Source: Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA)
Secondary principals and teachers are calling on the Minister of Education to introduce a new way of staffing secondary schools that is based on student need, rather than student numbers.
Kate Gainsford, principal of Aotea College and Chair of the Secondary Principals’ Council. told the PPTA Te Wehengarua Annual Conference last week that the current staffing formula, developed 80 years ago, fails as a resourcing model in a modern school system.
“The formula is not based on the actual needs of schools. For example, schools of similar size receive the samae guidance and pastoral staffing component, but a needs-based formula would cater adequately for the number of students with serious pastoral and guidance support needs nationally, and it would apply staffing differentially for individual schools because such students are not evenly distributed across schools.”
The new Equity Index, an equity funding system which replaces the old school decile system, gives schools a a far more accurate measure of the relative needs of their students, and provides the basis for a more needs-based approach to staffing schools.
Previous governments had reviewed how secondary schools were staffed but had failed to make fundamental changes, so the principals’ council had developed a new model itself.
Kate Gainsford says the current staffing model was based largely on a school’s roll size. “The new model would enable schools to be staffed more directly for need through five avenues: curriculum entitlement, guidance pastoral and learning support, professional development and mentoring, school leadership and management, and additonal staffing component such as beginning teacher time allowances and directed initiatives such as the NCEA changes.
“This model would give us enough pastoral care and guidance staffing to meet the huge demands schools are currently facing, enough staffing to properly run our schools without having to rob the curriculum or the pastoral staffing, and enough staffing to run reasonable class sizes at all levels, improving teaching and learning and removing workload pressures from teachers struggling to compensate for the disadvantage to students of being in overlarge classes.
“Having a model that PPTA Te Wehengarua takes under its wing as policy allows us to promote and fight for a very specific design that will supply staffing to meet all of our needs and to meet them adequately, regardless of how rich or poor the community is that we serve or the particular challenges that our communities may face.”
