School brings staff out of retirement amid teacher shortage
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Loading... - Isabella Borja
- 01 Jun 2022
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A central Auckland school has asked a teacher to come out of retirement and move across the country to help deal with worsening staff shortages.
Newmarket Primary School principal Wendy Kofoed brought a former teacher 200km from Tauranga to Auckland to fill a 10-week vacancy at her primary school.
This is just one example of Auckland’s teacher shortage. Schools across the city are switching back to rostering students home because they don’t have enough teachers in classrooms.
“In Auckland, it’s really, really difficult to get any teacher, for permanent positions or even for fixed-term positions like maternity leave. We don’t seem to have this reserve of teachers as we did a year or so ago,” Kofoed said.
Kofoed said the number of staff sick with Covid in her school had increased since the first term.
“It is worse this time ... and we haven’t even hit winter yet.
“I had five people [isolating] last week and one of those was my office person. So at one stage, I was emptying the bins. The caretaker was out, and the office person was out, so you are sort of managing sickbay and you are managing classes,” she said.
Point Chevalier School principal and head of the Auckland Primary Principals Association, Stephen Lethbridge, said he had “definitely seen an increase in staff isolating” since term one.
“We have had about eight staff self-isolating in the first four weeks of term two and that is equivalent to the total number of all those we had isolating in the first term.
“Eight may not sound like a lot of people to be away but it is a marked increase in numbers since last term,” he said.
However, Vaughan Couillault, principal of Papatoetoe High School, said the issue was not an increase in Covid cases but a decrease in teachers.
“We used to have 15 relief teachers on our list of people who worked regularly for us. Now we have six,” he said.
“So once I have got six teachers away, and today I have eight teachers away, then I am done.”
Papatoetoe High School, along with Avondale College and Papakura High School, is rostering students to stay home to cope with the lack of teachers.
Couillault said the shortage was likely caused by a wave of teachers leaving the profession and heading overseas.
“People have left the country that would normally be in our profession. And we have had to backfill those positions with what would have been our relief teachers ... at a time when we have not been able to import staff,” he said.
Couillault does not see any quick solutions.
“This is still going to be a problem, I think, until Christmas at least,” he said.
Ministry of Education spokesperson Hira Gage said relief teachers were in high demand across Auckland.
“We know that schools, kura and early learning services in Auckland are dealing with high levels of sickness and absence at the moment, due to Covid and winter illnesses, which is also affecting the availability of relief teachers. Read More...
