Unemployed teachers make proposals

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32862, 10 March 1972, Page 10

Unemployed teachers make proposals

Suspension of overseas teacher recruitment and rigid enforcement of a mandatory retiring age for secondary school teachers were among recommendations made by a meeting in Christchurch last evening of unemployed secondary school teachers.

The group of 10 women and 11 men, mostly graduates from the secondary division of the Christchurch Teachers’ College, has called itself the Unemployed Teachers’ Association. It will seek affiliation with the New Zealand Post-Primary Teachers’ Association. The meeting expressed a general dissatisfaction with the requirements of the teaching bond and sought to have part-time teaching recognised in this regard. Service in private schools should also be counted as time towards the teacher certificate and if teachers were unable to get a job after genuinely trying to do so, then the time spent in this quest should be credited to their bond requirements, the meeting decided.

The department was claimed to be condoning waste of teaching skills if it did not make use of the young teachers represented. One method of using the group would obviously be to introduce team teaching in more classrooms. Copies of the meeting’s recommendations will be sent to the Minister of Education (Mr Pickering), the chairman of the Christchurch Teachers’ College Council (Professor H. E. Field), the Labour Party spokesman on education (Mr P. A. Amos) and the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association.