Decades ago there was an expression called the 'play way' used to cynically describe an apparent lack of structure for new entrants in their first year at school.
This current bunch of teachers got used to Ardern's 'progressive' government under inept Hipkins' 'playway' system which refused to pin down children with much testing and preferred child centred decision making. Loosely structured programmes designed by adults who should have known this approach was doomed to failure.
Dangerous group think by socialists gone horribly wrong. A kind of child abuse which has ruined thousands of lives and to a degree the lunatics have still metaphorically got control of the asylum, as those in charge have been pushing back with support from the media who want Labour back in charge.
They don't like the more structured approach to numeracy and literacy (music to my ears) as it means more work. To hell with the kids. The truth is many teachers have got very lazy.
Ardern's failing was not to make a major priority of school attendance after she closed schools for too long during covid. Now years later it is much harder as truancy has become a habit for thousands of pupils. What a pity she didn't put her charismatic personality to practical use to get most students back to thc classroom; she didn't have the mentality to realise her grave mistake. Too hooked up on repression of free speech and other unhinged socialist dogma.
Her only claim to fame was to visit as many primary schools as possible and (wrongly) indoctrinate our children that Aotearoa, not New Zealand, was our country's new name. So sad.
39% attendance in 2023 was shocking; although May 2025 saw 58%, a 20% improvement, but still appalling. Like many teachers the kids had got lazy used to skipping school with low expectations from adults who should have known better.
Stanford excelled herself today in the House answering Willow Jean Prime's simpering repetitive questions. Her piece de resistance was naming (and shaming) the NZEI for their (inferred) negative approach and refusal to accept 12 weeks holidays and generous teacher only days provide time to upskill on new resources. This is the same with the PPTA.
Many people working in the private sector during this financial down time do not get guaranteed pay rises in tune with inflation; many have not had one for a very long time. This is belt tightening time, which the Opposition, teachers, media and unions who think money grows on trees, refuse to accept. The private sector also don't get life time guaranted employment like teachers, not to forget the holidays.
I left teaching 30 years ago. I can only remember one teacher only day on the first day of the year. Maybe we had one in term two and three, can't remember. Google weren't much help, We had three terms and 2 fewer weeks holidays.
And the pay wasn't great. MPs pay, if similar, must have been much lower in those days. I could only afford to travel overseas when my bond was finished as I played background music at a wedding venue on Saturdays and sang with a band on Friday and Saturday nights which had the benefit of increasing my bank balance.
I did not go on one protest during my 20 years teaching, just the occasional scheduled meetings at the Avondale Race Course which usually took place later in the day, closing schools at 1pm or 2pm, to the best of my memory. Not selfishly putting parents out with teacher only days pulled out of a hat at the last minute and strikes up the wazoo.
Teachers are like Maori, (publicly) thankless for all the money spent on their resources and just keep on like Oliver Twist asking for more. $700 million put aside in the 2025 budget for Maori; at this rate we will never get to surplus. What happened to the need not race approach to funding?
The very first funding announced by the government at the end of 2023 was $70 million for immunisation for Maori under twos for Northland and the East Coast. Did I hear one word of thanks from one Maori leader? Deafening silence. Immunisation is steadily rising thanks to Shane Reti's and now Simeon Brown's tireless efforts. Axing vaccination targets may have been Ardern's biggest mistake. And she made many... But I digress.
How can many primary school teachers who are being spoon-fed by Stanford's new innovative structured programmes for teachers and pupils ask for more money when they don't know the curriculum they are supposed to be trained to teach?
That has always been the question on the tip of my tongue.
But I can't finish without mentioning the thousands of teachers who love their jobs, are equipped with the necessary knowledge and a positive attitude, and against the odds improve outcomes for their pupils every day. I am sure many of these would have been at Stanford's Road Show this week eager to get across the new curriculum to impart to their classes.
Not loitering at roadsides on Thursday, accompanied by their victim mentality, with their negative signage boring the public silly with their pathetic platitudes.
Hope the heavens open.
