Clearly, we are at an impasse with the Ministry of Education around negotiations, and we watch with interest as our secondary colleagues walk off the job this Wednesday. While there are plenty of counterarguments being made in the public arena, the facts are very simple.
The offers don’t even keep up with inflation, and our teachers are going backwards at a time when interest in the teaching profession is shrinking. Right here in the Waikato, we have only 84 student teachers in their final year at Waikato University, compared with more than 280 per year group a decade ago. That local drop mirrors the national picture, where first-time enrolments in Initial Teacher Education (ITE) have fallen by around 28% over the past 17 years. Back in 2014, enrolments sat in the mid-4,000, and in 2023 only 3,330 new domestic graduates completed their ITE qualification. The Ministry now projects that in 2025 just 2,120 domestically trained teachers will enter the workforce—hardly enough to replace the roughly 11% of teachers who leave the job each year.
The change is felt daily in schools. A decade ago, when we advertised teaching positions, we would receive 100 or more applications, with 40 of those from locally trained and qualified teachers. Now, we are lucky to get five. Our relievers’ pool is paper-thin, and too often classes are split just to cover the gaps.
It is simple: we lack both teachers and those training to become one. Unfortunately, the very public and often combative negotiations, along with headlines declaring our education system in “systemic failure”, have not helped to attract new people into the profession.
These negotiations are not just about salary. Teachers are leaving because the job has become unsustainable. Every day, teachers are expected to do more with less.
- Children arrive at school with increasingly varied and complex needs, and the resources to meet those needs have not kept pace.
- Not every school has a Learning Support Coordinator, and even where they exist, the scale of need far outweighs the help available.
- Teachers are often left to handle serious learning and behavioural challenges without adequate professional support.
- Many are even covering basic care needs, like toileting, because the system has failed to provide the specialised assistance our most vulnerable learners deserve.
- School readiness is declining, meaning teachers spend increasing amounts of time managing fundamental skills instead of focusing on learning.
When support systems fail, everything lands back on teachers. They are counsellors, social workers, nurses, speech therapists, behaviour specialists—and somewhere in between all that, they are supposed to be teachers.
Don’t get me wrong: I welcome improvements to our education system. But as we go about making changes, we need to send a far more positive message about what is, at its heart, a hugely rewarding job that most teachers still love. Yes, we are human—we get tired and run down by the end of a term and need time to recharge. Yes, we value our holidays and non-contact time. But the facts are stark: this is no longer a job that people are signing up for in the numbers we need, and the stats make that abundantly clear.
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