I'm calling #Bullshit on Minister Chris Hipkin's claim that teachers will be $10,000 better off!

I'm going to start out by saying I really like Chris Hipkins.  He knows education and he's grown up at the knee of a great education academic.  He's passionate about our education system and I know he wants what is best.  I know he advocates for us.  But I know he is one of many in a Cabinet competing for money.

I also know that my colleagues are over worked, many are struggling financially, many feel their students are getting the raw end of the stick and many are wanting to bail.  And if I do not see any real change by the end of 2020, I may bail too.  I can't sustain my workload forever.  Already my health has suffered in the last year.

I also know this government has a healthy surplus.  Finance Minister Grant Robertson talks about saving the money for a rainy day.  Well Grant, the rainy day for teachers is bloody well here.

Minister Chris Hipkins claims there is no more money for teacher Collective Agreement negotiations.  His MOE negotiation team keep recutting the same pie over and over again, but it will not solve the problems the teacher population currently face.

Last year our NZEI negotiators went into the Collective Agreement negotiations for primary teachers with four issues on top for teachers across New Zealand:

• a pay jolt - we asked for a 16% pay rise over a two year contract
• a plan for recruitment and retention - the numbers entering teacher training have dropped dramatically in recent years and the number of experienced teachers leaving the profession have created a teacher supply crisis as schools struggle to staff themselves and put teachers in front of classrooms full-time, let alone when a staff member is sick.
• a reduction of workload - while National Standards have gone, the assessment are still there.  ERO and the MOE still demands a lot of assessment information.  There are a few principals who need some direction about teacher inquiry too.  But a lot of stuff has been piled onto teachers via the Teacher's Council which became the Education Council and is now known as the Teaching Council and it has blown completely out of control as planning to justify the reading of a story is expected by some principals under the guise of needing it to sign off teacher appraisals and registration requirements.  Then there are the excessive meetings and the paper work for getting extra assistance for students.
• help for students with special learning needs, so we asked for a SENCO in every school - these students often have learning needs over and above what the average classroom teacher can manage without support.  But where does this support come from currently?  How much education are these children missing out on because there is a lack of funding and expertise to access what these children should be getting?

These issues were the claim presented to the MOE.  It was a bit different than previously.  For the last three negotiations figures and statements were presented.  We had to fight to keep existing conditions  and earned increases that equaled or were just below the rate of inflation.  We needed to change how we negotiated.  But the MOE could not get their head around it.

The negotiators for NZEI told the stories of thousands of teachers and why these were the issues they wanted addressed.  I was told by a negotiator that they were rather disinterested in the stories and even disputed the truth of the stories.

These issues were the issues we as a membership voted as our claim in March 2018.  These issues have not changed.  So to hear Minister Hipkins claim a number of times that the claim has changed and that teachers don't agree on the claim is rather annoying.

Like schools across the country have different issues that are on top for them, teachers across NZ also have issues on top for them.  I put this to Minister Hipkins in a tweet thread earlier this week.

Our negotiators put a range of options on the table to address the issues above.  The NZEI team expected that the MOE team would pick out some options they were willing to negotiate on.  But they did not.  They ignored all the suggestions put forward by the MOE team.  Our NZEI team was told teachers could not have their cake and eat it too.

Now they have bunched those options together and claimed that we want all of the options and we won't budge and it will cost $4 billion over four years to implement all of these options.  Remember, we put these as a range of options to be negotiated on as to which could be implemented.  We did not put these on the table as a combined must do package.

And a couple of days later I felt it important to emphasise this again.

Teachers currently feel that Minister Hipkins is no better than Hekia Parata as they do not feel he is listening to them.  I'm sure Chris is listening and feeling like he is caught between a rock and a hard place - I hear the rock is Winston Peters and the hard place is Grant Robertson.

In the mean time I hear the stories of teachers struggling and those who have left the profession:

This is just a snapshot of what I am currently hearing and what I have been hearing for the last four or five years, in person and via social media.

