By Julie Kilroy, until recently, Adult and Community Education Co-ordinator at Glenfield College, Auckland
Glenfield College Community Education has been well-established in the community for over 30 years. I can remember as a teenager attending night school for English and Accounting which enabled me to complete School Certificate even though I had left school. In its heyday, Glenfield College was a thriving hub located centrally in the community and along with the other North Shore schools, had multiple classes happening each night.

When the opportunity came to work and learn about Adult Community Education, I jumped at the chance and applied. I knew how invaluable this service had been to me. I started in 2019 and it was clear that some things needed to change. Enrolments were low, systems needed updating and overall a fresh new look was required. In that year the programme was reduced to just eight courses. Whilst learning about the ACE Sector, I set about reviewing and updating everything. Because I came from a business and administration background, I knew we needed the right systems in place to successfully build and grow the centre.

By 2020–2021, armed with a new website and enrolment system, we had added many more courses to the programme. Twenty-seven different courses were on offer, a variety of both funded and non-funded courses. Numbers were increasing and we were meeting funding targets and KPI’s.

When the first lockdown came, we had reassurance from the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) that clawbacks wouldn’t happen. A welcome relief.

Feeling confident that we had hit the right mix, we saw a steady increase in enrolments which in turn attracted new tutors. However, Covid again had other plans. In August Auckland went into a regional lockdown. At the time we had no idea that it would last for as long as it did. Whilst the rest of the country transitioned into the new traffic light system, schools remained under the old system until the end of the year, so for two school terms, we were closed for face-to-face learning. It also became apparent that the TEC didn’t understand what was happening in Auckland and Northland resulting in their hard-line stance – a complete turnaround from 2020. They were quite removed from our reality. When they issued notice that our courses could go online, although positive in many ways, it was still ill-conceived. The idea that any course could and should go online is not always possible. Tutors don’t always have the skillset to teach online. There is an increased workload for them to rewrite and plan courses to be relevant online. Not everyone in our community was confident in using computers, or even had access to the internet, so that portion of the community was put-off and would wait until face-to-face classes resumed. Stress levels were increasing overall with people working online, becoming home-school teachers. They were reluctant to continue into the evening learning something online.

The President of CLASS wrote to the TEC on behalf of all ACE in school providers in Auckland and Northland asking for additional relief for our areas and clearly outlining the reasons why. The response was that there would be no waiver this time. We were expected to use all our funding, or we would have to repay any unused portion. During this time, we were dealing with bringing in systems to check the vaccination status of all enrolments and would be required to verify students were in actual fact entitled to access funding for the courses. It was good to see that the range of courses covered had increased as well as the funding rate, but with the information coming from the Ministry of Education and TEC sometimes being at odds with each other, things were becoming very confusing and administration-heavy to enforce. Each school seemed to be interpreting the information differently. To create more administration for centres that are already understaffed and overworked was a bit much to ask, and in my opinion was going completely against what the Government was trying to achieve with their new policies of making “Night School” easier to access. The Government recognised that schools had under-utilised facilities and were known within their local communities as well as understanding the needs in their local areas, so why couldn’t the TEC see this?

In November last year, we wrote to the TEC asking them to reconsider their stance and to this day we still haven’t had a response.

Now in 2022, the decision has been made to close our doors permanently. This was a hard decision for both the Principal and Board of Trustees to make. Although I am saddened by this decision and personally would have loved to see the programme continue, I cannot fault the reasoning behind it and fully understand and support it.

So why was this decision made:

• In 2019 the programme had to be almost restarted along with creating community awareness. 2022 would have seen us have to look at doing this again although not quite as much as in 2019.
• The Centre had been making consistent losses each year for the last 10 years with the exception of one year. We were budgeting as carefully as we could so there were no areas that could be cut back. Does the school continue knowing that continued losses were foreseeable?
• The Covid pandemic saw a rapid decline in attendees with many people choosing to avoid any additional activities that could expose them to Covid.
• TEC hard-line stance on ensuring funding conditions are met without any real consultation with ACE Providers or understanding of the impact their decisions have.
• Lack of response from the TEC on issues when approached.
• Having to pay back a term’s worth of unused funding in 2021 even though the centre was shut for five months and had overheads to still pay, as well as the possibility of having to continue paying as new strains come through and everyone retreats into their safe zones.
• Additional requirements from the TEC creating extra workload.
• Not being able to attract the right tutors for what the community wanted.

Only after our decision to close did we find out there was additional funding available that schools in our situation could access and this was from another colleague, not information that the TEC shared with us. TEC was contacted as soon as the decision to close was made. To date there has been no acknowledgement or response from them. It seems to me that the TEC is more interested in measuring funding than actually making sure they are following the directive of the Government in making Community Education easier to access. They have become difficult to deal with and have lost touch with why the ACE sector is here, the value of ACE, understanding of ACE and a willingness to work together collegially.