Ākonga at the Centre moving around the country
23 November, 2020
The Ākonga at the Centre national research project has spent two days connecting with colleagues and learners at Ara in mid-November.
Te Pūkenga’s commitment is to ensure a re-imagined vocational education system with learners at its centre. The formation of the Te Pūkenga team, supported by representatives from the 16 subsidiaries and many of the transitional ITOs, is well underway with a national engagement programme now beginning. This programme includes a research team that is facilitating small focus groups and larger workshop type activities, both in person and virtually.
“We’ve been surprised and delighted at the interest and engagement with our programme,” says Debbie Preston, Programme Lead from Te Pūkenga.
“We understand that people are really busy, but we’ve found as soon as we’ve got things underway and shared what we’re doing, and more importantly why we’re doing it, people just open up and share their thoughts.”
“To get the best information, we need to reach out far and wide. We’re engaging with Māori, learners in remote locations and those at different life stages, ethnicities, residency statuses, ages and socio-economic backgrounds.”
While visiting Ara, the team ran three focus groups that included a range of learners and Ara staff members that directly support them.
The research team also had other groups connecting with learners in three locations to get a sense of the enablers and barriers which exist across the learner journey. Over 100 participants engaged in this process and hundreds of thoughts were collected on Post-It notes to contribute to the research data.
Karen Te Puke, DCE Customer Engagement and Experience at Ara said, “The work that Te Pūkenga is doing to ensure learners are central to our thinking and delivery is critical. We have a number of colleagues at Ara who are passionate about ensuing this happens and it was valuable to give them an opportunity to share their views.”
“We also have a range of learners who are part of the Ara community and who had plenty of feedback from their own experiences when thinking about coming to join us and beginning their experiences which were able to be shared as part of this research activity.”
Insight gained from the Ākonga at the Centre research will be a critical contributing component for the operating model that will help transform the vocational education and training system with learners at its very heart, something that the organization explicitly states is a top priority.
The team has almost concluded eight weeks of working their way around the country, gathering information. In early December they will start to analyse this, so that they can start to understand themes that may emerging from the data.