3. The Training Opportunities Programme

Training Opportunities is part of a suite of vocational education and training programmes in operation in New Zealand, which are referred to collectively as Targeted Training Programmes. These also include Youth Training and Skill Enhancement programmes. They are referenced as targeted because they are open to participation by people who meet certain eligibility criteria.

Its genesis lies in the Training Opportunities programme in operation from 1993 to 1998, which in turn evolved from Access programmes. ACCESS was principally targeted towards people who were disadvantaged in the labour market, and for whom traditional training methods were unsuitable or unavailable.¹ ACCESS was open entry with a level of funding for each trainee based on the level of disadvantage they faced. Māori ACCESS (MACCESS) ran alongside, and was separately administered by Māori authorities, It focused specifically on Māori, and was largely delivered through Māori providers.

The Training Opportunities Programme (TOPS) developed out of ACCESS at the start of 1993, and MACCESS was subsumed into TOPS later that year. TOPS retained some of the features of ACCESS, but it was targeted more specifically at school leavers and long-term job seekers with low or no qualifications. It aimed to assist them gain recognised qualifications (or credit towards them), and to move into further education and training or employment.

TOPS was funded through Vote: Education and administered by Skill New Zealand until 1998, when a decision was made to split it into two streams: Training Opportunities, funded through Vote: Social Development, which retained its focus on work-training for long-term unemployed Work and Income clients; and Youth Training, funded through Vote: Education to provide work-readiness training for  young learners with low or no qualifications. Both programmes continue to be administered by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC).

Training Opportunities is funded to provide training for clients of the Ministry of Social Development’s Work and Income group who have, or will face, significant periods of unemployment and who have low and no qualifications. It focuses on learners acquiring a valuable set of foundation skills that enable them to move effectively into sustainable employment and/or higher levels of tertiary education.²

The programmes are required to have a labour market focus, reflected in training that:

• leads towards national qualifications
• meets local industry and employer requirements
• is mainly at Levels 1 to 3 on the National Qualifications Framework
• is full-time, with typically 30 hours a week or more of tutor contact time
• includes workplace learning.³
  

Training is provided by Tertiary Education Organisations (TEOs) who are required to be New Zealand Qualification Authority (NZQA) registered. Providers offering Training Opportunities training include: marae; charitable trusts; incorporated societies; local authorities; private training establishments; polytechnics and institutes of technology; schools; universities and others.

The data used in this report is sourced from the TEC, who collects it for administration purposes. The data is used to reimburse training providers for training services provided, and is considered to be reasonably robust.

Participation and output data is collected for contract management purposes. Providers are required to track each learner’s outcomes two months after the end of their training. These activities are referred to as Labour Market Outcomes (LMOs), and form the basis of funding accountability of providers to the TEC. Any employment and further progressive education activity engaged in by the learner two months after leaving Training Opportunities is regarded as a positive outcome, while unemployment and ‘out of the labour force’ status is considered to be a negative outcome, for accountability purposes.⁴

Some commentators have reflected on the utility of such an approach to measuring the outcomes of Training Opportunities, in particular, the duration of positive outcomes, as well as the implied causality of outcomes.⁵ This paper does not attempt to address these questions, focusing instead on gathering and analysing the programme–related datasets. As such, it is limited in what it can tell us about Training Opportunities.

Future analytical work may include statistical modelling of outputs using methods which assess the power of the data to provide a true picture of Training Opportunities, as well as tracking employment and other activities of Training Opportunities learners long-term, using education, tax collection, benefit receipt and other sources of data⁶.
 

Footnotes

1. Ministry of Education, 2002. Pgs. 6-7.
2. TEC, 2007. Pg. 4
   
3. Ibid, pg. 5.
   
4. Output sections of this paper analyses ‘leaving the placement’ outcomes, which can be regarded as either as positive or negative. There is a separate reporting regime ‘leaving the programme’ which has a different emphasis. Under the leaving the programme regime,  returning to Training Opportunities would not be considered a positive outcome, while under the leaving the placement regime it would.
   
5. Stolte, 2004
6. Statistics New Zealand is currently managing a project to manage the feasibility of matching tax and tertiary education administrative data.  While targeted training is not part of the feasibility project, it may be included if the feasibility is established and if the project is put into production.