Source: Radio New Zealand
Education Minister Erica Stanford. RNZ / Mark Papalii
Primary principals say they are at an impasse with the government over its school reforms.
In a series of open letters, regional principals associations have urged Education Minister Erica Stanford to slow down her curriculum changes and reverse her overhaul of the Teaching Council and the government’s recent removal of schools’ treaty obligations.
Association presidents told RNZ their members felt strongly about the situation and dissatisfaction was widespread.
Despite the complaints, Education Minister Erica Stanford said she was not losing the support of principals.
“In fact when I go around schools and classrooms the curriculum, as ERO has already said, is being implemented with fidelity around the country,” she said.
Asked if the principals’ concerns were unfounded, Stanford said: “Change is hard, right. Change is really hard and there are always principals who feel that there’s a lot coming at them. And we are there to support them,” she said.
“We’re there to make sure we’ve got resources, really good implementation, that we’re feeding back results early, we’re putting intervention teachers in to help those students who are falling behind, we’re doing everything we can.”
But principals told RNZ they could not possibly adopt the most recent changes to the maths curriculum in time for the new year.
They also said the government’s treaty change was “a massive mistake” and the Teaching Council overhaul was a power-grab that eliminated teachers’ control over their own professional body.
Auckland Primary Principals Association president Lucy Naylor said Stanford risked “losing” some teachers and principals if she did not compromise.
“The minister’s got a choice of knuckle down and keep going and lose some of the sector or we change direction and make some significant changes to to legislation,” she said.
“The implications of changing legislation are far reaching as well. So I do think that the minister is between a rock and a hard place at the moment, but we are going to have to have some definitive answers.”
She said the association surveyed its 428 members and found 77 percent of the 256 respondents felt negative about “the current educational landscape” and about 80 percent opposed the government’s Teaching Council and Treaty of Waitangi changes.
Naylor said many principals were likely too busy to complete the survey and she was confident the results were a fair representation of Auckland school leaders’ views.
She said the minister had agreed to a meeting.
“We’re planning to meet with her face to face in the next couple of weeks to work out a way forward, and I think that’s really important because there is so much negativity in the sector at the moment,” she said.
Otago Primary Principals Association president Kim Blackwood said Stanford often claimed that the sector supported her changes, but the association’s members were not convinced.
“The sector really feels like we’re not being listened to,” she said.
“The minister often makes remarks to say ‘the people have said’. When we get together, we’re all like, ‘Well where is this information coming from? That’s not what we’re saying on the ground’.”
Blackwood said schools were trying to cope with an unreasonable amount of change.
“On one hand, they’re saying, ‘this is for the betterment of children’. But actually, you’ve got the sector saying ‘I’ve got 30 kids in my class every day and I can’t get on top of what it is that I need to do because you keep changing it’,” she said.
Blackwood said schools were being asked to make a lot of effort to introduce changes that would likely be rolled back if there was a change of government next year because education was a political football.
“There’s no real traction because we’re always in a state of change,” she said.
Wellington Region Primary Principals Association vice-president Suzanne Su’a said the pace of change was putting unreasonable pressure on teachers and principals.
“Schools, principals, teachers, we’re not resistant to change. That’s not the issue at all,” she said.
“We’re absolutely open to change, but it needs to be change that is transparent, we need to be consulted around the change in a timely manner that’s manageable and achievable. It needs to all be evidence-based and we need to be involved in that process for change and that hasn’t really been the case,” she said.
Sua said the fourth school term was “chaos” and there was no way teachers and principals had the capacity to even think about changes to the English and maths curriculums.
“It’s not the time for teachers to be exploring the changes, particularly in English and maths and the maths changes that were recently introduced to us were quite different to what we’ve seen before. So to put into implementation at the beginning of next year is virtually impossible. It just it just can’t be done effectively, which then impacts on our kids.”
Rotorua Principals’ Association senior vice-president Hinei Taute said principals were feeling frustrated and let-down.
“There seems to be one thing after another,” she said.
“It just keeps coming at us.”
Principals Federation president Leanne Otene said the government was ignoring peak bodies like the federation, but it could not ignore local associations.
“This is hugely significant and it is coming from the regional associations,” she said.
She said the organisations consulted their members after an emergency meeting earlier this month and the feedback was clear.
“It was absolutely unanimous that the sector was reeling from all of these announcements,” she said.
Otene said the government had indicated schools did not have to use the revised English and maths curriculums from day one next year, but that was not good enough.
She said schools wanted to do the job properly and they needed more time to prepare.
Otene said teachers would also struggle to respond to consultation on drafts for other curriculum areas by April next year.
She said rushing would do more harm than good.
“When you have a curriculum where there’s not adequate professional development, where teachers and principals are not given the opportunity to be consulted on the process, where they’re not part of co-designing, where they don’t own the curriculum and they don’t understand the curriculum, what is going to happen is that it is going to be half-hearted,” she said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand