six years, Ako has paid scant attention to higher education teaching. A search of Ako’s website for “university teaching” produces few results from the last five years beyond the profiles of university teachers honoured the Te Whatu Kairangi | Aotearoa Tertiary Educator Awards (and its predecessor the Tertiary Teaching Excellence Awards).
Ako’s most visible work is on themes that relate to all parts of the system (such as the use of AI, supporting Māori and Pasifika students and dealing with learners with dyslexia). However, Ako has also supported work on certain other parts of the system (such as apprenticeships). Ako’s conferences and forums are cross-system events which bring together people with a similar focus from different parts of the system. Ako’s focus on underserved learners is appropriate.
However, the upshot is that Ako is often seen by university managers (whether fairly or not) as adding most value at lower qualification levels and as contributing little to their work in teaching and learning. Ako’s role as qualification developer of Level 1-6 tertiary teaching qualifications reinforces that view.
This means that university teacher development programmes and work on improving university teaching have become almost exclusively institutional; that means the potential of using Ako Aotearoa to act as a broker of professional development for universities and as a disseminator of best practice in university teaching is lost.
That should change.
We need more research on what works in lifting student success in universities
Research on higher education in New Zealand has tended to focus on system issues: participation, labour market outcomes, and matters like digitalisation, system structure and policy (much of it by government agencies, rather than academics). Unlike in the compulsory sector, there has been relatively little research on pedagogy, on the effectiveness of teaching approaches on learning[8]. The advent of generative AI and the potential for AI to affect the pedagogy of higher education – for better or worse – has created a new need for research on how learners in universities are taught.
With all universities now running sophisticated LMSs, with increasing take-up of the power of LMSs by academics, and with all the universities running some form of student survey[9] there are opportunities for researchers to design larger scale research beyond a single institution. Universities should be encouraged (or required!) to submit an EFTS-weighted GPA for each student for each year for inclusion in Statistics NZ’s integrated data infrastructure (IDI), to be used as a variable in pedagogical research (alongside the student-level data supplied to the IDI by the government agencies).
Large scale research, randomised control trials, quantitative studies, research that goes beyond illustrative case studies. The focus on student success resulting from the TEC Ōritetanga Learner Success initiative and the potential of AI to improve (or degrade) teaching, learning and assessment in universities – these should be drivers for a more systematic approach to analysing the effectiveness of teaching approaches in universities.
More sophisticated research into the pedagogy of higher education in New Zealand will require:
- encouraging researchers to develop research proposals related to higher education pedagogy and higher education learning and to seek funding for them
- making researchers aware of the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) and encouraging them to apply for funding[10]
- persuading universities to support the adult and higher education research group in the NZ Association for Research in Education (NZARE)
- persuading NZCER that education research is not exclusively related to the school and ECE sectors[11].
It requires researchers to access data from across the university system on teaching, learning and student engagement – and that requires richer university data in the IDI, including EFTS-weighted GPAs for each student for each year and, if feasible, student experience survey data[12].
We need to check that the tuition funding mechanism incentivises innovation and excellence
There is a case for a new look at the structure of the tuition funding formula for higher education, to make sure it is sending the right messages to universities. This section discusses six aspects of the funding mechanism that deserve scrutiny[13].
The funding of tuition
A mechanism that reflects costs …
Any formula for tuition funding needs to reflect costs. That means it needs to take account of the number of people being taught, and the inherent costs of teaching in the field of study. Costs of teaching vary significantly by field; if funding rates are out of kilter with those differences, there are risks to the quality of delivery.
… responding to demand …
On the question of volume – how many students get funded across the system – New Zealand has tried three systems since the Learning for Life reforms of 1990:
- rolling capped funding (from 1991-1998) where institutions made bids and the government made decisions on institutions’ funding based on its budgeted allowance for funding, irrespective of underlying demand, with institutions free to enrol students over their cap, unfunded (though over-enrolment in one year would lead to an increase in the university’s cap in the following year)
- demand-driven funding (1999 to 2008) where the government paid for all valid enrolments
- demand-led funding (2009-now) where the government makes robust forecasts of demand for enrolments and funds all (or nearly all) growth, with the TEC allocating the funding between institutions on the basis of institutional enrolment performance.
Demand-driven funding exposed the government to fiscal risk and rewarded all and any form of growth, resulting in perverse incentives to grow at all cost – creating quality risks. The current system protects the government against fiscal risk but provides a reasonable response to demand.
The current approach should stay.
