Paid Union Meetings

This month teachers from our school, along with teachers and principals from throughout NZ met to discuss a number of initiatives to ensure that all children going to school are able to learn the skills and abilities to grow up happy and productive in the 21st century; quality teaching for every child.

Over the past 6 years there has been a 40% drop in the number of people going in to teacher training with a large number leaving the profession within 5 years. This has contributed to a significant shortage of teachers nationwide. If we are to ensure quality teaching for every child then something must be done to make teaching an attractive and sustainable career option for both men and women.

Teachers have huge workloads; ensuring they are planned, ready to teach what children in their care need to learn, with a variety of learning needs and a variety of behaviours, from a variety of backgrounds, as well as keeping up with school expectations and their own learning. There just aren't enough hours in the day nor resources available for supporting teachers to support students with additional learning needs. It has become a daily struggle for some teachers.

"Teachers and principals have consistently raised high workloads, lack of support for students with additional learning and behavioural needs, and undervaluing of the profession as key issues over the last few years. We have tried to address these issues through previous rounds of negotiations and through work programmes.

Although we've made some progress, it has been insufficient to address the deep-seated and fundamental issues facing our profession. This has led to a crisis in recruitment and retention of teachers and principals.

So our Kua Tae Te Wā/It’s Time campaign has been launched to achieve the significant investment we need so that all children can reach their potential, and teaching is an attractive, valued and well-supported profession.

Together we need to build strong community support to ensure the government understands that this crisis can only be solved by major investment."

(from NZEI Website)

So, as a staff, we support the 'Kua tae te wa - it's time' NZEI Te Riu Roa objectives that they will be taking into negotiation -

• to have significant pay increases to address the teacher shortage and retention issues
• to have significant increases to staffing available to all schools to support leaders and teachers working with those with additional learning needs.
• to create meaningful career options for teachers and principals to make it more attractive as a career choice

We appreciate your support. If we want to ensure a world class education for all our children, we deserve to be recognised for providing it! Teachers are worth it! Your children are worth it!