Fact checking the Minister’s announcement regarding “strengthening initial teacher education and workforce governance”

Yesterday, the Minister of Education announced her intent to “strengthen initial teacher education and workforce governance”, by bringing professional standards and oversight for “teacher training” directly under the Ministry. She justifies this decision as follows: “We are firmly committed to backing teachers to succeed in the classroom. Multiple reports show initial teacher education is not doing that. It’s letting teachers and students down”. The Minister continues her justification, “The teaching workforce deserves a regulator that they can trust”. She proposes to ensure this by moving “all professional standard setting functions for ITE and the teaching workforce … to the Ministry of Education”. She details the steps required as

1. Immediately providing for seven ministerially appointed members and six elected members, removing the requirement for a teacher educator-elected representative.

2. In future, reducing its size from 13 members to between seven and nine members to ensure stronger governance and professional capability. The requirement for representative electives will remain with one from each of the early childhood education sector, the primary education sector, and the secondary education sector.

The Minister argues that “The first proposal is a small addition to the Education and Training Amendment Bill (No.2) currently before Parliament and is expected to come into effect in November 2025” and that “the second step is expected to be progressed in 2026”. The Minister concludes that “the proposed changes bring the Teaching Council’s governance model in line with other regulatory bodies, such as the Nursing Council of New Zealand”.

Let’s fact check the Minister’s justifications for her proposed changes.

1. Initial teacher education is letting teachers and students down

So far as we can tell, the “multiple reports” on ITE’s failure that the Minister is referring to are the following:

‘Who teaches the teachers?’ – This opinion piece was published in 2023, and written by Michael Johnston (former head of the Minister’s Ministerial Advisory Group) and Stephanie Martin for right-wing think tank, the NZ Initiative. The report asserts what the authors see as ideal ITE settings, and draws conclusions based on their opinions.

FACT: The report includes conclusions drawn from a cursory survey of university-based ITE providers’ web-based course information. Such information provides only a short summary of the focus of each course, often, no more than a sentence. The “report” makes a case for “policy settings enabling private providers to operate more freely” in ITE provision (p. 29).

‘Ready, set, teach: How prepared and supported are new teachers?’ – This report was published in May 2024 by the Education Review Office. A One News article published yesterday, cites the Minister as saying that “Last year, the Education Review Office found nearly two-thirds of principals believed new teachers were unprepared”.

FACT: This study involved a survey of a self-selected sample of 7.5 percent of new teachers, 278 principals (also self-selected), and interviews with 23 teachers, four school leaders, and four mentor teachers. There are many other issues with this report, including its obvious bias and inaccurate representation of data, but the study methodology means that the data presented is not generalisable to all principals or all new teachers. In other words, the report can only be read as providing insights into the perspectives of these particular participants – not robust evidence about the quality of ITE in general.

TALIS 2024: TALIS findings for New Zealand – This report describes the initial findings for New Zealand from the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS 2024). The findings of the TALIS survey are summarised on Education Counts, which notes that, while the sample of teachers surveyed was broadly representative, in 2024, New Zealand struggled to reach the OECD’s participation targets, and therefore the results needed to be treated with caution. New Zealand Year 7-10 teachers with less than five years’ experience rated their feelings of preparedness significantly below the OECD average in all areas apart from “teaching in a multicultural or multilingual setting” (TALIS 2024, p. 62). Year 1-6 teachers with less than five years’ experience rated their feelings of preparedness equivalent to the OECD average in the area of “general pedagogy”, and (like Year 7-10 teachers), more highly than the OECD average in “teaching in a multicultural or multilingual setting” (p. 63). The report authors note that “Teachers with five or fewer years’ experience were less likely to report that their first teaching qualification left them feeling prepared for teaching their subject compared to their more experienced colleagues”, and that “this, and a concurrent decrease across the OECD, suggests that COVID-19 disruptions may have negatively impacted learning opportunities for newer teachers” (p. 4). Notably, in the New Zealand context, the TALIS survey would also have coincided with a period of major and ongoing curriculum change. The report notes that a third of Year 7-10 teachers and a quarter of Year 1-6 teachers reported higher levels of stress than the OECD average, and that “for teachers, keeping up with curriculum changes was a notable source of stress” (p. 4).

FACT: The TALIS report suggests some areas where ITE providers are preparing new teachers more effectively to teach than was previously the case. Recently qualified New Zealand teachers were more likely than more experienced New Zealand teachers “to report feeling prepared to teach in a multicultural or multilingual environment, to use digital resources and tools for teaching, to integrate the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in their teaching, and to affirm the language, culture, and identity of students in their class” (TALIS 2024, p. 60). Also, the newest teachers (who qualified in 2020-2024) were more likely than all other groups to report feeling prepared to support students’ social and emotional development (pp. 60-61).

Conclusion: Assuming these reports are the basis for the Minister’s claims, the evidence she relies on is weak. The first is an opinion piece, and provides no grounds for claims that ITE is “letting the workforce down”. The second is based on a study which simply cannot be generalised to the sector due to methodological limitations. While the third does raise questions about new teachers’ feelings of preparedness, feelings are only a proxy for preparedness, and the report also points to contextual challenges shaping ITE in 2024. The Minister’s statements ignore the nuance of the TALIS data, and the evidence it suggests of the harmful effects of constant curriculum change on the ITE workforce (and by implication, ITE).

