Teachers are increasingly feeling overwhelmed by issues facing the sector.
The Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand says half as many Kiwis are signing up to become teachers than they were in 2010, and the number of students graduating as teachers has dropped by more than a third.
It comes as principals report experienced teachers being on their knees crying over workloads.
Speaking to The Front Page, deputy chief executive Clive Jones said the enrolment figures were concerning and pointed to a sector in crisis.
“If you look at the number of domestic students enrolling in teacher training programmes for the first time, that’s dropped by 51% between 2010 (6940 enrolments) and 2023 (3400 enrolments) and what that really says is we’re just not producing enough teachers to replenish the teaching workforce.”
He said Ministry of Education figures show domestic students graduating as teachers, dropped by 37% during a similar timeframe from 5315 students to 3330.
Teaching was not the attractive career prospect it once was, and those who had chosen it felt “undermined, undervalued and underpaid”, he said.
The Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood told the podcast that changes the Government had proposed to the teaching curriculum hadn’t helped matters.
“I was speaking to a secondary school principal last week, and she was talking about the impact that the changes to Level 1 NCEA are having on her teachers, and she spoke of teachers being on their knees and she’d had highly experienced teachers, teachers with at least 20 years of experience in tears.”
Schools were also being burdened with upskilling teachers from offshore in the New Zealand teaching curriculum as they tackled the teacher shortfall, Hood said.
“A principal told me last week that she advertised a job, and normally she would have had probably at least six or seven potential candidates who she could have employed into that job. This time she had 10 applications, and only one of those came from a teacher who was currently in New Zealand. All the others were from offshore, which just speaks to the immense strain that schools are under,” Hood said.
She said Covid was also incredibly disruptive to children’s education – the effects of which were being felt in classrooms across the country.
“What teachers are indicating is that in terms of children’s social and emotional development, they are one to two years behind where they otherwise would be.”
Students starting secondary school had the social skills and emotional development of someone who was at intermediate level, she said.
It was teachers who were unfairly copping the blame for some of those educational outcomes, The Teaching Council said.
“The conversation and the narrative around education seems to have changed in a remarkably short space of time from recognising that our education system is failing some of our kids to actually now saying our teachers are failing our kids. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“They are not in control of all of the parts of the system that actually will make the biggest difference to those outcomes. They’re not in control of things like learning support for children with learning needs ... they’re not in control of class sizes, they’re not in control of the curriculum,” Clive Jones said.
This opinion of educators didn’t help how people viewed the profession, but it was essential that long-term solutions to the education crisis were found because teachers were critical to our success as a country in the future.
“When you think about all of the big problems that New Zealand is facing in the future from things like climate change to inequality to racism ... it’s actually teachers that are equipping the current and our future generations to solve those problems,” Jones said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about this discussion and some of the solutions that have been proposed to the workforce crisis.
The podcast is presented by Susie Nordqvist, a former presenter and producer for TVNZ and Newshub. She began her career as a newspaper reporter and was a finalist for best newsreader at this year’s NZ Radio & Podcast Awards for her work at Newstalk ZB.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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