Anne Tolley Interview Analysis – Part III: Early Childhood Education

In this third and final part of analysing Anne Tolley’s interview we examine her responses on Early Childhood Education (ECE). I will put it out there here and now that I do not know a lot about this part of the education sector.

Espiner puts it to Tolley that she’s stripping hundreds of millions from the ECE sector. Once again she seems to do well in explaining how she’s shuffling money around to reflect the government’s priorities. Espiner asks “how can you reduce the quality” by only having 80 percent rather than 100 percent qualified teachers, and Tolley says it’s to do with the incentives. She doesn’t really explain why there wasn’t much of a difference, just flat out denies that it doesn’t.

Espiner says that the evidence shows that the proportion of qualified teachers, once again Tolley flat out denies this. There is not a lot being explained. In an earlier post I have mentioned how the previous target of 100 percent was inducing artificial credential inflation. The setting of this target didn’t do much more than forcing many ECE teachers who had had many years of experience to get themselves credentialled just to keep their own jobs.

Tolley could have made the case the New Zealand context is different from the research Espiner may have been referring to (he doesn’t cite any of them specificially) because it doesn’t have the history of having qualified ECE teachers like other countries. She does make the point of experience trumping credentials, putting it out there that many centres are parent run. They do not have credentialled staff but does that mean they are inferior in quality to anywhere else, she asks.

Espiner could have put a lot more pressure on the minister by say, blaming her for the unintended consequences from  shifting the goalposts in terms of the proportion of qualified teachers. People made decisions in retiring, or studying for credentials (taking on student loans!) or made business plans based on this target. People were expecting a demand for qualified teachers, but with a stroke of her pen, Tolley has reduced this demand by no longer offering the incentives put in place at the end of the previous government’s tenure. This did happen indirectly in the form of grilling her on possible fee increases, and Tolley was not very convincing in this regard.

Anne Tolley Interview Analysis – Part II: Status and National Standards

The next part of the interview is the status of being a teacher. In part, it is reflected in pay, but I think Espiner overestimates the importance of money in status. When I trained to be a teacher, money was important but not the most important thing. I do not know any teacher who is in the job because they want to make lots of money. The high points of teaching are hard to match – it does however take a whole lot of hard slog to get there.

Espiner also pushes Tolley on why there are fewer men in the profession than in the past. Tolley points to the lack of status it has. Status is referred to, but not defined. It is worth pointing out that it is one of the situations where if the situation were reversed, there may have been far more attention paid to the gender imbalance. It is also interesting to remember that at the beginning of the segment, Tolley is introduced as the first female Minister of Education. Quite noteworthy for a sector that has been dominated by women for quite some time isn’t it?

The entry requirements into the profession are brought up. At the moment on paper, one needs a three year ordinary bachelor’s degree aligned with a school subject (eg you need some maths in your degree to apply to be a maths teacher), a minimum standard of literacy in English or Māori, and referees to affirm you have certain qualities suitable to the profession to apply. You are interviewed, and if they deem you have the right motivation for doing teaching, communication skills and your credentials and police records check out, you are admitted to the programme.

These requirements sound reasonable – but they are not much more than any other job, really. Other professions with high status like medicine or law are known for their highly competitive grade cutoffs for example. However, that is not to say institutions let anyone into their teacher education programmes – when I applied for entry into two teachers’ colleges I was rejected by one of them.

Tolley refers to proposals like needing a Masters degree or fast track programmes not having universal agreement, and said she agrees with the sector for needing higher entry requirements. If there is universal agreement on that, I wonder if changes will be formally enacted. As far as I know there is nothing barring institutions setting as high a bar as they want.

National Standards once again come up. Espiner points out that the high membership teacher unions are against it, and points out that the $36 million only works out to be $60 per child, per year. He’s quite prepared with this figure and tries to draw more out from her on it. He then asks the question on what the Minister could do with basically a dollar a child a day, quite reminiscent of those charity ads for sponsoring malnourished children.

