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.

The Issues Behind the PPTA Strike Headlines

True to their word, the PPTA went on strike today. Various media have reported on the strike. One NZ Herald story is linked here.

So what’s not in the media? A lot. Most reports have been focussed on pay.

Teachers have not only been dissatisfied with pay, but with the government wanting to claw back conditions granted in previous times.

One of those issues is class sizes. There has been plenty of debate about it. Having smaller class sizes is better for the teacher, but obviously it costs more. What about the impact on achievement? Hattie’s Visible Learning, says it depends on what the teacher actually does with opportunity it provides. He found that teachers who already have a large class, when given a smaller class, do not perform much better on average. His conclusion was that smaller class sizes do not automatically increase student achievement. Of course, this is quoted in the media as “class size doesn’t matter” because it makes a nice little soundbite for the news.

Workload is quite an issue for teachers. Despite general support for the NCEA system from teachers, one bone of contention is the increased assessment workload it requires of them. What is not generally known is now that the curriculum has been changed (latest curriculum document published 2007), the NCEA standards have to be altered to reflect those changes.

Starting in 2011, new level 1 standards will kick in, followed by level 2 in 2012 and level 3 in 2013. Each school is charged with how they are going assess these new standards and alter their unit plans, assessment plans and get them sent off to NZQA to be checked. Most schools do this themselves, but some outsource this work to private companies. This amount of work was not needed prior to NCEA, as nearly all assessment was done by NZQA by setting and marking exams.

The PPTA has also called the government to address issues with teacher recruitment and retainment. From this story in the Herald:

Ms Gainsford said the ministry’s method of calculating vacancies – by counting job ads in the Education Gazette – was deeply flawed.

“If you talked to lots of principals and told them there was no teacher recruitment problem, they would laugh.”

The method reported fits in with an OIA request I made last year regarding what the Ministry defined as a teacher shortage. I wrote:

One reason the definition is blunt is that it doesn’t account for the actual number of apparently qualified candidates. Mathematics teachers are deemed in many places to be in short supply. But I asked one principal of an urban Auckland decile 3 school how many candidates would apply for a Mathematics vacancy. The principal told me that about 160 would apply.

That principal told me that most of these applicants were not suitable. And a lot of these were teachers from overseas who are not native English speakers or not familiar with the New Zealand system. A school would often have to toss up between just filling the vacancy or doing without until readvertising again. I think this is what Gainsford is referring to.

Secondary Teachers Contract Bargaining

The NZ Herald recently reported that a strike over pay and conditions is possible course of action. The government clearly has not impressed the PPTA with small offers of 1 and 1.5 percent increases on the bargaining table. I have heard that the government also wishes to claw back benefits like guaranteed non-contact time in a bid to save money. Faced with a strike (which looks likely in the current climate) I think the government will make a more realistic offer. It would seem that the government is quite intent on wearing down the resolve of the union and to drag things out for as long as possible. Why this is so I am unsure.

Nearly all sectors of government spending have been cut due to the recession, and there’s always the mentality “we agree that budget cuts are necessary, but not our sector…” which can easily take hold. Along with the likes of Health, Education is something a government is never allowed to spend less money on. Perhaps National are wary of the fact that PPTA can hold the government to ransom if they have to, with 95% plus of secondary teachers belonging to it. Even though they know they would come out poorly in a head to head confrontation they are dragging things out for as long as possible to attempt to portray themselves, not teachers as setting the agenda on education policy. It is not a good look for a government to have to beg teachers to carry out their policy, particularly election winning ones. Perhaps they are dragging things out for as long as possible so that the government can say “look, we tried to find a solution, but we couldn’t so sacking many teachers (or something else quite extreme) was inevitable” with some credibility. Maybe it’s a distraction that the government is willing to bear to take attention away from the opposition to National Standards in the primary sector.

