Kia ora e te whānau, Talofa Lava

The big story of the week is the spectacular pay equity win for teacher aides.

We applaud this outcome which places teacher aides on a pay scale that is reflective of the significant skills they need to work alongside our most complex young people. 

We know the value of our teacher aides. They are selfless, dedicated people. They work on the front line dealing with young people experiencing crisis and with those in need of significant curriculum modification or differentiated pathways to experience success. We rely on the dogged perseverance of teacher aides who simply refuse to allow the challenging nature of the job deter them.  

Principals want an educational workforce of the highest possible standard. The explosion in the understanding and recognition of learning abilities and disabilities, of syndromes and conditions, of learning theory and differentiated practice underlines the appropriateness of this pay equity decision. Our teacher aide workforce needs the assurance of stable employment and it needs training and development opportunities. This decision should deliver both.

The announcement came as a surprise. Principal peak bodies have not been briefed about the detail of this announcement. Such information is critical for us to implement the offer. Our system values openness, transparency, and collaboration, so the lack of detail has generated a running hot stream of questions to my email!  

What do we currently know about funding?

1. Teacher aides will receive the new pay rates by November backdated to 12 February 2020. This funding will be received by schools by October.
2. Additional funding will be provided to you based on the staff employed during the 2019 school year, using payroll information. If you employ different or more staff in 2020 the Ministry will take this into account when calculating additional funding.
3. All funding sources covering the gamut of teacher aides are covered. These include teacher aides employed through the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS), English as a Second Language (ESOL), the operational grant, school donations and local fundraising, Health (MOH), Oranga Tamariki (OT), Ministry of Social Development (MSD) and Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC).
4. If a teacher aide is funded as a cost to the school, then payment will be centrally funded by way of top-up and only for the top-up amount not the full cost of the teacher aide. The top-up is the difference in pay caused by the new rates.
5. Funding is ongoing and further details have been promised at a later date.
6. A commitment has been made to review the way schools fund teacher aides.

The focus on our teacher aides prompts other questions about learning and behaviour support.

One of the significant and persistent problems that principals deal with is the winning of Ministry funding for students in crisis that is invariably only a few hours a week when the child requires significantly more. In such situations principals routinely go to their operations funding and annual budget to sacrifice important and targeted income to increase teacher aide hours for the young person in need. This top-up resource would, under the information received to date, be subject to the higher pay rates - but only for the difference between current and new rates, not to fund the entire cost of the teacher aide which the school has opted to pay.

The paucity of teacher aide hours provided through the Ministry of Education for students in crisis, particularly behavioural, high health needs, or ORS students places principals under constant pressure to appropriately resource these complex young people from thinly stretched budgets.

At my school, I would routinely exceed my teacher aide budget each year by many thousands because as a principal, you have no choice but to provide the professional support required and at a level dictated by need.  

While this increase to teacher aide rates is warmly welcomed, a serious work programme about the level of resourcing of behaviour and learning support is long overdue.

NZPF has for years been calling for improved solutions for the support of students with high behaviour needs. We will continue asking this question.

Progress on the Accord between the Ministry of Education, PPTA and NZEI is moving slowly. This Accord was agreed as part of the settlement of principal and teacher collective agreements last year. The Accord sought to take several contentious issues off the table and send those issues into a working group between the unions and the Ministry. One of the Accord goals is ‘responding to students with complex needs’; an issue embedded in the daily responsibility principals face as they match a scarce teacher aide resource to young people in need.

Principals are hoping the outcome of the Accord will build on pay equity for teacher aides by enabling fair and equitable provision of teacher aide funding so that the needs of young people are met.

Most schools exceed their Special Education Grant (SEG) by many multiples of one hundred percent. It is common to find expenditure of up to 400% to 800% of the SEG. One school has reported to me that it is funded $34,000 in their SEG and spends $242,000 on teacher aides.

It is truly wonderful that our teacher aides will finally receive just and fair pay.

Wouldn’t it be great if the young people our teacher aides work with were also appropriately resourced?

Ngā manaakitanga

Perry Rush
perry@nzpf.ac.nz