{"id":506925,"date":"2026-07-02T22:39:14","date_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:39:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/506925\/"},"modified":"2026-07-02T22:39:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T22:39:14","slug":"one-in-five-secondary-teacher-vacancies-unable-to-be-filled-survey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/506925\/","title":{"rendered":"One in five secondary teacher vacancies unable to be filled – survey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Secondary school principals say they are getting more applicants for teaching jobs, but many are not good enough.<\/p>\n

They also told the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) annual staffing survey the shortage of teachers forced a quarter of respondents to cancel courses or offer them via Te Kura the Correspondence School.<\/p>\n

The union said the responses from 155 principals collected early in term 1 this year showed schools were still in a staffing crisis.<\/p>\n

It said this year’s results were better than recent years, but still among the worst it had recorded.<\/p>\n

Respondents said 23 percent of their vacancies had no suitable applicant and 28 percent had only one suitable applicant.<\/p>\n

A third had no suitable New Zealand-trained applicants<\/a> and a further third had only one.<\/p>\n

One in five vacancies could not be filled at all and eight percent were filled by people without teaching qualifications.<\/p>\n

Nearly half the respondents said they now had untrained people working as teachers<\/a> because they could not find qualified teachers, down from last year’s high of 57 percent.<\/p>\n

PPTA president Chris Abercrombie told RNZ the results showed schools were overly reliant on unqualified teachers at the same time as they were trying to deal with once-in-a-generation changes to the curriculum and qualification.<\/p>\n

“We’re increasingly relying on unqualified and untrained teachers to fill the gaps,” he said.<\/p>\n

“That’s bad enough at the best of times but when we’re dealing with once-in-a-generation curriculum and assessment change where we need our teachers ground in pedagogy, grounded in qualifications, grounded in curriculum; it’s a real concern.”<\/p>\n

\"Chris<\/p>\n

PPTA president Chris Abercrombie.<\/p>\n

Supplied<\/p>\n

Abercromie said schools would find the changes very difficult and middle-managers would be under a lot of pressure to support untrained teachers.<\/p>\n

“Otherwise, it’s going to be an absolute nightmare for our schools,” he said.<\/p>\n

Abercrombie said too few people were training to be teachers.<\/p>\n

“Overseas-trained teachers have been absolutely vital to our system, but they take a lot of time to upskill,” he said.<\/p>\n

“We’re going to have this continual shortage until we have a government that is serious about supporting teachers.”<\/p>\n

The survey found the number of applicants for vacancies was one of the highest on record, but the vast majority were from overseas – the number of New Zealand-trained applicants was one of the lowest on record at 2.9 per vacancy.<\/p>\n

It also found just half of the New Zealand applicants were judged to be suitable, lower than recent year’s figure of 60-66 percent and one of the lowest figures on record.<\/p>\n

“This could be a one-year as was the case in 2006 or it could be a worrying new trend,” the survey report said.<\/p>\n

One of the respondents observed that the quality of New Zealand-trained applicants was not high.<\/p>\n

“The number of high-quality academic staff, those who can teach to scholarship level, is becoming fewer,” they said.<\/p>\n

“It is a concern that those people are not coming into the profession. The standard of student teachers has been disappointing for the last two-three years.”<\/p>\n

Other comments included in the survey showed some principals had no difficulty hiring teachers, but others were finding it hard.<\/p>\n

“The teaching shortage is dire,” said one.<\/p>\n

“We are a low equity index Auckland school with an excellent reputation and struggle to get staff. I would hate to be principal of some other schools that are isolated or with high equity indexes,” said another.<\/p>\n

“There is a chronic shortage of quality secondary teachers. While the number of applicants can look healthy, many many applicants are unsuitable,” said a principal.<\/p>\n

“We are blessed with stable staffing and suitable applicants when we do need to advertise,” said another respondent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Secondary school principals say they are getting more applicants for teaching jobs, but many are not good enough.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":506926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-506925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=506925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/506925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/506926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=506925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=506925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=506925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}