SECOND TEACHERS’ COLLEGE

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29264, 23 July 1960, Page 7

SECOND TEACHERS’ COLLEGE

Board Member's Suggestion A second teachers’ college “somewhere in Canterbury” was the only solution to the present problem of shortage of teachers, said Mr R. K. Milne at yesterday’s meeting of the Canterbury Education Board. Promising students had been “turned down” in Christchurch last year—a very serious matter —to which the board should draw the Education Department’s attention, Mr Milne said. The board was discussing what Mrs C. C. Holland described as “the head-in-the-sand attitude” of the Education Department to the shortage of teachers. Mrs Holland said she was not prepared to accept without further protest a recent assurance to the board from the Education Department that “everything possible” was being done to meet present and future demands for more teachers, in both primary and post-primary schools, when the “smaller classes” policy was implemented. The department’s own figures, quoted in a White Paper last year, showed that 3255 more teachers would have to be trained in the next eight years to preserve the status quo. “The increase this year, over the whole of New Zealand, was

between 50 and 60,” Mrs Holland said. “An increase of 400 is necessary, not 50 or 60.”

“We have been talking about this question of extra accommodation in Christchurch over the last five or six years. It has been really thrashed,” said Mr E. F. Wilde. “It just doesn’t look as if they want to put up another college in Canterbury.” “We’ve been sitting back hoping that a certain property would be made available and expecting that to solve all our problems—but it won’t,” said Mr G. C. Warren. “We should get an objective, and go for it as hard as we can —what we feel is necessary for the size of another establishment,” Mr Warren said. “We should hammer away at it every month, if necessary, until the people responsible for Government take some notice.”