The fund supports tertiary education organisations to accelerate initiatives to increase the number of learners successfully completing their study. This is especially important for learners who often face significant barriers to participation and achievement at tertiary level. The fund aims to improve education outcomes for more learners and generate greater benefits for New Zealand.

The TEC invited tertiary education organisations to put forward programmes that they believed could more quickly make a real difference to learner success if they were provided with additional financial support. Key requirements included:

• the organisations must match any grant funding, and 
• the initiatives must provide approaches and ideas that could be shared across the tertiary sector, building learner success for all.

Ensuring more learners are successful in tertiary education is important for learners and for New Zealand because of the significant benefits it brings. Successfully gaining a tertiary qualification – such as a diploma or a degree – improves lifelong outcomes for individuals, families and communities. When more learners graduate, this supports industries and helps grow New Zealand’s productivity. 

Auckland University of Technology’s project will create a whole-of-university service delivery model including recruitment, enrolment, and academic and pastoral support. Future Skills, an Auckland-based private training establishment, will accelerate and increase the scope of two learner success initiatives – Learner Journey Mapping and Just in Time at-risk App Extension.

The Canterbury and Victoria university consortium will accelerate student success through data coaching, combining data literacy with organisational and infrastructural development, to identify system-level barriers and drive change.  

The next round of the Accelerating Learner Success Fund (Tūwhitia) is currently underway.

Find out more about the above projects:

Funded initiatives – Accelerating Learner Success Fund (Tūwhitia)