"The quality of trades education, and ultimately the safety of the public, are is under threat as a result of recent moves by the Plumbing, Gasfitting, Drainlaying & Roofing Industry Training Organisation (ITO)," says TEU president Tom Ryan. Recently, this ITO has been putting pressure on polytechnics to reduce the length of study for plumbing theory from 22 weeks to 11 weeks.

"When plumbing lecturers have insisted on maintaining standards, the ITO has threatened to shift programmes and students from highly regarded public providers, such as Unitec, to a private provider set up by an ITO proxy. This threatens the quality of education received by our next generation of plumbers", says Dr Ryan.

"Under the current system, student-plumbers spend time learning about crucial safety issues, such as hot water systems. Later they repeat this learning and reflect on it. Under the ITO's new scheme, they will look at each segment of skills once only. Halving their learning time is not safe for these trainee trades people, and it's not safe for the rest of us", says Dr Ryan.

"The ITO does not even have NZQA approval for this proposal. Its job should be to ensure education and safety standards, but instead it is setting up its own private provider to compete against a public polytechnic with a first-class track record in the field. The ITO also is offering current Unitec plumbing students $2000 to swap from the higher quality course to their shorter one."

Tom Ryan notes that similar corruptions of established standards in trades education occurred in New Zealand during the 1990s. The result was major shortages of properly trained tradespeople in this country, and in Australia the de-recognition of recent New Zealand trades qualifications.

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