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Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa
First of all, before I begin my speech to you, I want to refer to the sad loss of two special people from our PPTA fraternity in the last year.
Bernadette Childerhouse was a long-time PPTA activist and a member of our executive for a number of years, and Sammi Saili was our financial services manager in National Office. Both were held in high regard.
As a mark of respect, I ask everyone to stand for a minute’s silence in memory of these two people. Thank you.
Welcome
Welcome to our delegates from far and near! I trust you have had a happy experience getting here and that you will continue to have a positive experience now that you have arrived, renewing old friendships and meeting new people.
And I am especially pleased to see so many of our younger teachers here today. We all know that our profession is undergoing generational change, so it is critical in a democratic organisation that the voice of young teachers is strongly represented in decision-making.
You will note that I offered hope of a positive experience rather than a happy one. That is because the issues that we have to grapple with here today, tomorrow and the next day will be anything but easy.
It is my fervent hope however that when we all leave here on Thursday afternoon it will be with a particular conviction – the conviction that we have utilised the potential of this pre-eminent decision-making body of PPTA to good effect.
I would like us to be clear about what we want to do about the difficult issues that beset secondary education today. Having said that, I am sure we will not neglect to enjoy each other’s company in the process!
As usual at annual conference we will be taking the opportunity to deliberate as members of a somewhat exclusive group – practising secondary teachers. Many have tried it and found it too hard. Many claim expertise in it though they have long left the classroom. Others have never done it but consider themselves qualified to pass judgement.
We who are gathered in this room today are charged with representing the interests of our 18,000 members. We are the people who can speak with credibility and authority on behalf of secondary teachers.
Motivation
So what is it that keeps you in the classroom in spite of the workload, the daily challenges and frustrations that are not always balanced by our experience of professional achievement? The answer, I think, is motivation.
As you know there are two types of motivation – extrinsic and intrinsic. While both are important, intrinsic motivation is what I want to talk about. In doing this I am indebted to Gerald van Waardenberg from Auckland who drew my attention to a TED presentation on the science of motivation.
This is from writer Dan Pink, perhaps best known as Al Gore’s chief speech writer. He describes a psychological experiment where people are given a candle, matches and a box of tacks and they have to work out how to attach the candle to the wall above the table, in such a way that no wax will be spilled on the table.
After five or ten minutes, people work out that they can take the tacks out of the box, attach the box to the wall, and set the candle in the box. They find it hard to solve the problem due to “functional fixedness” (the number of times I have had to practise that phrase!). Most of us do not immediately see that the box could be used for more than just containing the tacks.
Experiments were conducted with two groups who were asked to solve this problem. One group was timed to establish a norm for how long it would take to solve it. The other group was offered a financial reward for doing it as quickly as possible. Amazingly, on average this second group took longer! Pink says this surprising result has been replicated over 40 years.
In contrast, if the tacks were taken out of the box, essentially simplifying the problem and making it less necessary to think outside the square, the group with the financial reward solved the problem much faster.
What Pink is arguing is that there is a significant difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. For any sort of serious challenging problem we need to do things because they matter, because they are interesting and worthwhile and challenging. On the other hand, only if a problem is straightforward and can be solved by following a clear set of rules does a rewards-based approach work.
Pink describes intrinsic motivation as having three elements:
- autonomy
- mastery and
- purpose.
He argues that if you want real engagement, self-direction works best. Of course people need to be paid adequately and fairly to get the issue of money off the table, but then they must be trusted to do the job according to the dictates of their professional judgement.
Autonomy
How much autonomy, mastery and purpose do you have in your day-to-day life? How many faculty or staff meetings have you been to where the topic of discussion was how to increase teachers’ sense of autonomy, mastery and purpose? What’s the effect of national standards on autonomy, mastery and purpose?
These are rhetorical questions. The fact is we will continue to struggle to recruit teachers and will continue to burn out those we have - if we don’t recognise the importance of nurturing professional satisfaction and reducing the focus on compliance and narrow accountability measures.
