Arrival and Networking

Conference Welcome

Featured Session - Julia Grace

Exhibitor Turbo Pitch

Morning Tea

Breakout session - From Plate to Practice: Using Industry–Academia Partnerships to Build Sustainability Skills and Reduce Food Waste in Hospitality

Food waste remains one of the hospitality industry's most significant sustainability and productivity challenges. At the same time, tertiary educators are increasingly expected to provide graduates with practical sustainability competencies that extend beyond classroom learning. This presentation shares the findings of a Participatory Action Research project involving hospitality students and sixteen independent restaurants in Wellington, New Zealand. Through a structured industry–academia partnership, students worked alongside restaurant operators to identify food-waste challenges, collect operational data, co-design practical solutions, and evaluate outcomes. The project demonstrates how experiential learning can simultaneously enhance student learning, support industry partners, and contribute to sustainability goals. Findings show that students acted as catalysts for reflection and innovation, helping operators identify waste-generating practices and implement simple, low-cost interventions such as waste-tracking templates, inventory management tools, portion-control guides, and surplus food utilisation strategies. The session will discuss how hospitality educators can integrate authentic industry projects into curriculum design, strengthen graduate employability, and create meaningful partnerships with local businesses.

Breakout session - The AI Blueprint for VET New Zealand: Why the Sector's Crisis Is an Operating Model Problem Breakout Session

In this session, Dave Howden, CEO & Co-founder at SupaHuman AI, presents the findings of An AI Blueprint for VET in New Zealand – a clear-eyed argument for why the sector's pressures won't be solved by compliance frameworks or workforce strategies alone. It's an operating model problem. And for the first time, there is a lever big enough to fix it. Drawing on insights from providers across Aotearoa, Dave unpacks where the real burden sits – assessment design, moderation, compliance documentation, programme development – and shows how PTEs are already using AI to do this work in hours rather than weeks, without compromising quality or NZQA requirements.

Breakout session - The International Education Journey: Opportunities, Expectations and Practical Advice

As New Zealand works towards its goal of doubling the value of international education by 2034, more PTEs are considering entering or expanding into the international market. Whether you are exploring international education for the first time or looking to strengthen an existing international operation, this panel will provide practical insights to support informed decision-making. This panel brings together providers and key sector organisations to discuss what it takes to enter and to succeed. Through a facilitated discussion, the panel will explore the international education landscape, market opportunities, regulatory requirements, immigration settings, organisational capability, working with education agents, indicative timelines, and the opportunities and challenges facing the sector. The session will conclude with an opportunity for audience questions.

Breakout Session - Workforce Design for the AI Era: Why You’re Optimising the Wrong Thing

In a regulated education environment, complexity often grows faster than revenue. As PTEs scale, roles become broader, leaders remain trapped in execution, and margins tighten even when enrolments continue to grow. Most organisations respond by hiring more people, implementing new systems, or embracing AI. But what if those solutions are optimising the wrong thing? In this practical and thought-provoking session, Anthony Rice challenges one of the biggest assumptions in organisational design and introduces a different way of thinking about workforce capacity, scalability, and the future of work. Using real education-sector examples, attendees will leave with practical ideas to rethink how work is designed, where AI fits, and how to build organisations that are more scalable, resilient, and better prepared for the AI era.

Breakout session - Effectively managing AI risks in your PTE

AI influences how learners’ study, how staff work, and how PTEs design, deliver, assess, and support learning. AI creates opportunities for efficiency, innovation, and learner support; however, it also introduces risks around privacy, data security, assessment integrity, learner authenticity, staff capability, academic judgement and recordkeeping. This session will explore how PTEs can use ISO 31000 risk management principles to manage AI risks and develop practical AI policies and controls. Rather than focusing on whether AI should be accepted or banned, the session will support providers to take a structured, risk-based approach to understanding AI use, setting clear expectations, and implementing safeguards across teaching, learning, assessment, administration, and quality assurance. Using ISO 31000 as a practical framework, the session will step through the process of understanding the AI context, identifying risks, assessing and prioritising risks, deciding on treatment actions, monitoring effectiveness, and communicating expectations clearly to staff and learners. The session will discuss what a practical AI policy may need to cover e.g. acceptable and unacceptable use, learner and staff responsibilities, AI use in assessment, disclosure requirements, privacy and confidential information, human oversight, academic integrity, use of AI detection tools, recordkeeping, staff training, and policy review. Practical examples will show how AI risks can arise in different areas