So why have we been refusing the MOE offer?

• the pay offer does not stack up.
• while the government last week announced a $94 million package to attract people into initial teacher education, there is NOTHING offered to retain current teachers.
• there is an offer for an extra 2.5 hours of classroom release time per term - that's 150 minutes divided by 10 weeks of term equally 15 minutes a week.  I guess it gives me time to go to the toilet once a week and maybe make a coffee.
• while they government in November 2018 announced an ambitious plan for 600 inclusive education co-ordinators.... there's still a lot of questions and the feeling this is not enough and will not impact on classroom teachers very much.

In the meantime the Minister of Education has been talking up the MOE offer and telling all and sundry there is no more money.  Mr Hipkins has made much of the idea that teachers will be increasing their wage on average by $10,000 if we accept the MOE offer.  This is disingenuous, or just not accurate.  And so this tweet stream below illustrates that.

For a better look at that extra step, here is the picture Chris Crumble kindly supplied me.

I'm not holding my breath on this new step however.  I feel this may disappear in the final wash.

The ethos of this post is just to say, don't believe everything that you are hearing come from the Minister.  He is a good Minister.  But his hands are tied by Cabinet and he's been given his lines.  As a profession, if we want to uplift the status of our profession, we need to target the big players in Cabinet alongside Mr Hipkins. 

We need to focus on the Deputy Prime Minister, Winston Peters.  Race Courses have done well under Mr Peters, but he needs to listen to Tracey Martin more - and send Tracey letters too, after all, she is the Associate Minister of Education.  Grant Robertson's mum is a teacher, so Grant should know better - let's keep the pressure on him.  Dr David Clark is not only the Minister of Health, he is also an Associate Finance Minister - so let's apply pressure there too.  Phil Twyford may be Minister of Housing and Transport, but he has a lot of sway in that Cabinet - hit him with the letters too.

Finally, the 29th of May with our mega strike with the secondary teachers offers us new leverage.  Let's not let the momentum fail after that and let's keep the pressure on this government because we teachers are worth more.

Thank you Chris Hipkins!! Goodbye National Standards. But....

Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins.
Sourced from stuff.co.nz

Labour campaigned on it.

New Zealand First campaigned on it.

The Green Party campaigned on it.

Last Monday, the Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins, finally announced it.

From 2018, Primary schools will no longer have to report on National Standards to parents or the Ministry of Education from the new year.  Education Minister Chris Hipkins said reporting would shift from the standards to reporting on children's progress. Reports would be written in "plain English", he said.  Read more here:  Government confirms primary schools to scrap National Standards (NZ Herald 11/12/17).

He also said parents and teachers had lost confidence in the "narrow policy" that he called "nothing more than a compliance exercise" and a "major distraction to schools".  (Government scraps National Standards, Newshub, 12/12/17)

I'm stoked that National Standards will not be compulsory, Chris Hipkins.  Thank you very much.

I've been campaigning against them since the legislation was enacted under urgency in December 2008.  I've joined Facebook groups, commented on numerous forums, written blogs opposing National Standards, attended protests, lobbied politicians, informed colleagues, friends, family, parents of students and the general public of the futile and stigmatising nature of National Standards.  I became a co-admin of Save Our Schools New Zealand and upped my involvement in NZEI.

Personally, over the years, while I have met the requirements of my job description as a teacher in regards to National Standards, I've mostly ignored them.  Here's how:

• the original National Standards document I received is still unopened in the plastic it arrived in.
• that document is buried in my storage locker with 99% of what I own - that's how little I value it.
• I actively ignored National Standards as a teacher and minimalised my involvement in doing anything involving them.
• I minimalised my discussion of the National Standards with students and talked to them about where they sat according to age norms and the curriculum and the progress they were making from a certain point to that point. 
• I taught with good practice to encourage the love of learning, not the need to need an 'aspirational' standard that did not meet with how we know children learn.
• I avoided putting anything on display or in the student's books that referred to the Standards.