… and to the inherent cost of delivery …
Differences in funding rates by discipline were set in 1991 and reflected the teaching practices and the costs that applied then. The differentials were researched again in 2011/12[14] and some of the imbalances in funding rates were corrected then.
The government needs to satisfy itself that the field of study differentials are still appropriate.
… and to mode of delivery …
But we risk a circular argument. The funding rates – set on the basis of the 1991 costs – reflect modes of delivery from 30+ years ago. If there is a more effective but more costly mode of delivery, then it will be unlikely to be implemented by cost-conscious management in universities. A case in point is the wish of universities to broaden access to work-integrated learning (WIL). WIL has always been used in New Zealand in pure vocational degrees such as medicine, nursing and teaching[15].
But in Canada and Australia, many universities give WIL opportunities to non-vocational degrees (such as BA and BSc) and have enriched the traditional work experience requirements of vocational qualifications like law, accounting and engineering[16]. But to do WIL well and at scale is costly[17]. The University of Waikato has made participation in WIL a requirement of all bachelors degrees and has had to absorb the cost of that.
However, if WIL is to be really effective, students need not just the experience of work and not just a reflective essay or a presentation on the internship. There should be deliberate, specific educational input from the university as well as the workplace supervisor. Looked at like that, WIL becomes expensive; economies of scale can evaporate. It is likely that the light-touch of the WIL offered in some courses and the relative slowness to embrace WIL in a comprehensive way across New Zealand’s universities may reflect the fact that the funding formula makes no allowance for mode of delivery[18].
… and, perhaps, to the characteristics of students …
Some students are easier to teach than others. The great majority of undergraduate students in higher education have a university entrance qualification so there is greater homogeneity of preparation for study among entrants to degree study than in non-degree tertiary education.
But research on student performance identifies factors that predict attrition; understanding what factors increase the risk of attrition can lead to interventions to reduce that attrition[19]. The research shows that school performance is, unsurprisingly, the most important predictor of attrition, but that there are some other factors (for example, ethnicity) that significantly predict attrition (even if the effect sizes are small), even controlling for school performance. That sort of analysis can be used to guide the targeting and the nature of interventions to reduce attrition risk[20].
We need to ask: To what extent should the funding formula allow for factors that signify greater risk of attrition (and hence, greater cost in remedial interventions to universities)?
… and institutional factors like scale …
There are serious economies of scale in tertiary education – there are very high fixed costs but, in most cases, relatively low marginal costs. Yet the current funding formula takes no account of institutional scale. Providing average funding when marginal cost is reducing incentivises increasing student numbers; that is a positive but can produce a risk to quality and can disadvantage smaller institutions.
In 1994, an institutional base grant was established designed to mitigate the disadvantage faced by small institutions but that was wiped in the later 1990s.
The question of whether there should be mitigation of the problems of smaller providers needs to be on the agenda of a comprehensive review of the tuition funding mechanism.
… a student contribution …
A student contribution, in the form of a tuition fee, reflects the shared benefits of tertiary education between government and students. New Zealand has established that expectation among students and uses the (generously subsidised) loan scheme to ensure that students are not deterred from enrolment by lacking the liquidity to meet the cost of tuition fees.
The government has been obliged under the coalition agreement to maintain a fees free policy but moving it from first year to final year. The difference in year is unimportant – fees free is bad policy, whether it is first year, final year or any other year. The research is clear – fees free doesn’t change student behaviour[21] and it is implausible that it would affect institutional outcomes. The way the loan scheme operates, granting free fees – first year or last year – confers zero financial benefit on students for seven to ten years following graduation: when the graduate finally does get a financial benefit, it is a slightly early date for the increase in take home pay that occurs when the loan is repaid – it is a very small bonus delivered at a time when most graduates are well-established in careers with reasonable earnings. It’s just wasteful expenditure.
That ship may have sailed for now, but it might be useful for the UAG to advise the government that the money spent of fees free would be more usefully spent on tuition subsidies in institutions.
… and questions about the funding time horizon …
Inevitably, there is a question about the time horizon for funding. Currently, tuition funding is calculated, allocated and delivered annually while most research funding is calculated and allocated over longer time frames. That difference reflects the fact that tuition costs rise and fall annually with enrolments, while research projects are mostly multiyear.
Over the years, there have been calls to extend the horizon for tuition funding, supposedly to facilitate better planning. Some people often hark back wistfully to the years before when the old university funding system was quinquennial.
However, those of us who worked with the quinquennial system know that it was only ever suitable for extended periods of stability; the 1980s, the last decade of the quinquennial system was anything but stable. There is not the space here to describe just how corrosive quinquennial allocations were, both for government and for institutions and their culture. Put simply, it was a terrible system, inflexible, unresponsive – that’s why it was abandoned.