Breakout session - What learners want before they tell you: early signals, better decisions

Most providers are making strategic decisions based on information that is already out of date. Enrolment data from last year. Completion rates from the year before. By the time a trend is visible, the planning window has often closed. This session draws on Nexties' ongoing work with schools and career advisors across Aotearoa, including a current pilot programme with secondary schools focused on how rangatahi explore learning and career options, to share what learner intent looks like before it becomes an enquiry. What are learners exploring six to twelve months before they contact a provider? How does that differ across sectors, regions, and learner types? And what does it mean for how PTEs plan, position, and make decisions about where to focus? The session will share practical observations from this research and school engagement work, and invite participants to reflect on how forward-looking learner insight could change specific decisions in their own organisations, from programme planning and employer partnerships through to how they evidence labour market alignment in TEC investment plans. The goal is not to add to the noise. It is to give PTE leaders a different kind of signal, and a practical way to think about using it.

Lunch

Breakout session - From Engagement to Progression: How the Native Tech Model Supports Learner Success

This presentation introduces the Native Tech model, a flexible and learner-centred approach to tertiary education designed for rangatahi who may not have experienced success in traditional learning environments. The session will outline Native Tech’s pedagogical framework and explain how it shapes curriculum design, delivery, learner support, and progression. It will explore how the model combines project-based learning, digital and creative skills, strong relational practice, wellbeing support, and flexible programme structures to meet learners where they are. The presentation will also discuss why this approach works for our students, particularly priority learners with diverse levels of readiness, confidence, and previous educational experience. Rather than treating flexibility as an add-on, the Native Tech model places responsiveness at the centre of programme design and organisational practice. Through this model, Native Tech aims to improve engagement, retention, learner success, and meaningful progression into further study, employment, and positive futures.

Breakout session - From Policy to Practice: AI-Enabled Oral Assessment for Learner Success

Vocational and tertiary providers are under pressure to respond to changing learner needs, strengthen assessment quality, improve productivity, and turn policy intent into practice. This presentation shares how Fruition Horticulture and Scarlatti redesigned assessment using Vocina, an AI-enabled oral assessment platform. The project addressed two challenges. For many vocational learners, including Māori, Pasifika, ESOL learners and those with literacy barriers, written assessment can obscure what they know and can do. For higher-level learners, including Fruition’s Level 6 diploma students, AI-generated work is raising concerns about authenticity and academic integrity. With Vocina, learners complete structured oral assessments through a guided AI agent. Tutors set the questions, prompts and rubric alignment, while the agent asks follow-up questions to clarify or deepen responses. Recordings, transcripts and summaries support tutor judgement and moderation, but the final decision remains with the educator. The approach has reduced barriers for priority learners and enabled professional learners to explain, defend and apply their thinking in real time. This session will show how the model moved from pilot to embedded practice across horticulture, leadership and primary industry programmes. Participants will gain practical insights into inclusive oral assessment, managing AI risk, and using technology to strengthen professional judgement.

Breakout session - Neuro-inclusion: From research to practice

Most education organisations in New Zealand will tell you they support neurodivergent learners. Far fewer can show you how. This presentation tells the story of what happens when research becomes practice. Between 2023 and 2025, I undertook a substantial body of research into appreciating and supporting neurodiversity, examining how education and employment settings identify, accommodate, and include neurodivergent people across New Zealand and internationally. The findings were, in many respects, uncomfortable. Whilst good intentions were common, consistent, evidenced, structural support was not. The research produced calls to action across policy, assessment design, workforce capability, and the lived experience of learners, with implications spanning pre-vocational and vocational education, industry, and government. The Neurodiversity-Supportive Standard (NSS) is an outcome that GAC developed in response to that research. Launched in Paris in June 2026, it is structured around seven principles and four recognition levels, and is flexible enough to be applicable worldwide. The NSS gives organisations a clear, independently assessable framework for building genuine neuro-inclusive practice rather than simply claiming it. It is not a checklist. It is a development pathway. This session traces the full arc from research question to working standard, and asks what it takes for New Zealand's tertiary and training sector to move from awareness to accountability.