Then I decided I needed to do more:

• I joined the Labour party and began having the conversations with various politicians from not only Labour, but the Greens and NZ First, to push the need to see National Standards gone.
• I assisted with campaigning in the 2014 election.
• at the end of 2015 I decided I really could not stomach National Standards anymore.  After a whole term of testing instead of teaching and writing labourious reports to the Standards and crying over the 'Well Below' children and consuming far too much chocolate and bourbon, I called it quits.  I decided not to teach again under a National government.
• I began my Masters of Education focusing on Global Education Policy.  Just the dissertation to go.
• I protested Hekia Parata, the former Minister of Education, at the largest education conference in New Zealand, ULearn.  Out of hundreds of messages and personal conversations and likes, only two people called me disrespectful and disagreed with my protest.  Over a year later, I'm still getting people thanking me for taking my lone protest to the middle of ULearn during the Minister's speech, right in her line of sight.
• 2017 was all about my goal to #ChangeTheGovt - this involved becoming even more involved in the Labour party and managing the Taranaki-King Country Labour campaign and assisting in the campaign thoughout the Waikato as well as supporting the campaigns in the Rangitikei, New Plymouth and Te Tai Hauauru electorates.

So imagine my excitement that night that Winston Peters announced that New Zealand First would be going into coalition with Labour and that the Greens also had a supply and agreement document with Labour.  All three parties would not let National Standards continue.  No more National Standards!

So once again, Chris Hipkins, thank you very much for saying that National Standards will not be a requirement in 2018.

However, what I'm not pleased about is that you will still allow schools to "choose" to use them as a tool.  

Schools who still want to use National Standards to report a child’s progress to parents can continue to do so – despite the Government saying they’d scrap them.  Education Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed National Standards would no longer exist, but any school that wanted to use them as a tool to report progress wouldn’t be forced to stop doing so.  “We’re going to require schools to report child progress against the curriculum.  What tools they use to do that is up to them.”  From National Standards will no long exist but schools can still use them - Chris Hipkins (Stuff, 14/11/17)

That just makes a mockery of your announcement.  When my principal heard this he was dismayed.  He thinks you have stumbled at the final hurdle and given BOTs the opportunity to continue this folly, overriding the teaching staff and principals.  

This is a man who was hanging out for a change of government prior to the election because he knows National Standards has not done his students or staff any favours over the years.

I'm also rather concerned by this line:  "We will take the next few months to work with the sector, students, parents, whanau and iwi to develop a new approach for understanding progress across the curricula that will meet their needs, and contribute to the education system supporting the success of all students."  (NZ Herald, 11/12/17 - as linked above).

During the election campaign, Mr Hipkins repeatedly said that there would be no replacement because we have a world leading curriculum which should inspire learning and be the baseline for assessment.  I am therefore concerned about the need to 'replace' National Standards.  I believe that Mr Hipkins is very sincere when he says he will work with the sector and relevant interest groups.  However, I believe he has forgotten why Finland had a successful education system and how it got it: by copying the world leading child centred education system New Zealand had prior to the formation of Tomorrow's Schools.

I've made the decision to step back into full time teaching in 2018.  I did this on the basis of having a Labour led coalition that was disposing of National Standards and returning our New Zealand Curriculum to the front and centre of our education landscape.

I will be watching this very carefully.   I will be advocating for my students, colleagues and the system.  I am not going to accept any neoliberal programme over the top of our world leading curriculum.  

Thank you Rod Emmerson for saying it how it really is!!

So Mr Hipkins, let's get that National Standards legislation repealed once and for all.  Let's ensure the New Zealand Curriculum is front and centre.  And let's ditch National Standards into the history books (aka rubbish bin).  Completely.  Nothing less will be acceptable.