The Ministry of Education says schools are likely to be short 1250 primary and secondary school teachers this year. Photo: RNZ/123rf
Correction: This story originally misidentified a secondary school principals association as a secondary school teachers association.
A teacher shortage is disappointing but no surprise, the head of a secondary school principals' association says.
The Ministry of Education said schools were likely to be short 1250 primary and secondary school teachers this year, after it mistakenly under-counted demand by more than a thousand teachers.
President of the Secondary Principals Association Vaughan Couillault said data released this week reflected what secondary school teachers were already experiencing on the ground.
"So it was not a shock at all. There was obviously a change in those projections from a primary school perspective, but that again reflects what [secondary] colleagues have been saying on the ground, and the data analysts have caught up."
Both teachers and the ministry team who made the error were disappointed, he added.
"It's quite disappointing and quite a significant miscalculation for our primary colleagues."
Secondary schools were less affected, he said, because they had experienced supply issues for the last decade.
Couillault said secondary schools had tried to address those shortfalls by "going hunting in other jurisdictions... So you go hunting overseas and I know that there has been some work done from a Ministry of Education perspective and trying to target certain markets offshore."
The preference "for all of us" was still to train local teachers and to grow our own humans to teach our own children.
"But that's a medium- to long-term solution, not a not a short term one."
Schools were having to cut courses or make classrooms bigger to adjust, or ask non-specialist teachers to teach specialist courses, he added.
Teaching remained a "fantastic, wonderful career choice", he said.
"Every job can be challenging and there's far more uplifting moments than there are ones that that keep you down."
Couillault said a bi-partisan, common-sense approach to education was needed.
"Let's continue to work with policy makers and people who make cabinet-based decisions to value the importance of health and education...[they] are the two big public goods we've got to get right, and we've got to have some bi-partisan approaches to it where you're not being pulled from one direction to another based on the change of a government or a coalition agreement.
"We need a real bi-partisan approach that's commonsensical, and we get that public good provision of education right, for all of the children we care for."
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