Breakout session - Reimagining Education in the Age of AI: Moving from Awareness to Capability

Generative AI is not just another technology trend. It is fundamentally reshaping how work is performed, decisions are made, and value is created across every industry. Education is already responding, with institutions building awareness through policies, training, and experimentation. But awareness is no longer the challenge. The real challenge is capability. This keynote explores what it means to move beyond awareness, and why incremental responses are no longer sufficient. It reframes AI not as a risk to manage, but as a defining capability that must be intentionally designed into curriculum, assessment, and learning workflows. Drawing on real-world practice in applied technology education, the session will introduce a clear shift – from awareness, to capability, to AI-enabled outcomes – where students do not simply use AI, but produce better work because of it. It will outline practical principles for redesigning education, including starting from the future role of the graduate, embedding human–AI collaboration into learning, and leveraging AI to enable continuous feedback and more effective learning processes. This is not a conversation about tools or policy. It is a call to rethink how education is designed, so that graduates are prepared not just to participate in an AI-enabled world, but to perform and create within it.

Breakout session - What Are We Incentivising? Translating Policy Intent into Organisational Behaviour and Outcomes in Vocational Education

This presentation shares findings from recent Master’s research into how governance incentives, assurance settings, funding signals, and regulatory expectations shape organisational behaviour in vocational education. It addresses a question central to the 2026 conference theme: when policy intent moves into operational practice, what behaviours are actually being encouraged? Drawing on sector survey and interview insights, the session explores the space between governance intention and organisational reality. It examines how providers interpret and respond to regulation, funding, assurance, evidence, and performance expectations, and how these settings can support — or create tension around — quality, learner outcomes, cultural responsiveness, industry relevance, and organisational sustainability. This research offers a system-level lens for understanding where alignment is strong, where pressure points emerge, and where well-intentioned settings may create unintended behavioural consequences. Participants will be introduced to my incentive–behaviour–outcome framework that supports sharper conversations about policy implementation, quality assurance, evidence, organisational responsiveness, and system improvement. The session is designed for sector leaders, providers, policy actors, quality professionals, and system stakeholders seeking to test whether current settings are driving the intended behaviours and outcomes.

Breakout session - The Responsive Practitioner: Why One Research Question Could Transform PTE Teaching — and What Gets in the Way

Think about the last time you changed something in your teaching because of what you observed — not because policy told you to, but because you noticed something was not working and you decided to find out why. That instinct — to look, to question, and to act on what you find — is the most underused resource in the PTE sector. Every teacher has it. Very few are supported to develop it systematically. And yet it is exactly what the Tertiary Education Strategy, NZQA quality frameworks, and every equity obligation we carry are implicitly asking for: educators who are not just delivering content, but genuinely responding to the learners in front of them. This session makes a simple but important argument: responsiveness is not a policy compliance activity. It is a practitioner habit. And we cannot build responsive organisations out of educators who have never been invited to ask a systematic question about their own teaching. Drawing on her experience as a Senior Lecturer, Programme Leader, and Doctor of Professional Practice candidate at Otago Polytechnic, Dr. Sadia Farzana shares what happened when she started asking that question seriously — how it changed her assessment design, her relationship with her learners, and her understanding of what quality teaching actually requires. More importantly, she will make a call as it is about having a habit. And with this strategy every PTE educator will be able to improve the delivery model, curriculum and to meet the learners` need.

Afternoon Tea

Featured session - Grant Klinkum, NZQA

Featured session - David Downs Education New Zealand

Conference Day concludes

Networking function and presentation of the ITENZ Awards