(Side bar: if there’s one thing the education sector likes better than acronyms, it’s an extremely outdated pop culture reference.) When I first started teaching, students went to the public library to check their Bebo accounts and in professional development we talked breathlessly about “ICTs” transforming education. Quite simply, teachers need to spend more time in the real world to do their job well. And if you spend all your time assessing, analysing achievement data and report writing, you become very good at the science part but neglect the art of the job. Teaching is as much an art as it is a science. When I was head of learning area, I’d often remind our team that you can’t be a good teacher without being a person first. And meanwhile, we lose half of our fresh teachers. However the revisions will take another four academic years to implement and a few more to embed. From what we’ve seen so far, the move to fewer, larger achievement standards and a simplified structure will improve workload for both teachers and students. In the NCEA revisions we have retained NCEA Level 1 as an “optional” qualification but it appears most schools intend to offer it. New Zealand is the only country in the OECD to have three years of high-stakes national assessment. More contact time means a lot less preparation time, and a lot less time to do administrative work – marking, emailing parents, writing reports and liaising with outside agencies, for example. In New Zealand this means Year 12 and 13, when we are preparing and teaching complex subject matter and making high-stakes assessment judgements. We spend much more time directly teaching students than many other OECD countries, particularly at upper secondary school level. It’s time – enough time to do the very best by our students. ‘New Zealand teachers spend much more time directly teaching students than many other OECD countries.’ (Photo: iStock) It’s not the money that keeps good teachers in the jobĪsk any teacher what they need more of, and it’s hardly ever more money. It’s pretty hard to stomach for those new teachers which is perhaps why we’re losing around half of them in the first five years of teaching, according to the PPTA. And the low pay is really off-putting to the many competent teachers who are entering the profession and doing exactly the same work as their experienced counterparts – plus running more extracurriculars, going on camps and generally volunteering for more jobs around a school. I came to teaching after a few years of full-time work and remember my first pay being not far off what I had been earning as a retail assistant and after-school tutor while I completed my teaching diploma. It’s just that it takes a really long time to get there. I earned a very comfortable base salary as an experienced teacher – $90,000 is the top step of the pay scale. Teachers are overworked, but quite well-paid (eventually) Here are the realities, from where I sit, anyway. The sector needs to urgently address a few things if they want to ensure a supply of quality teachers. Stress and fatigue levels have been unusually high over the course of the pandemic but to be honest, I can’t see teaching returning to the challenging but fun job I once loved. This includes the potential for teacher supply to worsen even further. The past three years have been hard on rangitahi, and the cracks in the education systems are starting to show. But I found young people truly delightful – and still do. I know a lot of adults are either slightly scared of teenagers, think they are gross or just prefer to ignore them, pretending they were never one themselves. But quickly, I came to revel in the creativity of the job and also the springy, goofy energy of young people. I remember the constant nerves of my first year of teaching – unable to swallow my lunch in anticipation of the tricky class that was about to follow. And at the age of 38, I really shouldn’t be this tired. The job has irrevocably changed since I started in 2010. “I was promised five different careers in my lifetime,” I tell people, “and I’m going to have them.” But there’s more to it than that. The glib explanation I like to give about why I no longer want to be a teacher is that I came of age during the “knowledge wave” of the ’90s. (Where is the orange make up? The greasy hair and ill-fitting clothes?) At the staff break-up, I was farewelled by my colleagues with a colourful and heart-felt speech, as is tradition. I sat through my last butt-numbing prize giving last week, waved at grateful parents and admired, for the last time, the incredible poise of today’s teenagers. After 12 years of secondary teaching in schools around the South Island, I’m done. I’ve hung up the whiteboard markers and returned my ministry-issued rental laptop. I love my students and the effect I can have on them, but I’m despondent about the state of the profession – and I can’t see it getting better any time soon.
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