Call for teaching assistants
Some schools are spending more than $100,000 a year to employ teacher aides but still can’t provide enough support to meet increasing student needs, principals say.
If the Government helped to fund teaching assistants – potentially one per primary school class – it would do more to improve student learning than mandating an hour daily of reading, writing and maths, some said.
Tāhunanui School principal Barbara Bowen said “wholesale change” was needed to support student needs.
The primary school in Nelson had just lost two teacher aides after a drop in the government funding it received for students with the highest level of needs, she said.
Two pupils funded by the Ministry of Education’s Ongoing Resourcing Scheme (ORS) had left the school, so the school had to cut its teacher aides’ hours, causing two of the teacher aides to find more hours elsewhere, she said.
But more pupils needed support with a growing range of needs from intellectual to social and behavioural, including poverty and anxiety, Bowen said. “If the research is right, it’s at least one in five [students affected], and yet the funding would be more like one in 50.
“We’ve always had to fund extra [for learning support], but it’s getting to the point where we can’t keep doing that.”
Less than 2% of the country’s schooling population received ORS funding, data from 2022 showed.
Three of the 250 children at Tāhunanui School next year were partially funded for support, including a “very high needs” ORS student, Bowen said.
The child was funded for about 20 hours a week, with the school paying for the remaining 10 hours of teacher aide support through its operations grant.
Another pupil received five hours a week for one term under a behavioural fund, and the third would get help from a speech and language therapist.
Schools could apply for some contestable funding for learning support.
But more support was needed across classrooms, she said.
The school was among those that said it was already teaching an average of about an hour of literacy and numeracy a day.
Having expert support and smaller class sizes would help teachers to focus on making teaching time effective, Bowen said.
It was about “putting the expertise where it’s needed at the right time, instead of putting out fires”, she said.
The school, and others in the Stoke-Tāhu
“If the research is right, it’s at least one in five [students affected], and yet the funding would be more like one in 50.
Barbara Bowen
Tāhunanui School principal
nanui school cluster, had missed out on learning support co-ordinators allocated by the Government to some clusters in 2019.
The acting principal of Nayland College in Stoke, Hannah Banks, said the secondary school was using more than $100,000 of its operations budget to help provide 16 learning assistants next year. “We could easily double our spending on learning assistants and still find that we would use more.”
While 14 of the secondary school’s more than 1400 students were ORS-funded next year, students with a “huge range” of learning difficulties, from autistic spectrum to foetal alcohol syndrome, were not funded at all for support, she said.
“There are challenging students in mainstream classes who take up teachers’ time and expertise, and some [other] students end up having a different experience at school because of that.”
The Ministry of Education said it was working with the education sector to consider improvements to the resourcing model for teacher aides. The aim was to strengthen outcomes for students and reduce the administrative burden for schools.
Flexibility to align the type of support with the type of need was “an important element of achieving educational success”, so schools could decide how they spent their funding, spokesperson Hester Goodwin said.