There is too much mistrust and too little personal autonomy. There is too much compliance and not enough support and space for teachers to expand their professional mastery. There is too much direction and surveillance and not enough intellectual freedom and creativity. If you trust teachers and give them time and space, good things will result.
This is one of the reasons PPTA got involved with the curriculum support days. The NZC was never going to implement itself and despite the MOE’s naïve view that the outdated notion of “trickle down” would prevail, we knew that there was no actual source from which the “trickle down” was to originate. Teachers needed some space to work on developing a shared understanding of the document – and its impact on our practice.
We are well aware that the days operated differently from place to place. We are also aware that many teachers benefited from the collaborative process that the CSDs supported – and that confidence (if not mastery) has increased as a result.
Pink describes successful organisations as ones that trust employees and encourage intrinsic motivation. He gives the example of an engineering firm that has found it can generate great new ideas by giving workers a day every now and then and the freedom to work on their own projects, which they then present to their colleagues. Google comes up with many new developments because its staff are allowed to spend 20% of their time working on anything they want.
There is no better illustration of the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation than a comparison between the traditional, top-down, compliance-driven, managerialist approach Microsoft took to the establishment of Encarta, its internet encyclopedia, and the collaborative, inclusive and creative process that has characterised Web 3 technologies.
How is it that the movers and shakers who run education can understand the principle that students work better when they are supported and trusted to take charge of their own learning, but they cannot grasp that the same principle actually applies to adults and teachers as well?
Connections
We should be able to look to the education research community to lead the discussion about the connections between teacher motivation and student learning but this is not always the case.
Professor John O’Neill of Massey University reflects on this in a recent paper, entitled New Zealand research says teachers matter most: truth or ‘truespeak’? He points out that there is little completely independent or disinterested research done in New Zealand education. The Ministry of Education is all but the monopoly commissioner of educational research in this country, and research is closely tied to policy in which the funder has a vested interest. Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.
If we take that to its logical conclusion, when there is a shortage of research funding, researchers will tend to play safe and advance projects that are politically favoured and produce results that will be acceptable to the establishment.
O’Neill argues that researchers have a duty to ensure that their work is reported objectively and frankly, with due note taken of limitations in techniques and the influence of particular theories and ideologies. This is not always the case.
For example, he points out that Auckland University professor John Hattie’s claim that this country should look again at performance pay for teachers was not referenced at all in his book Visible Learning. It was simply a personal opinion, but the media presented the view as if it had research backing. It was up to the researcher to clarify this misrepresentation but to date that hasn’t happened.
The same media claim that class size was neither here nor there in terms of effective learning is a view which has been strongly challenged in a critique of Visible Learning done by academics from Massey University.
We agree with O’Neill when he recommends that educational researchers need to be more considered and cautious about research findings given that education is an area of complexity. Personally I worry that the hunt for funding dollars and media glory may be compromising the objectivity of education research.
O’Neill also notes that it is commonplace to see research commissioned with the specific instruction not to produce recommendations beyond suggestions for further research. Presumably, this avoids any political fallout should the findings prove embarrassing to the Ministry’s political masters. It makes sure there are no cost flow-ons. So we risk paralysis by analysis.
He is particularly scathing about the political agenda behind the claims from a multiplicity of Ministry-commissioned reports that hold teachers solely responsible for student achievement.
He says “Since the late 1990s, government and officials have argued that the quality of teaching is the key determinant of educational success or failure, particularly for those students who comprise New Zealand’s long tail of educational underachievement in international surveys”.
The trite and simplistic chorus of ‘teachers matter most’ comes from selective readings of the international research literature, apparently backed up by New Zealand studies funded by the Ministry of Education.
The notion that only teachers matter is of course false. Neurological research from the States has revealed that an impoverished childhood can have as much effect on the brain as a stroke. And New Zealand’s record in addressing poverty makes for grim reading.
A new OECD report Doing Better for Children deals with child wellbeing in its 30 member countries. New Zealand’s spending on children aged five and under is less than half the OECD average, and New Zealand is also struggling in health, with the OECD’s highest youth suicide rate and an above-average child mortality rate.
