“Buildings before people” criticised

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33067, 7 November 1972, Page 34

“Buildings before people” criticised

Buildings rather than people appeared to be more important to New Zealand’s political parties when they referred to senior technical education, said the president of the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutes (Mr H. Durbin). Mr Durbin, in a statement, attacked the General Election manifestos of all parties which, he said, gave more priority to technical institute buildings than to the tutors and students who inhabit them.

Many tutors teaching today would still be teaching students in the year 2000, and to do this properly, and in the interests of economy and efficiency, positive action should be taken soon to allow tutors to return to industry for refresher training, Mr Durbin said. Present indications were that the matter of refresher leave was being forgotten by the Government and the other political parties. Mr Durbin emphasised what he said was an urgent necessity for a system of teacher-training for the 1000 tutors already in New Zealand’s 12 technical institutes. “This has largely been ignored, though a scheme for new tutors has been approved,” he said. “The need to equip the bulk of tutors with better training should not have to await the success of the smaller scheme for new tutors.”

New Zealand’s technical institute tutors were not impressed, Mr Durbin said, by Government assurances that a scheme for refresher leave was under consideration. “We know that the working party report on this was made more than a year ago, and in May this year the A.T.T.I. was told that a Cabi-

net decision on the matter was ‘only weeks away’—but we are still waiting,” he said.

The A.T.T.I. agreed that buildings to meet the demands of senior technical education were important, Mr Durbin said, but more important was the supply of well-qualified and welltrained tutors. “This latter issue seems to have been completely ignored by the political parties,” he said.