The question has to be asked, even if the answer is simple.
The funding formula
Some aspects of the existing funding system – the annual funding cycle, demand-led funding etc – work well and should stay. But there is a need to think about some of the other matters discussed above – field of study differentials for instance.
There is an important balance to be struck in creating a funding formula. The formula needs to reflect costs and therefore, to be responsive to the drivers of cost. But there is a risk of over-complicating the system and a risk of creating a false sense of precision. Would including such factors as type of student, mode of delivery etc in a funding formula cause institutions to focus too closely on how to improve their revenue, rather than on the core focus on bringing in students and supporting them to succeed? Are these issues for institutions and government to decide together?
We need a systematic study of the funding formula.
Endnotes
The endnotes below refer to the readings and research that have informed the analysis and arguments in this paper. The full bibliography is at this link.
[1] For instance, the University of Canterbury which has created a teaching fellowship programme to make use of the expertise of their most successful teachers.
[2] See Eadie et al (2010)
[3] See Smyth (2023a) and this page of the TEC website
[4] See Matear (2018)
[5] Advance HE (2023), Office for Learning and Teaching (2014)
[6] Suddaby (2019) reports that New Zealanders from Unitec, VUW and UC can apply directly for recognition as fellows of the UK HEA, while AUT and MU “… are accredited with HEA/Advance Higher Education and are able to grant recognition to any of their own staff that have undertaken the programme”.
[7] Suddaby (2019)
[8] That has begun to change to an extent with the TEC’s Ōritetanga Learner Success Programme. As an example, see Kay and Bostock (2023). This paper reports on the effectiveness of a learning intervention at the University of Canterbury.
[9] Regrettably, surprisingly, there is no standardisation of the student experience surveys run across the universities – that needs to change!
[10] TLRI data shows that only two higher education research projects have been completed since 2016 – 4% of the total.
[11] Section 13 of the NZCER Act 1972 does not prevent the Council from conducting or sponsoring research on higher education
[12] In the Agency Roles section of this submission, I discuss the role of the tertiary education agencies in analysis and research on tertiary education performance. The agencies, naturally, have an interest in evaluating system performance, but the TEC, in particular, is also vitally interested in questions about the effectiveness of teaching.
[13] This section draws from and summarises Smyth (2023b) which discusses the factors a review of tuition funding might canvas.
[14] Connew et al (2015)
[15] In this paper, the term “vocational degrees” was taken as referring to those where the degree provides access to a specific occupation and in particular, to regulated professions (such as medicine, nursing, law, accounting etc) or where the qualification was clearly pitched to a particular profession (such as performing arts). More than half of all higher education graduates in New Zealand take out vocational degrees according to analysis of data in Smart (2018). That estimate ignores qualifications that are vocational but that are not separated in the data (such as degrees in creative writing which are in the BA/MZ sequence). In addition, it excludes the many students (in degrees in for instance, business management, data science or IT) who have constructed a vocational course of study. Australian research on student motivations to study suggest that the great majority in that country enter higher education with a view to building the base for a career – see Norton (2020).
[16] WIL has been shown to have good, long-term outcomes for students. See Finnie and Miyairi (2017) which reports on the labour market outcomes of graduates who had participated in WIL (called ‘co-op ‘in Canada) compared with comparable students who had not taken WIL. In most disciplines, the WIL group had significantly higher earnings in the eight years following graduation, even controlling for students’ GPA. Note however, there is a selection bias in this study; some of those who decline to participate in WIL may have a lesser career focus – this is an unobservable variable.
[17] See Quigley (2020)
[18] See also the Knowledge Transfer section of this submission. Holland et al (2024) discusses the difficulties in implementing a work-based degree in NZ. In the UK, equivalent degree apprenticeships received additional funding from an employer apprenticeship levy. And when the levy was consumed, the placements stopped.
[19] Earle (2018) uses IDI data to identify attrition risk factors. See also Meehan et al (2017).
[20] That sort of approach to targeting interventions is more sophisticated than the proposed needs-based funding adjustment currently under discussion in Australia as part of the Accord reforms – which mirror the old ethnicity-based special supplementary grants for Māori and Pacific students introduced in NZ in the early/mid 1990s. See Norton (2024).
[21] See Smyth (2019 and 2023f) See also Yong et al (2023) which explores the elasticity of demand for higher education in the presence of a loan scheme.
Strategy, Policy, Analysis | Tertiary Education 