Education Minister Erica Stanford in her Beehive office. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Education Minister Erica Stanford in her Beehive office. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Education Minister Erica Stanford has told a room full of teachers and education professionals that getting to speak with them is the thing she loves most about her job.
Stanford, who spoke at the annual New Zealand Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) conference today, said she speaks regularly with the PPTA’s president Chris Abercrombie with whom she has a “great relationship”.
“I want to let you all know that the relationship that I have, and my team has, with the PPTA, I see as being excellent,” she told the room full of teachers and educators.
“We really value that relationship.
“The thing that I love most about my job is talking to you and it’s getting out into schools.”
Stanford said Abercrombie has been bringing to the table “a number of issues” that the Government is “taking on board and trying to shift our position on”.
“Everything that we have done has been informed by the conversations that I have had with you, and to be challenged by you, and sometimes it’s uncomfortable,” she added.
“And sometimes the direction we’re taking doesn’t align with some things that other people think, and it can be uncomfortable, but we always take it on board, and we always try and pivot where we can to take in the views of the sector, or certain parts of the sector.”
Speaking after Stanford, Abercrombie said teachers did their job because they believed in the impact of a high-quality public education.
Chris Abercrombie, president of the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA).
He also said Stanford’s Associate Education Minister David Seymour had “attacked teacher unions” and in doing that he was “attacking the people who fight every day to improve outcomes because I think he forgets the ‘teacher’ part when he talks about teacher unions”.
“We will continue to be united and fight for good education policy.”
The PPTA, which has more than 25,000 members, has been strongly opposed to some of the Government’s new education policies.
For example, it says the $153 million in funding being used to re-establish charter schools in New Zealand should be spent in the existing state school system.
However, Seymour, who is behind the charter school legislation, says the unions are only opposed to the schools “because of fear they will lose their membership fees and their grip on the sector”.
The PPTA has also hit out over Government funding cuts to a te reo Māori programme for the education sector.
$30m in funding has been shifted from the Te Ahu o te Reo Māori programme – which provides te reo Māori lessons to school teachers – to a fund providing mathematics resources for students.
Stanford says the money needed to be moved because New Zealand was facing a “maths crisis” and that particular programme was not delivering as desired, was 2.3 times more expensive than comparable courses, has low attendance rates and lacks evidence of tangible effects on students.
The PPTA said the cuts were “disappointing and short-sighted” as the programme “had a very good uptake among teachers and helped teachers meet the Teaching Council expectations around te reo Māori skills”.
“This programme was very new and over time I’m sure it would have made a positive difference in classrooms around the motu,” Abercrombie said.
Julia Gabel is a Wellington-based political reporter. She joined the Herald in 2020 and has most recently focused on data journalism.
