A teacher says a lack of planning and resources is creating stress in the classroom. As told to Greg Bruce.
This year we’ve got two brand new curriculums. We always got told it would be a refresh. It’s not a refresh at all. They practically got dumped on us, ifyou want to call it that, in October or November last year.
We did get to provide feedback for a week or two and then it was finalised. In my own opinion, I think they are great, but the problem is that every single school in New Zealand has to implement them this year and it’s just too much change all at once.
Who’s teaching the teachers how to make all these changes all at once? We’ve all been told we have to implement structured literacy, which is a totally different way of teaching literacy, which teachers have never been taught, which includes reading, writing, spelling, handwriting. And we’re not allowed to take training days in term time. So how do we upgrade 40,000 teachers without support? And it has to be during the school holidays. Providers can’t run workshops in the holidays for the whole country at the same time.
It would be like if our job was in the corporate world and suddenly your boss said to you: ‘Okay, 80% of your job is changing, but you’ve got to learn it on the job, but you’ve still got to do your old job at the same time’. You just literally couldn’t do it.
That’s how it feels at the moment. The Government still hasn’t told us how to assess this new curriculum or how to report it to parents. So schools are in a limbo year in terms of assessing and reporting.
Minister of Education Erica Stanford, pictured at Browns Bay School in February 2024.
Now, how do we actually teach it in the classroom so it matches the new curriculum and the new approach? It’s a totally different way of teaching maths as well, so schools are having to choose which maths programme and provider they are going to use, but without really knowing which one best matches the needs of the school. If you overload teachers with maths PD (professional development), reading PD, writing PD, they’re going to leave, and there are not enough teachers in New Zealand as it is.
The teachers need good PD and the right resources to make it work. At the moment we don’t have enough resources. We have to scrape money from all budgets to buy the specific decodable literacy books to match what we want and need, because the Government doesn’t provide enough funding for these resources.
We don’t send our structured literacy books home as readers. We simply can’t afford to. If your principal just said: “We’re doing the new curriculums; here’s maths PD, here’s reading PD, here’s Zooms to do after school, here’s all the assessment we’re going to do because we’ve been told to…“, you couldn’t do it all. You would be studying every single day after school, plus doing the old planning and lessons you did before, because you still can’t throw it out yet.
You need a good management team that says, “If we’re going to do that assessment, we’re going to stop this one.” We can’t do it all, because it’s impossible. I think that’s the biggest thing. We’ve had standardised assessments in New Zealand for years, but they need to rethink about which ones we actually need. Which ones inform teaching and show progress and which ones are just ticking the boxes and reporting to the Government because we’ve always done them?
Many of the old assessments simply do not match the new curriculums and so are becoming redundant. It’s time to look at assessments that do the job we want, and yes this might mean looking at overseas assessments, as many of their assessments have been tried and tested on millions of children, which NZ simply can’t do.
Why create something new when we can simply modify an assessment to match New Zealand children and our ethnic diversity?
If we had to implement every single thing we’ve been told to, teachers would leave. It’s just too much.
At the back of a teacher’s mind is always the thought ... If and when the Government changes, will there be another refresh? Have we done all this hard work for nothing? Why is education a political issue?
The best thing that happened to teachers was with our last negotiation we got more non-contact time or classroom release time. Back when I started teaching, I got one day a term to watch other teachers, do professional development or test my own class. Many times my class was left with busy work while I tested one child at a time.
A Kiwi teacher says the Government needs to "pay teachers as the professionals they are and what we are really worth". Photo / Getty Images
We are now getting five days a term, right, which is amazing. It’s increased for the last three years, but actually it’s amazing. I get released with the other teacher that I work with and it’s such a valuable time. We can plan topics and units together, we talk to each other about what we’ve noticed about our kids academically, socially and emotionally and where extra support is needed. This time is spent on assessments, observing other teachers in the school that we might never get to see teach, attending PD, meeting with parents and other agencies.
So it’s actually the best thing to ease teachers’ workload because you’re not having to play catch-up all the time. It actually gives you time to do something well and to test your kids in a quiet environment and not just test one while the rest of your kids are busy doing some independent thing. So that has been, I think, a game-changer for lots of teachers in reducing stress and workload.”
If I’m sick and they get a reliever to cover my class, they get paid for five hours. They actually get paid five hours for the day. So, technically, that means I get paid for five hours a day. Now, a teacher would never do just five hours a day, even if they only arrived at school the minute it started, because there’s actually more than five hours in the school day and teachers are usually on playground duty at break times, or taking a lunchtime club or sports training. I could get into more detail about teachers’ pay but that’s an article in itself.
At the moment, the teacher population is ageing. I think the average age is around 50-55 years old in New Zealand, and not many people are training to be teachers at all. So when they retire, who or what are we going to have in front of our classrooms? No one.
At our school, we’ve lost a few teachers. They trained, they did their two years to get registered, then they left for Australia. They can do exactly the same job with more release and earn 20 grand more. So why would you stay here?
We should be having teaching apprenticeships where teachers train both at uni and in a certain school over a number of years so that they get both the theory and hands-on experience. They could then be bonded for a certain time to a school or an area, and then at least you’d be retaining teachers. This model might also encourage people to go into the teaching profession, especially if fees were paid or they were given an allowance like an apprenticeship.
They might reach the end of their bond and leave, but then again they might not. They might think that, actually, New Zealand’s great.
Or, by then, maybe our Government would have caught up with what the going rate is and pay teachers as the professionals they are and what we are really worth. How much are generations of well-educated children worth to society?
