Secondary School Pupils “Deprived”

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31763, 21 August 1968, Page 26

Secondary School Pupils “Deprived”

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, August 20.

The effect of the critical shortage of teaching staff, both numerical and qualitative, was that the entire present generation of the New Zealand secondary school population was suffering educational deprivation of dismaying proportions, said the president of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers’ Association (Mr A. H. Scotney) in his address to the annual conference today.

Mr Scotney said the chief reasons that some 500 teachers resigned from secondary’ teaching last year had been given as the excessive work load, too-large classes, and low salaries.

“In some schools basic courses which ought to be available (e.g. School Certificate science) are not available because of lack of qualified staff to teach them,” he said.

’ln other schools courses are restricted because of lack of textbooks. Thousands of our pupils are being poorly taught, inadequately taught, or not taught at all. “And this only partly touches on the great problem of the non-academic third of our secondary-school population, commonly called our slower streams, for whom the basically academic type of education we offer is quite un suited.

“For most of them the recent changes in the School Certificate examination will have no significance, because they never had and still will not have any intention of sitting for School Certificate,” said Mr Scotney. Badly Supplied “We are ill equipped and badly supplied both in staff end materials; so ill equipped

and so badly supplied in fact, that the numbers of secondary teachers who see the task of matching further needs against present resources as impossible of achievement have steadily increased.” Out of a total entitlement of more than 6000 teachers —based on staffing schedules now 20 years old—there were more than 400 teachers who ought not to be employed in New Zealand’s schools, because they were either inadequate, inadequately qualified, unsuitable or totally unqualified, he said. Not The Staff “Faced with the necessity of improving the level of attainment of our secondary school pupils, which might possibly be most readily achieved by raising the school-leaving age, we have to admit that at present we simply haven’t the staff to do it.”

Mr Scotney said some 500 teachers resigned from secondary teaching last year, twothirds of them in their first five years of teaching, and about 60 per cent of them with at least a bachelor’s degree. “At the present time, the secondary teaching force has

an annual turnover rate of one in six,” he said. The first step that had to be taken was to stop the crippling losses of young teachers.

Mr Scotney, commenting on recent discussions between the association and the Department of Education on class-size reductions, said a greater measure of agreement had been achieved than seemed possible only a month or two ago.