Wendy Geus is a former speechwriter and generalist communications advisor in local government. She now writes for the pure love of it.
28 comments:
Stick to your guns, teachers. NZ needs qualified educators or we are at risk of falling into idiocracy. Ignore the coordinated disinformation campaign. Real kiwis are seeing through the political smokescreen and are with you all the way!
Well said. Nail and head come to mind.
Yeah all those greedy teachers and doctors. When will we finally get a government who sticks up for the regular folk, like landlords, fossil fuel companies, tobacco companies!?
I read in the news this morning this what the Public Service Commissioner’s actions say about how seriously the government is about getting a resolution.
“Speaking to Morning Report while on holiday in Australia, Roche said he remained available to any negotiating parties.”
Like yeah you don’t want “helping teachers” to get in the way of a good holiday. The disregard is so blatant that it should be funny, but this is about our children’s future, so it is just plain disgusting.
It’s hard to understand why some people don’t back teachers fighting for better pay and conditions. We should be backing the people shaping our future, not expecting them to just make do. Good education starts with looking after the educators.
Wendy. I have a better idea. This is the opportunity to start cleaning out the far left radical rot that most of these teachers try to instill in these kids. Get rid of them. It will be hard for about 2 years, but it will be worth it.
Kia kaha teachers! Also there are far too many mixed metaphors in this opinion piece, the author needs to go back to school herself!
Professionals are paid to do a job and public perception of them depends largely on how well they are seen to be doing that job.
Doctors and nurses work in a system that is characterised by continual improvements in medicine and surgery, leading to better outcomes for more patients. Hence, they tend to attract public sympathy when complaining about pay and conditions.
Teachers, on the other hand, are working in a system that has seen a downgrading of those things that make it work, such as a curriculum that focuses on basic skills. Outcomes have headed south - kids leave primary school incompetent in reading and writing and carrying out artithmetical operations, while slightly older kids leave high school ill-prepared for further or higher education or entry into the work force. Hence many people are unsupportive of demands for higher pay and better conditions (i.e. having more money thrown at the system).
In my opinion, the education system as a whole is not working properly because the central authority does not dictate detailed curricula and impose strict performance criteria on teachers which they must meet in order to be able to claim that they are doing their jobs. In the so-called Napoleonic system of governance, teachers are 'agents of the State' and must enact the will of the State through rigidly prescribed curricula.
I gather that there is a curricular tightening up process going on in NZ. This can only be a good thing. Once teachers enact it and we see pupils getting better at the things they are supposed to be learning, I suspect many people will be more supportive of teacher claims to higher salaries.
'Co-ordinated disinformation campaign?" Haven't seen at all. I think for myself, like most citizens, that teachers are being manipulated by an anti-government NZEI - stooges, of whom I (ex-teacher) am ashamed.
ai teaching kids will:
- increase engagement of the computer game generation,
- make learning more exciting,
- regularly benchmark individuals progress and tailor levels and lessons to individuals,
- provide regular dispassionate and accurate progress reports to students and parents.
- stop the sabotage of our kids education to make teachers life easier.
- stop the obscene annual increases forcing kiwi battlers to commit more of their hard earned to an education system which has slipped to the bottom of the oecd.
and best of all we wont have to listen to constant whining from overpaid underperforming teachers.
so how about it Mrs Stanford, there must be a successful technology based teaching system somewhere in the world you can copy!
It's lines like this one that explain why folks like me don't align with Labour / Green / left nor Nats / ACT / right - I mean, its downright racist and offensive. I'm a teacher and my great grandfather was called Hori. Does that make me a thankless, ungrateful native? Both right & left in NZ are revolting these days.
"Teachers are like Maori, (publicly) thankless for all the money spent on their resources".
'Tis hard to think of the poor battlers, managing on 12 weeks paid holiday p.a. Thank God for Erica Stanford, who is battling to instil some rigour into their 'fight'.
I wonder how many maori and palestine flags will be held by the brainwashed workers.
