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.

Hekia had 46 kids in her class and she was taught well - how would that go in today's classrooms?

On Sunday morning I woke up to this article in my Twitter feed, an opinion piece from Jonathan Milne titled: A good teacher can inspire anywhere - but small classes help (4/9/16, www.stuff.co.nz).

A read through soon showed me a bunch of out of date clichés, such as the outdated phrase "stop work meeting", but this one from Minister Hekia Parata was particularly galling:

"I went to Manutahi School in Ruatoria," she told me. "I got in touch with my old teacher there recently, and he told me there were 46 children in my class, and that wasn't the biggest class in the school. We got taught well."

This is a classic that is often thrown out by people who think they are experts in how school should be because they went to school.  My grandmother went to school in the 1920s and often told me she had 50 odd kids in her class.  But to know that the Minister of Education is saying this is horrifying because that shows she understands so little of what goes on in schools today and how teaching works.

Minister Parata is currently 57 years old (I checked, thanks Wikipedia) so began school I expect in November 1963 when she turned 5 years old.  Back then I assume it was not to dissimilar to when I started school in late 1978, wooden tables, wooden chairs.  As you moved through the school you got a wooden desk with the lift up lid and the hole where predecessors put their ink bottles, and an incredibly uncomfortable wooden chair.  My teacher had our class sitting in our year groups.  Maybe Hekia's teacher did too.  Maybe her teacher had them lined up in rows.

Today I walk into a class and there are not enough desks and chairs for all the students - on purpose.  In a modern learning environment, students do not necessarily have to sit at the desk.  They may be on cushions on the floor or standing at a standing desk, all their possessions stored in a cubby or tote tray.

I just thought though after reading Mr Milne's opinion piece that Ms Parata needed a reminder of what having 46 students in a class today would be like - she needed a reality check.  So I tweeted her, 34 times, to get my thoughts across.

So let's look at what is different from the 1960s when Hekia was at primary school to 50 years later when my first nephew started school, following by another nephew and niece.  Let's compare their realities to Hekia's golden memories of her school days.

Well first of all, the biggest change, is we have a lot of assessment now compared to the 1960s and we have National Standards which means more reporting and graphs and stuff and it's all very intense compared to what Hekia's teacher did 50 years ago when s/he was teaching Hekia.  And I did a bit of maths to explain this.

Running records to assess reading were not around when Hekia began school.  But imagine if her teacher had to do 46 quality accurate running records for 46 students.  I estimated, conservatively, that this would take up more than a week of teaching time.

Then there is gathering writing samples.  The assessment and moderation with colleagues could eat up at least a week of teaching time if you all had 46 kids, because that would be 138 assessments to moderate.  And some schools expect you to do this twice a term, which would be up to two weeks of teaching time to do a quality assessment of a student's writing ability.

I reckon it would take at least another week to get through 46 kids to do either the full Numeracy assessment or JAM or Gloss accurately on every child... plus the time to monitor an IKAN assessment and mark and level those.

Plus there are the administration of assessments like spelling, basic facts, Burt Word Test, PATs, STAR, and possibly e-asTTle for triangulation purposes and the time to mark and level all these assessment and record the data in a Student Management System (SMS) along with the data from the reading, writing and maths.  That is at least another week of teaching time.  And don't tell me PaCT will make life easier Hekia, because that will still be just as time consuming and an 'add on' rather than an 'instead of'.

So far I think we have racked up four weeks of quality assessment of 46 students (conservatively) taking up important learning time.  Who is going to release a teacher for four weeks to do assessment every term?  Imagine trying to get quality assessment for that many students AND manage the class learning and behaviour at the same time!!

So times for some times tables.  If it takes me four weeks every term to get the assessment done for 46 students, that would be 4x4=16 weeks over the year of assessing instead of teaching.  A teaching year is roughly 40 weeks, so 40-16=24, so that is only 24/40 weeks used for learning and teaching to get my 46 students to the Standard.

Here is some more maths, putting those weeks into actual days:  I have 200 (approximately) real whole days to teach.  If I am assessing for 5x16=80 days and only teaching for 120 then I am using up 60% of my time with these children on assessment.  It should only be 10% maximum.

Now I have already mentioned that a teacher has to input the data collected on the SMS for their school.  But there is a heap of other stuff you have to consider would get bigger if they have 46 students: there is collating the data, report writing, planning, updating records, PaCT (if you get it past the gate, but that is another story)...

Then there are the meetings.  Teachers are always going to have staff, syndicate, curriculum and appraisal meetings, but do not forget about the meetings they have with parents and caregivers, RTLBs, RTLits, Special Education staff, speech language therapists (if you can get one!), and other outside agencies.  Several years ago my class of 19 Year 4-8 students had six students with special education needs - Downs Syndrome, Global Development Delays, Dyslexia - a third of my class and this is not unusual in many other classes!  With 46 students I would estimate 15 students would have special learning needs - that is a lot of meetings with parents and supporting agencies and a lot of writing and assessing of IEPs.

Hattie, Hekia's favourite academic, argues that class size is irrelevant and quality feedback is what counts.  So I am supposed to give all 46 students quality feedback every day.  Good luck with that!  When will I have time to develop my relationships with them, develop trust and know their little quirks and what they need when I have 46 students at once?  How do I support the wellbeing of 46 individuals?  How fair is that on the students?

Speaking of wellbeing, let's talk about the wellbeing of teachers.  Teachers are wilting under the workload of their current classes.  Imagine the chaos of teachers collapsing under the workload of 46 students.  Imagine the damage to their mental health, let alone the damage to their relationships with family and friends. 

In December 2012 a mental health worker told me she had seen five teachers that last week alone.  It's progressively becoming a bigger issue.  Every week I see posts on NZ Teachers of people who are over worked and worn out, seeking support or claiming they are leaving the profession due to the workload.  Personally, I am happier not to be doing the workload this year - studying is hard enough.  We are losing great teachers out of the profession because the workload has become what two teachers should be doing - yet you think we could have 46 in a class!

So how will one of your Teach First NZ teachers with their eight weeks of intensive training to be a teacher cope with 46 students in their class Hekia?

So back to the classroom furniture we talked about earlier.  Most schools struggle to fit 30 students and their associated desks and chairs into a standard classroom, let alone 46 students!  And I'm not sure that you noticed Hekia that kids are generally bigger than what they were 50 years ago, so fitting 46 students in would be a big challenge.... but I guess you will solve that with Communities of Online Learning, aye Hekia.

Ultimately, you need to remember that the teaching conditions of a teacher are the learning conditions of a child.  So if we flipped all of these arguments to the child's view, it means less individual time with the teacher, as teacher who is not teaching as much, too many assessments, lost in a crowd of other students and having a teacher who is stressed out to the max.

And this is what Global Funding could present to our schools.

But that's ok according to Hekia.  She was in a class of 46 and she was taught well.

Thanks to the fabulous cartoonists of New Zealand for the illustrations.  Hekia is giving you a lot of material, that's for sure.  Love your work.