Mike's Minute: Public support could be tipping away from teachers

As the teachers maybe, maybe not accept their pay offers and maybe, maybe not go on strike yet again, I can't help but worry about the new recruits. 

We were busy celebrating just last week, enrolments to become teachers have gone up markedly – big, big increases. 

This seems, on the surface anyway, to in part be a solution to a long-term problem, i.e. our permanent shortage in a profession that has lost its lustre. 

I am not against migration to solve issues, but there is a balance to be struck and you would like to think that the profession is actually staffed by people who like what they do, and not a pile of recent arrivals whose main criteria for being in a New Zealand classroom was to be in the country, not the job itself. 

So, lots of new recruits, good. But once out the other side, what awaits them, and does it look like the ongoing industrial mess that pervades our work landscape at the moment? 

Do these recruits know what they will get paid? What their conditions are? Do they know what actually teaching in a New Zealand classroom in 2025 entails and looks like? 

Because somewhere between the enthusiasm of enrolment and the jaded misery of experience a decade on, something dramatically goes wrong. 

The money seems decent —not spectacular, but decent— the same way it seems decent for nurses and doctors. 

It seems to me we have got to a point where no small amount of energy, money, and change has been put into education, and between that and the pay, it’s not a bad deal. 

Yes, it's challenging, given kids and their issues. Yes, you'd like more specialist teachers, or non-contact time, or whatever, but negotiations are quin pro quo. 

The rises we have seen in recent years, the change currently being implemented to turbo charge performance by way of results, seems to be setting us up for a decent sort of system producing a decent sort of outcome. 

Is it the unions that are wrecking this? Are they really the impediment? Do most teachers just want to get on with it?  

We seem at a place where the public support is most certainly not what it was for the teachers' plight, and might just be tipping against them. 

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