I saw lots of palestinian flags and maori flags as the protesters walked down queen street. Zero nz flags spotted. Of course it is political.
Anon 144 draws our attention to the observation that many teachers see themselves as agents of [revolutionary] change. They are activists and use the opportunities that teaching provides to recruit 'child soldiers' for their various causes. This is an abuse of privilege and should be regarded as grossly unethical.
Here's a suggestion:-
Teachers should get pay increases in proportion to their performance / results.
As I have said so many times before Progressive Education has never been concerned with actual education instead they have a socialist , activist group , agenda which only, originally differed from Marxism in not promoting revolution but gradualism. Gradually working towards building a socialist utopian state by using schooling as their vehicle for achieving this. That scores in reading and maths have plummeted is of less concern to them than indoctrinating children into becoming socialist.. Of course there still are teachers concerned with teaching children but the' profession ' attracts the left leaning.
Our education system had become abysmally dysfunctional and massive changes in the curriculum are needed but teachers indoctrinated by academics have not be well equipped for the massive changes required. Learning up the phonic system and learning basic arithmetic is a lot of work for a 'profession' unaccustomed to academic learning themselves. There is also all the te Reo to learn .
Teachers are victims of having been indoctrinated by all our Educational Institutions , into a kind of educational Marxism .
Great protest turnout today. Proud of our teachers. Ignore the keyboard warrior trolls, real Aotearoa is behind you all the way!
The trouble with performance pay for teachers, Doug, is that teachers are only one part of the educational outcomes equation, and they are not even the main part. The main factors determining outcomes of schooling arise from the learner's home background.
Put a mediocre teacher in a good school with pupils strongly motivated to do well by their family backgrounds and you get great results. Put a top-class teacher in a crappy school with kids who come from shambolic backgrounds and who are not at all motivated and you get lousy results.
This makes it inadvisable to use academic results as measurement instruments for teacher quality.
Aotearoa is tired of this far right government.
Katherine Burbalsinghe in her London low decile school with academic results for her students comparable to Eton , Marva Collins in her Chicago inner city slum school.having all her students becoming college graduates, the astonishing literacy improvements in the poorest US state of Mississippi on a low budget , the research in Clackmannanshire the poorest Scottish shire with students acquiring standards comparable to those in high decile shires and many other examples contradicts your assessment of educational achievement being related entirely to SES ( Socio Economic Status) .
Ineffective teaching methods , based on modern progressive constructivism produces the results you describe Barend. Traditional methods , discipline and content , however overcomes the disadvantages of poor homes and produces social mobility.
Are any commenters here the product of the NZ education system? Some of them seem really uneducated, some of them even have foreign names. It’s all pretty sus if you ask me.
In got my PhD from Otago, Anon 856. Foreign name an' all. What about you, babe?
>"... contradicts your assessment of educational achievement being related entirely to SES."
True to form, misrepresenting what others have said/written.
Nowhere did I claim that.
What I did allude to was the finding in numerous studies that school and teacher variables come in behind home background variables as predictors of scholastic achievement.
You'd better look up 'Halo Effect' too...........
Barend doesn’t sound like a kiwi name to me. I don’t mind foreigners but it’s only polite to be up front about it.
I'm with Prof MacCulloch. The writer took a gratuitous swipe at Maori, in a piece on a different topic. She comes across as an woman whingeing on autopilot .
'Barend' is indeed not a 'kiwi name' - it's an ancient Caucasian name alluding to the bear as a totem animal.
What has any of this got to do with the topic under discussion?
Anon @10.09pm - MacCulloch is closer to it than anyone else here, but not quite on the money for mine: This whole left/right culture nonsense is pure distraction, to keep us occupied, sniping and bickering (yes, even in an echo chamber) while the rich and the corrupt keep on getting richer. And the distraction appears to be working on a lot of folks who really are good people at heart, but something in society isn’t working for them. I don’t know the solution but I can try to live above the line every day, sometimes even a small kindly gesture can have a bigger effect on someone than you’d think.
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