Effective Teaching
The recruitment, retention, capability and performance of teachers should be the foundation of a credible education policy. The quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. The quality of teachers directly affects student performance more than anything else within the education system.
It is UnitedFuture policy to:
- Ensure that entry requirements to teacher education are rigorous.
- Oppose any moves to introduce Performance Pay as we see it as wrecking the collegial working environment currently enjoyed by teachers.
- Ensure that student teachers develop both the competencies and the disposition to work with children and young people and those non-performing student teachers are identified and if necessary failed.
- Clarify the protocols available to Principals for removing an incompetent teacher.
- Reject current calls for introducing National Standards in literacy and numeracy in Primary Schools as this policy assumes that teachers are not currently measuring students in these areas and that current measurements lack scientific robustness. This is just not true and is based in the politics of fear.
- Require schools to explain to parents how progress is measured, how often and for what purpose.
- Increase the amount of time student teachers spend in school-based practicum.
- Include mandatory course content on teaching children and adults with disabilities in all teacher education.
- Focus on improving working conditions that contribute to the decision teachers make to leave the profession like workload and student behaviour.
- Recognise that teaching is perceived as a stressful and underpaid job that is largely misunderstood and undervalued by the wider public.
- Support a review of teacher pay rates so that they reflect more accurately the additional management units and professional development undertaken and are internationally competitive.
- Support professional standards that are descriptive rather than prescriptive. To anchor teachers to narrowly measured standards is likely to be counter-productive in a fast-changing information age. Teachers should be able to demonstrate that they are committed to ongoing personal professional development.
- Strengthen current professional development priorities specifically in assessment practice, classroom management, subject expertise, meeting the needs of disabled students and the ongoing roll out of Te Kötahitanga.
- Ensure that support for newly qualified teachers across all sectors is consistent and of a high standard.
- Encourage more men to join the teaching profession at all levels.
- Recruit more Maori and Pacific teachers.
- Support the inclusion of teacher trainees in a bonding scheme to reduce student loan debt for those who are qualified in fields facing shortages, in return for a continuous period of work in New Zealand after graduation.
- Support the call from Principals for the Teachers Council to deal with disciplinary matters in a more transparent manner.