Auckland uni opts to axe most teacher support

The University of Auckland is proposing to terminate its mainstream advisory service for teachers — even though the Government has promised to create a new national advisory service.

University Dean of Education Mark Barrow has told school principals that his faculty has agreed to transfer its teacher support unit Team Solutions to the university’s commercial arm, UniServices.

A proposal that has gone out for consultation with the unit’s 77 staff does not specify how many jobs will go, but a university spokeswoman said “services that cannot be sustained financially will be terminated”.

She said the faculty’s revenue from professional development for teachers and principals had plunged from $15.5 million in 2016 to a projected $4.1m this year after the former National Government opened up the field to a free market in 2016.

“As a result, we lost $1.6m last year on provision of this service and expect to lose $2.5m in 2018,” she said.

“We have contacted the Minister of Education to explore any Govern- ment plans that might change this picture in a reasonable timeframe and there appear to be none.”

Barrow said UniServices would maintain specialist services such as Reading Recovery, which was funded by the Ministry of Education, a Play.sport programme funded through Sport NZ, and support for Ma¯ori-medium schools.

But the university will stop providing centrally-funded teacher support to mainstream schools, such as training teachers to teach maths for Year 3 or literacy for secondary schools.

“The university at this point has made a decision that it is not going to continue with that centrally funded PLD [professional learning and development],” Barrow said. “We have had two years to make that work, and found that it doesn’t work.

“The problem is, and this happens incredibly frequently, a PLD member gets booked up through the ministry, and then we’ll get a ring from the principal the day before, saying this can’t go ahead. We have already flown the person to Tauranga . . . It’s just unsustainable.”

The faculty’s director of professional learning and development, Camilla Highfield, said the universities received base funding for teacher professional development until 2011, and continued to win major contracts when managed nationally until 2016.

But national contracts ended in 2016, apart from one.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins said in March he intended to establish an Education Advisory Service to share best-practice, act as mentors and advisers to teachers and oversee all centrally-funded PLD. His “Tomorrow’s Schools” taskforce is to report by November 9 on, among other things, that service.