Solutions needed for teacher shortage

One of the truly great things about the summer holidays, especially for parents of teenagers still at school, is the freedom from study stress.

Six to eight carefree weeks where you’re no longer hovering around the teenager’s bedroom door squeaking ‘‘Are you OK honey? How’s it going in there?’’

No longer peering anxiously into their stony faces at the dinner table, desperate to know if they need the ‘‘Top Ten Stressbusting Tips For Exam Study’’ which you’re saving as a last resort because you know you’ll just be told that mum, that’s lame, I’m fine.

And that’s just the parents. Imagine how stressful it is for the kids. Then imagine how things are going to turn out this year, for those who’ve had a succession of relief teachers, or subs with no specialist subject knowledge, guiding them all year.

Teaching, particularly in Auckland, is in full-on crisis. There are not enough of them to fill the vacancies and schools are having to come up with emergency work-arounds.

How did we get here? Oversupply in the early part of this decade led to falling numbers signing up for teacher training courses by 2012 – the pipeline of qualified teachers slowed to a trickle and no-one apart from schools and teacher unions appear to have clicked to the urgency of the situation.

Early last year PPTA Vice President Melanie Webber must have felt she was shouting her warnings into the void. ‘‘We’ve got a perfect storm waiting to happen ... and no-one’s paying attention to it,’’ she said in May.

The warning signs were there some time ago. When your child comes home despondent because they got under 30 per cent in a science test, you feel a prickle of concern. When they explain this was around the class mean, you wonder what the hey is going on.

A couple of years ago, I was part of a parent advisory group helping the board at my child’s school formulate its four-year strategic plan. We wrote down what we felt the school did well and not so well, and then refined the process until we were left with the top two parental bugbears.

At number two: lack of space for musical instrument storage in the hall (don’t ask me – I voted for more comprehensive sex education classes).

And at number one, by an overwhelming majority: poor results and the lack of consistent teaching in maths and science. The school admitted it was having a hard time attracting and retaining maths and science teachers, never mind other more specialised subjects (when I asked my child why the school was no longer offering te reo, they shrugged and said the teacher left).

At least my child’s school recognised the problem several years ago. Now we start the 2018 school year with ten per cent of Auckland schools unable to find enough qualified staff to fill their vacancies. Against talk of larger and larger class sizes and retired teachers being pulled back into service, finally, everyone’s racing in to offer solutions.

This week’s stunner came from the Auckland Chamber of Commerce. CEO Michael Barnett’s suggestion that the Government fund an ‘‘Auckland wage’’ may well have been the most unpopular suggestion ever tended.

We ran a Newshub poll on the idea – it was swamped by 11,000 votes on the first day. A thundering 70 per cent thought it was a bad idea.

Why so emphatic? It’s not as if a subsidy of this kind is unheard of. There’s been a ‘‘London Weighting’’ wage top-up for a range of essential service workers from teachers to airline staff since the 1920s. And Barnett is right when he says ‘‘we can’t afford to have suboptimal performance (in teaching and nursing)’’.

I talked to unions and business groups about the idea, and none were terribly enthusiastic. The sticking point appears to be at gut-level – it’s simply unfair.

The responses on Facebook were more blunt. David posted thus: ‘‘This poll makes me sick. The rest of NZ already subsidises Auckland through GST and fuel tax. There is no way I would pay more for people to live in Auckland. You know maybe if you can’t afford somewhere you should move.’’

Council of Trade Unions head Richard Wagstaff suggested going back to the days when the Ministry of Education built and managed housing for teachers.

Kim Campbell from the Employers and Manufacturers Association wished schools could decide for themselves what to pay their teachers. All acknowledge the problem is the cost of housing.

A housing subsidy, then? Nope. That’s likely to be hoovered up by landlords, just as we’ve seen happen with student allowances in Wellington.

The only real fix appears to be the painfully slow wait for new housing supply. Depressing statistics like the total building consents in Auckland for 2017 (at almost 11,000 they were the highest in more than a decade but still way below what’s needed) are no help.

If like me, you have a child smack in the middle of the most important years of their schooling, the near future of teaching is terrifying.

Teaching, particularly in Auckland, is in full-on crisis.