Our children live in poor material conditions and average family incomes are low by OECD standards. Teachers know that wider social inequalities have a bearing on how young people get on in school. New Zealand needs to do much more outside the school gate to ensure that kids are able to engage with learning.
The most disappointing thing about research that blames teachers and denies the role of the whole village in bringing up a child is that it perpetuates a false polarity. It isn’t a case of either/or - teacher effectiveness versus socio-economic effects – it’s both!
New Zealand kids have the right to grow up in a loving family, in a safe and healthy environment, not one blighted by poverty. They have the right to free education in a well-resourced state school where they are taught by committed, motivated and effective teachers. All of us need to focus on that goal and not absolve ourselves of responsibility by cleaving to one side of the debate.
It remains the case though that the effects of inequality are pervasive in society. Where income is more unequally shared, all sorts of problems are much worse: levels of violent crime, imprisonment rates, infant mortality, mental illness, obesity, teenage births, school drop-out rates, rates of illiteracy.
The evidence is marshalled in a book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better”. The book looks at 23 of the 50 richest countries in the world, countries with good information on inequality.
There is compelling evidence that a more equal society would help reduce problems in schools. This is a recurrent issue for us and one that is addressed in a number of our conference papers.
Conference papers
First, the paper entitled 80, 15, 5 percent deals with aspects of conduct problems and disorders. It resulted from the paper presented by the Hutt Valley and Wairarapa regions last year, which in part led to the Taumata Whanonga, the behaviour summit. The paper addresses concerns that sit within schools, as well as those that lie beyond schools in the community.
It needs to be recognised that dealing with difficult young people requires a range of government agencies to work together on the issues. This requires a sophisticated level of collaboration and leadership. Intervention needs to be as early as possible and PPTA is keen to see the implementation of programmes that have some evidence to back them up and to see that they are effectively coordinated by the various state agencies involved. We have high expectations of them, and their duty of care.
What constitutes our duty of care? This question lies at the heart of our paper Duty outside timetabled hours which was requested by members of conference last year. This paper attempts to put some processes and acceptable guidelines in place that will enable schools to function efficiently and teachers to have a decent existence as professionals. This will be important work.
As a profession we need to be mindful of how we look after those new to secondary teaching. We have a paper on housing affordability. Unlike our politicians for whom housing affordability is no problem because they can always “bill” the taxpayer, housing is perceived to be a problem by a significant number of our members.
Teachers just starting their career, or starting a family, or moving from a low-cost area to a high-cost area with little equity in the home, can find the challenge of accumulating a deposit pretty difficult. There are a number of proposals to improve the situation that conference will debate and decide on.
One particularly difficult and challenging issue about expectations of and within the education system is dealt with in the paper Integration or disintegration? We are mindful of the fact that we have members in integrated schools and I think this paper charts very fairly the unintended consequences of the integration process and how we arrived at the clearly unacceptable situation we are faced with today.
We certainly need to recognise that there is a clear disadvantage to the state school system in the way in which wealthy private schools are blatantly able to access taxpayer funding yet retain the label and privileges of being “independent”.
The profession, and indeed the country, must not shy away from open debate about the basic tenets on which our education system was founded. Let’s not avoid the real issues. The problem is not choice – it is ideological dogma.
How far away from those fundamental principles of Beeby, of the long, proud tradition of New Zealand beliefs in a free and fair education for all, have we drifted? How do we create a fairer, more just, more accessible and therefore more effective education system?
The paper Connected Secondary Schools highlights some of the issues schools face in the matter of working effectively across a number of institutions. There is a need for a way to be found for computers and internet access to be provided to the homes of pupils whose families cannot afford it. This idea has been welcomed by principals who note that the educational gap between rich and poor will only increase if the problem is not addressed.
