Items discussed at the September 2017 meeting
Notes from the Senior Positions Advisory Committee meeting 15 September 2017
Issues raised by SPAC on behalf of senior leaders at its last meeting included:
• RTLB funding for year 11 is reverting to being back to contestable
• Long term primary and secondary principals are retiring.
• Charter schools
• BYOD and equity issues.
• Low estimations of GMFS by MoE
• Health and safety tension between being child/parent friendly and being safety conscious.
• Students double dipping in two courses with standard in common.
• Expectation that there is one standard offered in term 1 and 2 to avoid end of year pressure
• Student well-being and mental health issues overwhelming guidance counsellors.
• Novopay is refusing to pay for the additional role of house masters and acting-up if headmaster is away doing marketing. (PPTA will take up cases directly with Novopay.)
• Jason Ohler from US spoke in Auckland on digital citizenship. Recommended to other schools/ regions if they can get him.
• Senior leadership reorganisations – an HR topic for SPAC next year.
Surplus staffing
The main role of the senior leaders in a surplus staffing round is to pull all of the data together for the CAPNA (Curriculum and Pastoral Needs Analysis) to help the board make appropriate decisions. A spreadsheet tool is available from PPTA to assist you.
Things to know about surplus staffing
Communities of Learning (CoL)
PPTA's survey of teachers and leaders in CoL is now available:
Implementation of Communities of Leraning - practitioners' experiences (survey)
Advice from the survey:
- Take your time in moving towards being a CoL and in the development phase.
- Be very familiar with the resource material available.
- Do the consultation properly, widely and vertically and involve the teachers and the parent communities.
- Don’t make appointments too early and make sure the planning about how to integrate them well into the existing structures (including the SCT) has been done and that they are well understood by everyone in the school before you do so.
- Have an open and fair appointments process and include classroom and middle leadership representation.
Communities of Learning advice and resources
National Education Leaders Partnership(NELP) concerns about CoL
NELP has raised 7 particular concerns with minister in a recent meeting about CoLs:
- The pressure put on schools directly and indirectly to join CoL
- The lack of flexibility around leadership models
- The lack of flexibility around the achievement challenges
- Problems around the support, guidance and advice for schools
- Back fill for CoL positions
- The extra demands and expectations being placed on CoLs , which are still in the development phase.
- The lack of consultation with key stakeholders.
The Minister of Education was reasonably open to recognising some problems and possibly a need for some more flexibility and guidance and a ‘shared narrative’ about how it was going. She said they were not seeking to impose the system on schools that were not ready. (However, while schools may be being told they can sign up if they want to, they are still being offered new levels of support only if they are in a CoL.)
Meetings to be held for Across Community Teachers (ACTs), Within School Teachers (WSTs) and Specialist Classroom Teachers (SCTs)
PPTA will organise a series of two hour meetings around the country this term (term 4, 2017) and in term 1 of 2018 to bring together ACTs, WSTs and SCTs to discuss their role expectations and how they might work together.
Holiday pay investigation
PPTA is engaging with the Ministry of Education in the Holidays Act review programme currently. Record keeping systems will need to change to become compliant; this is an area which may affect the work of senior leaders as fixing up the employment records could fall under their area of responsibility.
Holidays Act compliance - School payroll
If you have issues you want raised at the next Senior Positions Advisory Committee meeting please contact your SPAC representative.