2. The teaching workforce deserves a regulator that they can trust.

The Minister has presented no evidence to support the implication that the sector does not trust the Teaching Council to act as the independent regulator of the profession. Equally, the Minister has presented no evidence to suggest that the Ministry of Education is a regulator that the sector can or would trust. The Ministry of Education is required to operate according to the expectations of the Minister. The Teaching Council is required to have regard to any statement of government policy by the Minister. This means that the Teaching Council may disagree with the Minister, while the Ministry of Education may not. This proposal appears to be based on a recommendation from unelected individuals, such as Michael Johnston and the NZ Initiative. Notwithstanding the constrained autonomy of the Teaching Council under current legislation, the Minister’s proposals would significantly increase her influence over it.

FACT: The Minister’s proposal is similar to one made in 2024. At the time, the proposed changes were rejected because 86 percent of respondents opposed them.

Conclusion: The Minister has given the teaching sector no grounds for trust in her intent in changing the regulatory frameworks for ITE and the wider teaching workforce, or in the Ministry of Education as a regulatory body. Based on the 2024 consultation process outcome, the proposed changes run counter to the will of the sector.

3. The proposed changes bring the Teaching Council’s governance model in line with other regulatory bodies, such as the Nursing Council of New Zealand.

Shifting the Teaching Council’s regulatory functions to be functions of the Ministry of Education would be at odds with arrangements for most other independent statutory professional bodies, including Law (New Zealand Council of Legal Education), Medicine (Te Kaunihera Rata o Aotearoa Medical Council of New Zealand), Accountancy (Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand), Dentistry (Dental Council Te Kaunihera Tiaki Niho), Engineering (Engineering New Zealand Te Ao Rangahau) and Psychology (Te Poari Kaimātai The Psychologists Board).

Shifting the Teaching Council’s regulatory functions to become functions of the Ministry of Education would be at odds with arrangements for other professional scopes of practice and professional bodies listed in Schedule 2 to the Health Practitioner Competency Act 2003 (Chiropractic Board, Dietitians Board, Medical Radiation Technologists Board, Medical Sciences Council of New Zealand, Nursing Council of New Zealand, Occupational Therapy Board, Optometrists and Dispensing Opticians Board, Physiotherapy Board, Podiatrists Board).

Shifting the Teaching Council’s regulatory functions to become functions of the Ministry of Education would also be at odds with the relationship between Government and professional bodies that do not fall under the HPCA (Kāhui Whakamana Tauwhiro Social Workers Registration Board, Te Kāhui Kaiwhakatikatika Reo Kōrero o Aotearoa New Zealand Speech Language Therapists Association, New Zealand Association of Counsellors Te Roopu Kaiwhiriwhiri o Aotearoa).

The proposed legislative change would facilitate direct political interference in ITE, diminishing both the status of the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand, and the status of teaching and teachers in Aotearoa. Notably, the proposed legislative change is also at odds with other parts of the Act for university-based staff, who, under 268 (2) (i) (E) of the Education and Training Act 2020, are required to accept “a role as critic and conscience of society” . The Act (2) (ii) (A) notes that universities are “characterised by a wide diversity of teaching and research … that maintains, advances, disseminates, and assists the application of knowledge, develops intellectual independence, and promotes community learning”. University-based ITE staff have played, and continue to play, a vital role informing the work of the Ministry of Education, generating research evidence to guide the work of the Ministry, and monitoring curriculum outcomes. The proposed legislative change is political overreach. It would facilitate direct political interference in the setting, approval and review of standards for ITE and for the teaching workforce more broadly; allow the Ministry of Education to override and ignore evidence generated by university-based educational researchers; and thereby risk undermining the integrity of the wider education system.

Diverse groups are currently represented within the governance and staffing of the Teaching Council. The Council’s relative statutory independence from government and the Ministry of Education enables the Council to adopt critical, independent, evidence-informed and sector-informed positions on the requirements for professional teaching and professional teacher education and ensures a level of system-wide stability in the face of government change.

FACT: The Minister’s proposal would not bring the “Teaching Council’s governance model in line with other regulatory bodies”. Rather, it would undermine the professional status of teachers by making the profession directly accountable to the Ministry of Education and therefore to direct political control.

Conclusion: In our view, a key role of the Ministry of Education is to oversee teacher workforce strategy (supply and retention). The Ministry’s apparent failure to develop and implement a workforce strategy over many years (if not decades) gives us no confidence that it would have the capability or capacity to undertake the proposed transferred functions.

So what do we think is really going on?

We are struck by the timing of this announcement. On the back of a curriculum release that has engendered serious critique from university-based academics and educational professionals, the Minister’s announcement reads as a move to tighten her personal “command and control” over teachers as public servants, despite her increasingly hollow public claims to want to work alongside and support them. The Minister’s justifications just don’t stack up. There is a lot at stake here: the professional status of the teaching and ITE workforce; the freedom to scrutinise and critique government policy (including curriculum and curriculum development processes) with respect to its evidence base and alignment with human rights and legal frameworks; and the maintenance of a robust, public education system, grounded in actual evidence, not empty assertions and manufactured crises.

Reference

Alcorn, N. (2015). Between the profession and the state: A history of the New Zealand Teachers’ Council. NZCER Press