Pay is always one of the more visible issues when it comes to teacher recruitment and retention. However, as far as pay and career progression goes, once you hit the top of the standard payscale, the only way to get more money is to do less teaching. The current secondary scale has 14 steps and most new teachers with a Bachelor’s degree and a teaching diploma would start on step 7 (current starting salary $45653 pa), and go up one step a year. Once the top is reached ($68980 pa) one can only get paid more by getting management units, as a department/faculty head, deputy principal duties, et cetera which entails more paperwork and less teaching.

One may think that it’s a fairly good salary considering that there are two week school holidays between terms and a fairly long summer break. The reality is though – teaching is a stressful job. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve tried to do in my entire life. Teachers get stressed, and also get ill quite easily from hanging around so many young people every day with all sorts of ailments. The hours are more than just during the 9am-3pm ish teaching day – many hours of preparation, marking, taking the rugby or debating team are a few of the many commitments teachers are expected to make. The skills teachers have often are better renumerated elsewhere, especially say those have skills in Mathematics.

An Analysis of Teacher Shortages

Often teacher shortages are reported in the media. But what is a teacher shortage? According to an OIA response dated 5 October 2009, the Ministry of Education says:

Teacher shortages are determined by the number of teacher vacancies advertised and re-advertised in the Gazette.

A definition, albeit blunt, that is generally useful. It seems to be similar to using the unemployment rate as an indicator of a recession – whether or not one has a job is what matters most.

One reason the definition is blunt is that it doesn’t account for the actual number of apparently qualified candidates. Mathematics teachers are deemed in many places to be in short supply. But I asked one principal of an urban Auckland decile 3 school how many candidates would apply for a Mathematics vacancy. The principal told me that about 160 would apply. This is an apparent paradox. One would think that if there were a shortage there would be few or no candidates applying. But the paradox could be easily explained by schools wanting quality over quantity.

If this is the case it raises questions about the quality of teacher education and whether the right things are being done to address teacher recruitment and retention. It would appear that we are not training enough teachers well enough to the satisfaction of schools, and that simply increasing the number of training places will do little to solve the problem and have prohibitive costs.

The subject breakdown is below. The numbers are percentage of number of secondary and composite vacancies as at 7 September 2009.

Rank	Advertised	Readvertised
1	English 14%	English 21%
2	Mathematics 11%	Mathematics 10%
3	Science 7%	Māori 8%
4	PE 6%	Bilingual/Immersion 8%
5	Technology 5%	Home Economics 6%
6	Social Studies 4%	Music 6%
7	Bilingual/Immersion 4%	Science 5%
8	Māori 4%	Technology 5%

I also have some numbers on Auckland vacancies. However, I am unsure of the interpretation, as even assuming great doubling up in subject duties as single vacancies, the total percentage seems too high. They are also not just for the secondary and composite schools. I will seek further clarification.

Rank	Auckland
1	Technology 55%
2	English 38%
3	Mathematics 37%
4	Music 36%
5	Drama 27%
6	Science 24%
7	Health 18%
8	PE 18%

From the first table we can see that English vacancies are common. Its percentage rises for readvertised vacancies. I interpret that as English vacancies are a little difficult to fill than otherwise would be expected. The TeachNZ website states:

Teacher Recruitment Scholarships (Secondary Subjects)

These scholarships aim to encourage more people into studying to become a secondary teacher in these target subjects where there is the highest need: chemistry, home economics, mathematics, physics, technology and Te Reo Māori.

It is interesting English is not on the list, when it had been in the past and has the biggest shortage. Also the subject would be a high priority given literacy requirements for NCEA go up to level 2 as opposed to level 1 for numeracy requirements for university entrance.

Home Economics may seem an odd subject to be in shortage, but the numbers provided justify it – it is not on the top 8 vacancies overall, but appears difficult to fill as it jumps up into the top 8 readvertised vacancies. Te Reo also is difficult to fill, its proportion doubling when readvertised.