 Flagging the snags
PPTA News November 2009, p. 12
The Teachers Council is consulting the profession on some proposals for changes in teacher registration.
Matters of concern
1. What is a “teaching position”?
The biggest issue in the consultation is a proposal to revise the council’s definition of “a teaching position”. The revised wording says it, “Involves holding the prime responsibility for the planning, implementation, assessment, evaluation and reporting of a sequential programme of learning (sustained, full cycle of teaching and learning, length to be determined)” and “enables appraisal against all the Satisfactory Teacher Dimension/ Registered Teacher Criteria”.
The problem is that neither the previous definition nor this proposal is sufficiently flexible to cover all the non-standard roles that secondary teachers hold now and may hold in the future. For example, it appears to not apply to guidance counsellors, careers advisors, resource teachers learning and behaviour (RTLBs), even non-teaching senior managers.
It is simply not going to do the job. These people have been appointed to teaching positions, and can’t be just removed from them by the Teachers Council redefining what a teaching position is.
2. Categories of registration
The council is also proposing to make a new distinction between registration and holding a practising certificate. It suggests three categories of full practising certificate: in a teaching position, “in transition”, or “allied teacher”, i.e. working in a learning institution but not in a teaching position.
PPTA’s concern about this is that although the council suggests that the teaching practitioner role could include professional leaders and resource teachers, despite the fact that they may well not do any classroom teaching, “some guidance counsellors” (presumably the teaching qualifi ed ones, which is the vast majority) appear likely to be relegated to the “allied teacher” practising certifi cate category.
Why there should be a distinction made among these groups is not clear. For a perspective on the signifi cant contribution that guidance counsellors make to the development of the key competencies in the New Zealand Curriculum, read an article by Colin Hughes, HoD guidance at Trident High School.
3. What is recent teaching experience?
Another proposal that may concern teachers is to change the definition of “recent teaching experience” for the purposes of maintaining a full practising certifi cate, currently two years in the last five, to a more demanding requirement of one year in the last three. The council’s argument for this is around the speed of change in education and the need to be assured that a person with a full practising certificate is up to date. Someone re-entering teaching after a period of over two years would be placed in the “subject to confirmation” category, in today’s parlance, or the “transitional” category if the proposal discussed above was adopted, and would then have a reduced period of “advice and guidance” before being recommended for a full practising certifi cate again.
4. How long should a teacher be provisionally registered?
A less contentious proposal is to limit provisional registration to three years, with a right to apply for a further three years if the beginning teacher is “making satisfactory progress towards meeting all of the Satisfactory Teacher Dimension/ Registered Teacher Criteria”.
This would mean that someone who failed to achieve full registration after six years, or was making insufficient progress towards it after three, would have to leave the teaching profession. Teachers may be surprised to learn that for some years now, due to a glitch in writing the legislation that set up the Teachers Council, there has been no upper limit on the time a teacher could stay provisionally
 Download PPTA submission to Teachers Council
PPTA News November 2009
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