Devolved school management, competition between schools and patchy levels of income have made it difficult for many schools to develop effective ICT networks. The report by Computers in Homes suggests that there are about 100,000 Kiwi homes that don’t have access to the Internet or cannot afford a computer. With students now doing research at home and students and schools already handling learning through the web, this problem is not going to go away.
The paper Mentoring for secondary teachers was developed by two key constituencies within PPTA. Maori teachers identified that someone in a supervisor-mentor-support role could work with individual teachers and could relate from a Maori perspective.
The Young and New Teacher network observed that every provisionally registered teacher has different needs and may operate in a range of contexts needing specific support.
Both needs come together in this paper. We seek to work with the Ministry to create some sort of best practice model of mentoring that suits the New Zealand context and so satisfies the needs of all teachers at any stage of their career.
We hope to be able to work with the government, boards and the community to make progress on the issues raised in these papers As a sector group representing over 90% of the secondary teachers, we expect our professional judgement to be valued.
It will be plain to everyone who knows anything much about our history as an organisation that no matter what government is in power we will be dedicating ourselves to the advance of secondary education and we will not be showing any interest in initiatives that take the sector backwards instead of forwards. In fact, we have on many occasions in the past found ourselves acting staunchly in defence of the sector and our students, and we will never make an apology for that.
ACE
I need to be clear that our exercise of professional judgement can also include saying no. And I am saying no to the cuts to ACE funding, and no to teacher staffing cuts.
Later in the conference we will be hearing from Maryke Fordyce, the president of CLASS. They have been running the campaign to stop night class cuts. We are backing this and I know many regions have been involved in the campaign. I believe that the government has misunderstood the importance of night classes to the economy and seriously underestimated the political consequences of this destructive policy.
The Minister may argue that her policy targets so-called hobby classes that people could afford to do and that she wants to emphasise a focus on literacy and numeracy.
The reality is there appears to be wholesale withdrawal from ACE provision in all but the highest socio-economic, urban areas, where the “hobby courses” will continue perhaps on a user pays basis. In rural and low socio-economic areas - where literacy and numeracy classes are most needed – the policy will have dire consequences. This is the unintended consequence of a policy that was not properly thought through in the first place and it is just common sense that it be reversed.
I remain totally unconvinced by the arguments for $13 million cuts to night classes when the government seems perfectly able to find money, even in a recession, to:
- subsidise polluters (around $400 million)
- fund private schools (around $35 million)
- return the SAS to Afghanistan (around 100 million)
- for boot camps and youth guarantees for private providers (around $50 million)
- to establish new schools not justified by roll growth to provide “choice”. (on-going property, staffing and operation funding charged to the state runs into hundreds of millions)
Staffing
When it comes to cutting front-line secondary staffing I have to point out that the Government chose to continue implementation of the 1 to 15 ratio in primary school at a cost of $100 million and against Treasury advice.
This is an educationally sound decision but they cannot expect to fund it by an equally unsound decision to increase student-teacher ratios in secondary schools, tamper with entitlement staffing, reduce non-contact time or any of other cost-cutting schemes the Ministry is currently working on. No school in New Zealand has more staff than it needs.
In recent paid union meetings, 98% of members voted in a secret ballot to oppose staffing cuts. This is a very clear steer.
We would, of course, rather work with the government towards thoughtful, considered and coherent change in education. That’s what’s best for principals, schools, teachers and students.
It is in the interests of beginning that process we have published the document Secondary Education and the Economic Crisis which calls on the government to develop a strategy for investing in secondary education so New Zealand is better placed to take advantage of the recovery.
Conclusion
Finally, I want to say this. Being your president is truly rewarding. I find it heartening to visit schools and branches all over the country and it is inspiring to see the wonderful things you are doing for your students and, with your other hat on, for our union. Meeting people involved in secondary schools reinforces my belief that our work as an organisation is critically important for teachers, for students and for public education. We really do stand for education.
Let us, as a conference, use the next three days to engage in honest and robust debate in order to reach wise decisions for the good of our profession.
Kia kaha
Kia maia
Kia manawanui
(Be strong, Be brave, Be stout-hearted)
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