GRADING OF TEACHERS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27125, 22 August 1953, Page 2

GRADING OF TEACHERS

ARBITRARY CHANGE PROPOSED

MR A. E. LAWRENCE’S SUGGESTION

The Minister of Education (Mr R. M. Algie) should arbitrarily impose on teachers the new scheme of appointment and promotion which the profession recently rejected by national referendum, in the opinion of Mr A. E. Lawrence, chairman of the appointments committee of the Canterbury Education Board. . “Numerical grading has been tried and found wanting; it is time it was wiped out.” he said at the board meeting yesterday morning. “I don’t think it is in the interest of the community that one section, who are employed by the State, should have the decision in this matter. There was a lot of support for the new scheme, and there are 41,000 reasons why the present system should be abandoned and those reasons are the children in our schools. “It is time the Minister himself took this thing by the neck and told teachers: ‘You are our employees. There’s the new system. Try it out,’ ” Mr Lawrence said. * Thousands of taxpayers had a direct interest in this matter, Mr Lawrence said. Teachers’ salaries cost the Canterbury board alone £1,026,000 annually. “I think the people who provide this money should have some say in how things are run,” Mr Lawrence added.

The appointments committee was continually, or at least very often, obliged to make appointments of square pegs in round holes, he said. There should be greater discretion allowed. “Yet we are to continue this fantastic numerical grading, because no Minister has yet had the pluck to take hold of the thing,” Mr Lawrence sqid. There was no board discussion, the chairman (Mr S. J. Irwin) remarking that the Minister had promised that he would make no change without consulting teachers. “FLEXIBLE SYSTEM WANTED” SCHOOL COMMITTEE’S VIEW There was an urgent need for a new system of grading and selecting teachers for posts in which children were given first consideration, said the chairman of the v Ham School Committee (Mr T. C. Williams) and the vicechairman of the committee (Mr C. A. Trethowan) last evening when they expressed pleasure at remarks by Mr A. E. Lawrence at a meeting of the Canterbury Education Board yesterday. Mr Lawrence had urged Ministerial intervention to introduce a new scheme of grading and selecting teachers for posts. Messrs Williams and Trethowan said that to give continuity to a school and security to children a grading system should be flexible. The Education Department and board should have power to allow a teacher to remain at a school where necessary. They said that they recognised that teachers’ interests should be protected, but not at the expense of the children. The present system was throwing schools out of gear, they said. At Ham 11 of the teachers, including the headmaster and infant mistress, would move between now and the beginning of the new school year. Not all of these movements, they added, were attributable to grading, but they considered that the system should be flexible enough to hllow a headmaster to be retained.