ITI Articles

Sue Allard, National Principal of Natcoll Design Technology, has just been elected as the Deputy Chairperson for ITI.

Sue’s career has been dedicated to education in a variety of ways for the past 35 years. Originally trained as a primary school teacher, Sue moved to teaching art in secondary school. She taught for three years in Papua New Guinea at a polytechnic, and twice for a two-year period in the UK. For fourteen years she was the Head of the Mathematics Department at Hagley Community College in Christchurch. At the time the College catered mainly to senior classes with over 1000 adult students and around 300 secondary students.

In 1999 Sue was offered the job of running the Christchurch Campus of Natcoll. Feeling that it was time to make a change, she took up the challenge. While at the Christchurch Campus, Sue developed the Natcoll Education Trust, sourcing external funding for a free primary school programme. She also set up a short course programme, which now runs from all three of Natcoll’s campuses.

In 2003 Sue was offered the position of running the whole company, which includes Natcoll’s campuses in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Since becoming the National Principal she has done a lot of internal restructuring of the company and implemented a number of initiatives, including developing new courses and a successful international strategy to attract overseas students. She initiated the set up of a publishing company from which Natcoll now sells its resources externally, and has implemented the Creating Futures programmes, which offers an affordable way for secondary schools to expand their curriculum in the areas of Print Design, Web Design and Multimedia.

Sue says that the importance of PTEs being well represented is what binds the various institutions in ITI together. She says that ITI has an important role to play in ensuring that the PTE sector’s voice is heard in the various forums that are tied to government compliance issues.