KEY POINTS:
School trustees want the education sector to abandon what they call "patch protection" in the interests of improving teacher quality.
School Trustees Association president Lorraine Kerr said today recent reports quoting Auckland school principals as rating 73 per cent of short-listed teaching applicants in November/December 2007 as poor or very poor were not reassuring.
The quotes were in a survey also showing that almost half the applicants were beginning teachers, and a third were applying from overseas.
New Zealand schools were generally well served by well qualified and competent teachers, Ms Kerr said in a statement.
But "it is hard to escape the conclusion that there is a teacher-quality issue among new teachers."
" I am hopeful that those of us in the education sector can look past our own tendencies to protect our patches, and support change to [deal with] these critical issues.
"Teacher quality is vital to our goal of increasing student achievement, so we cannot afford not to," Ms Kerr added.
She noted that in a time of teacher shortages, many school trustee boards had limited recruitment options available other than recruiting and employing from the pool of beginning teachers.
"This means employing schools do need assurance that the quality of the recruitment pool is high, if principals and boards are to have the confidence to permanently employ more of these new teachers."
Ms Kerr was commenting at the same time as a media report today said the Cabinet would consider a proposal this month for an extra year of on-the-job training for trainee teachers.
Education Minister Chris Carter said the report was simply wrong.
He said the Ministry of Education was currently preparing a report as a result of feedback on a discussion document called Becoming a Teacher in the 21st Century.
The Government was committed to ensuring trainee teachers met high standards, the reason for the initial teacher-education review.
Ms Kerr said robust nationally consistent selection processes to gain entry into teacher training would be good start in raising standards.
But issues such as the need to lift the status of teaching, and to pay exceptional teachers better, were also matters deserving of consideration in the pursuit of better overall teacher quality.
- NZPA