The political reality is, no extra spending is ever going to be given carte blanche to anything. It will always be part of a highly targeted initiative so that politicians can say how wonderful programme X is. As a result of the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms way back in the 1980s, schools are highly devolved so specific targeted programmes are the only way to visibly increase education spending. Tolley appears confident in explaining ways in which limited money is being shuffled around to address the government’s priorities.

The last thing I’ll mention is Espiner breaks down the 80 percent figure Tolley quotes on the takeup rate on the standards, Espiner saying that’s really only 19 percent, with those identified as being well on track. Tolley was calm in explaining those 19 percent were already doing things like the policy anyway and only had to make minor tweaks. She says the rest had to make major changes to get to where they were. She also punts other problems into touch saying that it will take time for data to appear in any case. Other things in the debate have not really progressed and have already been mentioned elsewhere.

Anne Tolley Interview Analysis – Part I: Pay

Anne Tolley appeared on Q+A yesterday in this interview.

The interview starts with the most visible issue, that of pay. Tolley argues adjusting for New Zealand’s GDP, the “average” pay for a teacher is about $70,000. This seems a bit of an generous assessment. Espiner responds to that by asking is that nearer the higher end. Tolley in return states her assumption to get to that figure. A lot seems to hinge on what you mean by “average”, often it’s the choice in choosing the arithmetic mean, or the median.

Update: The ministry explains the calculations in a press release. The figure was based on the calculation of a mean salary. I have also made a further post about Kate Gainsford’s response to Tolley’s claim.

Neither Tolley nor Espiner seem to give much detail behind this exchange. Those involved in education will get it, but it would be lost on others, especially the more political ones. I will try to flesh out their exchange in detail.

Espiner means to say to get paid that much, according to the STCA salary scale, one would have to be near the top of the scale (top scale is step 14), have teaching qualifications (usually a subject based degree plus teaching diploma, which gets a teacher to start on step 7) with 6 or 7 year’s experience and have at least one unit.

Units are pay for extra responsibilities, like management units for a HOD or deputy principal duties or for particular projects a school runs. Which means a teacher with these units is probably teaching fewer classes than a teacher who does not, all other things being equal. This is part of what I mean when I have written in the past that the only career progression available to teachers is to teach less. Tolley refers to this when she talks about the “structure” of a teaching career.

Tolley responds that she has based her figure on a teacher in the “middle” of their career. So she’s saying that the average length of a teaching career is at least 12 years, by then a teacher would be near the top of the scale halfway through that. I do not know how she arrived at that figure. [Since this post has been updated, I now know otherwise.]

According to the statistics on this page, in 2008 the median age of a secondary teacher was about 40. I haven’t been able to find figures on the length of teaching service, but if you assume a teacher starts their career at 22 say, they would have 18 years of service to get to the median age of 40. There would be some adjustment for the fact that some teachers are career changers – but some of those years in other careers may count as steps up the payscale, so it may even out in the end.

So Tolley’s claim of the “average” career length seems credible. It seems that Tolley has arrived at her figure as the wage of a teacher with a median length of service. Espiner then compares it to the starting salary, in the mid 30 range. I don’t know how many secondary teachers actually start there. A teacher would start on step 7 with a 3 year degree plus a diploma, which would be $45,653 per annum.

The comment teachers are “disconnected” from the real world is then addressed by Tolley. She argues that teachers are “unrealistic” because they want bigger raises than what police, nurses and others settled for and point to 4% raises they got each year under the previous government. She also points out that many people have done without pay rises and Irish teachers went with a pay decrease. She has set the scene for the PPTA having to show that they deserve special treatment to get the pay increases they are asking for.

Tolley tries to dismiss the PPTA negotiations as if they are a loud minority, but doesn’t get far with it. Espiner catches her out with the PPTA having a huge membership of about 95%, but pulls his punch with this one too, with nearly all the members voting to strike as well. However, she does do well to dodge the performance based bullet. She asserts outright it’s not on the agenda and explicitly acknowledges that it won’t go down well with teachers; Essentially she’s saying she’s not going to go there, because it’s just not worth it. She is skilfully diplomatic in saying teacher expectations are “unrealistic”, denying the use of “greedy” by Espiner.