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December 2013
INSIDE Tectra’s shearing training role not under threat A new Page 4
generation for a fabled sport
Page 10
What exactly is Agresearch up to? A few straight answers please! Page 23
by Hugh de Lacy
Shearing industry training provider Tectra is not about to be kicked into touch by the newly-formed Primary Industry Training Organisation (ITO), Shearing Contractors Association president Barry Pullin says. Privately-owned Tectra was until recently unique among ITOs economy-wide in that it both organised and delivered shearing and wool-handling training, a situation it inherited with the demise of the Wool Board a decade ago. Farmers’ subsequently voted to abolish the compulsory wool levy, which used to be collected by the Wool Board for a range of industry-good purposes that included the WoolPro woolharvesting training programme. Tectra, which was formed in 2004 and is jointly owned by three people with training provision expertise, stepped into the vacuum left by WoolPro, becoming the sole recipient of Government funding as both ITO and contracted training provider.
Christmas at a pioneer farm
Although the statutory environment for the provision of training is supposed to be a competitive one, Tectra in effect held a monopoly.
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But from next month the expanded Primary ITO, which covers industry training up to the point of sale for all the farming industries, will take over the organisation of the wool-harvesting training sector, with Tectra reverting to the role
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of contracted training provider at least for the practical on-thejob skills training. The ITO will separately organise and contract out the off-the-job training. Canterbury Farming understands the changes have caused alarm in the shearing industry among those who thought Tectra was being dumped in favour of some new training provider, or none at all. But Pullin, whose shearing contracting business is based near Rolleston, said such fears were unfounded. “The contract for the delivery of training for 2014 is a rollover to Tectra of Levels Two, Three and Four of shearing and wool-handling training. “The ITO and Tectra agree they both need each other. Tectra has said, ‘Yes, we need to work for the ITO,’ and the ITO has said, ‘Yes, Tectra has a major role to play’ — which is great for the Shearing Contractors Association,” Pullin told Canterbury Farming. “What is changing is that wool-harvesting used to be the only industry in the country where the training and the service support of the trainees was handled by the
training provider. Now with [the formation of the] Primary ITO they’ve said, ‘Let’s take the opportunity and bring this all back so everyone’s the same’. “There’s a lot of people out there who still believe that Tectra is the Wool Board, but it’s not the Wool Board and it’s not Meat and Wool New Zealand — they’re both dead and gone.” However there remained “a lot of confusion and misinformation out there”, especially about the separate on-job and off-job training provision. For the time being Tectra will provide the on-job training — the physical and technical aspects of shearing the sheep and handling the wool — though it is possible it will face competition in the future to secure the contract from the Primary ITO. “The change in the delivery of training is that some of the soft skills — the likes of nutrition and hydration — are going to be accessed off the job by the Primary ITO through the Work Record Card and the like.” Pullin said the Government had decided there were too many ITOs in the wider industrial
sector, and had required many of them to merge. “So the Primary ITO was rationalised to cover everything from wool-harvesting to sheep and beef, dairying, arable and horticulture. “The Primary ITO has now got very large, including even horse-related skills and everything else.” He said that while the Shearing Contractors Association supported the changes, it still had some concerns about how the woolharvesting sector would be serviced by the new body.
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However there were already pilot schemes under way to try different forms of training service delivery from Tectra’s established ones. “Some people don’t like and don’t learn under the prescriptive Tectra way, so there have been some pilots where the learning has been totally on-the-job, and they have proved to be successful in their limited fashion. “What we’re moving to is a competitive model — not a monopoly by Tectra — where there is flexibility for people to learn in different ways,” Pullin said.