Term three has just begun. Principals are worried about staff shortages and sickness. They say teachers and students were at breaking point before the end of term two and could do with some respite this term, but that’s unlikely. Winter illness will get worse and there are no relievers.
Richard Dykes, principal of Nelson College, told Radio New Zealand’s Morning Report, ‘ . . . staffing and ongoing disruption to learning will be the biggest challenges as schools reopen.’
He then added, ‘That disruption is becoming cumulative and what I’m hearing from schools from my region, but also further afield around the South Island and New Zealand, is that they fear we’ve got students who are already saying, “look, given the amount of disruption . . . that’s it. I’m signing out”,’ he said.
Dykes went on to say that in term 2, schools had been averaging about 20 per cent of staff absent on any given day and teachers had been having to give up free periods to cover classes.
‘If we pick up from there and carry on at that same rate there’s a real concern among principals that the impact on our staff is going to be significant,’ said Dykes.
Dykes called on the Government to announce measures to help students pass NCEA this year and relieve pressure for teachers and students. He also called on Government to dial back wide-ranging changes to the system including an overhaul of the NCEA qualification.
Dykes isn’t the only principal calling for a halt to the change programme. Regional principals attending the NZPF ‘Moot’ last month (see full report p. 18 of this issue) were similarly calling for a ‘slow down’ on the curriculum refresh, the literacy and numeracy strategy, the attendance strategy, ERO’s new school engagement model, Te Mahau restructure and professional growth cycles.
Principals were quite clear that these system changes would not be getting the attention they deserved right now. Across the country, in primary and intermediate schools, the relief teacher shortage was biting deep. Many principals and deputy principals were taking their turn in classrooms and others were rostering students to study at home to prevent whole school closure. Schools are in survival mode. They are desperate for the Government to recruit more teachers from abroad.
Whilst Rome is burning, the New Zealand Initiative (formerly the Round Table) has tuned its fiddle to pound out an old favourite. The song became popular in the 2010s and is called ‘One in Five is Failing’. Yes, one in five Kiwi kids is failing in reading writing and maths. The 2020s version is very similar only this time it targets NCEA students, declaring one third are failing numeracy and reading standards and two-thirds are failing writing. In the 2010s the Government’s response was national standards, and we know how disastrous they were. Despite a new Government in 2017 abandoning the illadvised policy, it is fair to say our young people are right now not producing results that would give the nation high confidence for the future.
We may have to troll back a decade or two to find the real source of our young people’s unsatisfactory performance today. With the 1980s came Tomorrow’s Schools. The policy had its flaws but also strengths and few principals would wish to relinquish the self-management structure or community connections it brought with it.
Over time, a new policy of inclusiveness was introduced and welcomed as a humane approach to give every child, irrespective of their abilities or disabilities, the right to an education at their local school. The downside was that the policy did not come with supports or with the appropriate expertise – the psychologists, the trauma therapists, the counsellors, and the high-level behavioural experts and speech therapists required for these young people to be successful. Nor have schools had access to alternative pathways, short-term or long-term, which are necessary to avoid another alternative pathway – suspension or exclusion.
A new national curriculum was welcomed to the stage and heralded as the most innovative in the world. Curriculum was flying, until its wings were clipped. First to fall were the curriculum advisors, who were subject experts and critical to the success of teaching in our schools. Curriculum leadership in the Ministry was next to wane. Our Teacher Training Colleges closed and with them the practise-based training that had made our teachers such highly regarded practitioners. Then fell professional learning and development (PLD) which has never recovered. PLD is fragmented, elusive, inequitable and any PLD provided by the Ministry or Teaching Council is having minimal if any impact. The stunning new curriculum never stood a chance without implementation support. It’s still waiting, fifteen years later.
And now, this. A pandemic, a fragile workforce, still no support and now, no relievers. Hardly the time to give schools another literacy/numeracy bashing. But if we want to keep teachers and make teaching an attractive career, it might be time we started supporting and developing those teachers and principals we have got.