Tōtika - Balance
Mahia i runga i te rangimārie me te ngākau māhaki

With a peaceful mind and respectful heart,
we will always get the best results
 

Kia ora e te whānau

Welcome to the first week of Term Three!  I hope you managed some free time over the holidays to clear your heads and allow some fresh ideas to percolate. 

Conference 2019

It was a great pleasure to meet so many of you at the NZPF national conference early this month. The conference was hosted in Auckland and opened with a powerful pōwhiri at Ōrākei Marae, Bastion Point.  Bastion Point holds immense historic significance, as you know. The 506-day occupation of the land in 1977-78 resulted in the first successful land claim through the Waitangi Tribunal and paved the way for many more iwi to settle land injustices.  The powhiri set the scene for a conference that challenged and inspired delegates on many levels both personally and professionally. We had musician and activist, Moana Maniapoto and Dr Keri Milne-Ihimaera who addressed the impact of colonisation and demonstrated how colonial policies fed racism and bias and located Māori at the bottom end of every measure of success for the next 150 years. We listened to outstanding research from Professor Yong Zhao and Dr Karen Edge which both excited and provoked us in equal measure. It was a wonderful event and my thanks to the organisers and all delegates attending. A comprehensive report will be included in Term Three NZ Principal magazine.

NZEI Pay Negotiations for Principals

At their most recent meeting, the NZPF national executive resolved to adopt the recommendation of the NZEI and disengage with all Ministry work streams, advisory and reference groups, until progress is made on pay negotiations for the Primary Principals’ collective. 

The NZPF position is that in the interests of fairness, primary principals should be granted parity with their secondary colleagues.  

NZPF representatives will not be attending any Ministry-led meetings until negotiations are settled.

I urge any of you who are appointees to any Ministerial-led groups to also disengage with the Ministry. In this way we will send a strong collective message to the Minister to accelerate the process of finding a resolution to the pay parity issue.

Education Payroll - $1500

This week I was informed (via the Education Payroll website) that many schools will unexpectedly have their operations budgets affected as a result of those teachers coded to BG (Bulk Grant) on 13 June.  

As you know, all teachers will be receiving a one-off $1,500 payment as a condition of their negotiated pay settlement. Teachers employed by the school board, rather than under the school’s staffing allocation, will have their $1,500 paid by the School Board.  This is a school budget item that was not expected and is an unintended consequence of the teachers’ settlement. It will however impact on your school budget and operations grant.

In the course of negotiations, we were not informed of this consequence by the Ministry, Education Payroll or by NZEI. I have written to Education Payroll and the Ministry to ask why this was not discussed with us earlier.

Schools can send through a NOVO21 to retrospectively change the code to TS (Teachers Salary), but I note that these adjustments can only be made for the previous two pay periods.  I wrote to the CEO of Education Payroll and requested that this be extended to four pay periods to include 13 June.  Had we been notified earlier this would not have been necessary.

I have also phoned the Minister's office to ask that all $1,500 payments be covered by TS and not BG.  Many schools are already struggling to meet their budgets, with New Zealand schools funded at the lower end of OECD countries. I requested that this payment not be deducted from schools' bank accounts.

I am now waiting for the Secretary for Education to provide a ruling for us which I will immediately share with you through this newsletter. 

Ngā manaakitanga

Whetu Cormick
whetu@nzpf.ac.nz