One in five secondary teacher vacancies unable to be filled - survey

Secondary school principals say they are getting more applicants for teaching jobs, but many are not good enough.

They also told the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) annual staffing survey the shortage of teachers forced a quarter of respondents to cancel courses or offer them via Te Kura the Correspondence School.

The union said the responses from 155 principals collected early in term 1 this year showed schools were still in a staffing crisis.

It said this year's results were better than recent years, but still among the worst it had recorded.

Respondents said 23 percent of their vacancies had no suitable applicant and 28 percent had only one suitable applicant.

A third had no suitable New Zealand-trained applicants and a further third had only one.

One in five vacancies could not be filled at all and eight percent were filled by people without teaching qualifications.

Nearly half the respondents said they now had untrained people working as teachers because they could not find qualified teachers, down from last year's high of 57 percent.

PPTA president Chris Abercrombie told RNZ the results showed schools were overly reliant on unqualified teachers at the same time as they were trying to deal with once-in-a-generation changes to the curriculum and qualification.

"We're increasingly relying on unqualified and untrained teachers to fill the gaps," he said.

"That's bad enough at the best of times but when we're dealing with once-in-a-generation curriculum and assessment change where we need our teachers ground in pedagogy, grounded in qualifications, grounded in curriculum; it's a real concern."

Abercromie said schools would find the changes very difficult and middle-managers would be under a lot of pressure to support untrained teachers.

"Otherwise, it's going to be an absolute nightmare for our schools," he said.

Abercrombie said too few people were training to be teachers.

"Overseas-trained teachers have been absolutely vital to our system, but they take a lot of time to upskill," he said.

"We're going to have this continual shortage until we have a government that is serious about supporting teachers."

The survey found the number of applicants for vacancies was one of the highest on record, but the vast majority were from overseas - the number of New Zealand-trained applicants was one of the lowest on record at 2.9 per vacancy.

It also found just half of the New Zealand applicants were judged to be suitable, lower than recent year's figure of 60-66 percent and one of the lowest figures on record.

"This could be a one-year as was the case in 2006 or it could be a worrying new trend," the survey report said.

One of the respondents observed that the quality of New Zealand-trained applicants was not high.

"The number of high-quality academic staff, those who can teach to scholarship level, is becoming fewer," they said.

"It is a concern that those people are not coming into the profession. The standard of student teachers has been disappointing for the last two-three years."

Other comments included in the survey showed some principals had no difficulty hiring teachers, but others were finding it hard.

"The teaching shortage is dire," said one.

"We are a low equity index Auckland school with an excellent reputation and struggle to get staff. I would hate to be principal of some other schools that are isolated or with high equity indexes," said another.

"There is a chronic shortage of quality secondary teachers. While the number of applicants can look healthy, many many applicants are unsuitable," said a principal.

"We are blessed with stable staffing and suitable applicants when we do need to advertise," said another respondent.