Education Faculty celebrates with fees bursaries

25 January 2005

New Faculty of Education celebrates with fees bursaries

The University of Auckland will award $300,000 in new bursaries to Faculty of Education students this year, to mark the amalgamation with the former Auckland College of Education.

The scheme targets teaching and social science students in financial need. Around 150 students who meet the criteria will have their tuition fees for a year reduced by about half.

“This is a more generous scheme than has existed in the past for these students in either the University or former College and is yet another way for people to get a qualification more easily, says Stuart Windross, head of Academic Services at the Faculty of Education, Epsom campus.

While the bursaries are open to students in all Faculty programmes, they add to the already formidable Government incentives to attract people to teaching, the Faculty's main activity, he says.

“The millions in new government scholarships and additional teaching positions announced last year, plus better pay for teachers, is putting teacher on the career radar for many more people who may not have seriously considered it before. A good job market is also a certainty in Auckland, where growing school rolls continue to ensure a demand for both primary and secondary teachers.”

The incentives seem to be having some effect, with applications for primary and secondary diploma teaching programmes having increased at the Epsom campus, alongside a 45% increase in applications for the early childhood teaching degree and twice the number of students than expected applying for a new early childhood graduate diploma.

The new tuition fees bursaries are on top of the University’s Access Awards for student hardship and ‘a huge variety of other grants and scholarships provided at the University of Auckland’, Stuart Windross says.

Each year about 1,000 new students enrol in the Faculty, which has an equivalent full-time roll of around 4,000. The Faculty was created on 1st of September 2004 through amalgamation of the former 123 year-old Auckland College of Education with the School of Education in the University of Auckland.

The amalgamation was undertaken to give a quantum boost to the provision of research-led programmes in teacher and social services education and to better prepare graduates to meet identified educational challenges.

ENDS

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