{"id":581114,"date":"2026-08-26T17:58:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T17:58:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/581114\/"},"modified":"2026-08-26T17:58:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T17:58:14","slug":"government-considers-effectiveness-of-teacher-education-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/581114\/","title":{"rendered":"Government considers effectiveness of teacher education"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ministry said it commissioned consultants to prepare a discussion document covering \u201cdomestic and international evidence on effective initial teacher education and teacher readiness, and identifying areas for further consideration\u201d.<\/p>\n

Claire McLachlan, Waikato University pro vice-chancellor, education, said it was not exactly clear what the minister wanted to change.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve got students on campus, we\u2019ve got them online throughout the country, and we\u2019ve got them on site in schools. So I have heard her say on radio recently that teacher education is woeful. Which bits are woeful? That\u2019s the bit that\u2019s unclear to us,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe universities provide 85% of the secondary teacher education programmes, so there\u2019s only a small handful of stuff being done by other people. We\u2019re doing the bulk of it, so if we\u2019re not doing it well enough, then that would be good to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

McLachlan said Australia went through a similar review over the past five years and she expected similar results \u2013 requiring core content on subjects including the science of learning, understanding the role of the brain in learning and knowing how to teach children with diverse backgrounds.<\/p>\n

Auckland Primary Principals Association president Lucy Naylor said schools wanted to see more consistency between providers.<\/p>\n

\u201cDepending on where your student teacher comes from, the quality of those teachers is very, very varied, extremely varied,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat they\u2019re actually being taught is in some cases, not all cases, inadequate to meet the demands of the new curriculum. So that puts a strain on schools because we are having to do a lot of the training ourselves.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

She said some new teachers were graduating with too little classroom experience and welcomed the Government\u2019s boost to school-based training.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cTeaching is such a relational profession that the biggest, the most positive outcomes we see are from the student teachers who have spent the most amount of time in the classroom during their practicums,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are some programmes at the moment where student teachers spend maybe six to eight weeks in a classroom and then off they go. And that\u2019s just not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Howick College principal Dale Burden said the Government\u2019s criticism of universities\u2019 programmes was unfair and misplaced.<\/p>\n

\u201cOtago University run an absolutely outstanding programme,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a great programme, they\u2019re great students, and they make an instant contribution when they come into school.\u201d<\/p>\n

Burden said the real issue was whether the very best graduates were choosing to become teachers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s about the quality of the students in the programmes. I think that\u2019s the thing that really makes or breaks the graduate,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Burden said a bonding scheme succeeded in attracting excellent people to teaching about 40 years ago, many of whom recently retired or were about to.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was an outstanding programme, and it captured the best in a generation,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Victoria University\u2019s director of teacher education, Ben Egerton, said it looked like ITE providers were at the start of a period of significant change.<\/p>\n

He said they had already altered their programmes to match new teacher standards developed by the Teaching Council and the next target was likely to be greater consistency between the various courses on offer.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it makes sense. We have I don\u2019t know how many players in this space nationally, probably 25, 26 tertiary institutions, private providers, polytechnics all offering ITE,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHaving rationalised the teaching standards over the last couple of years for the teaching profession, it makes sense to do this in initial teacher education too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Otago University\u2019s dean of education Vivienne Anderson said she was worried the Government wanted to make system-level changes without good evidence.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the moment there\u2019s an increase in funding going into schools-based or SOTP [school onsite training programme] programmes and it\u2019s being represented as almost as a kind of silver bullet that\u2019s going to fix workforce problems and I\u2019m just not convinced that is the case,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ministry said it commissioned consultants to prepare a discussion document covering \u201cdomestic and international evidence on effective…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":581115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[18205,84,174456,44248,266,5126,111,43,139,69,1118,7574],"class_list":["post-581114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-considers","tag-education","tag-effectiveness","tag-gerritsen","tag-government","tag-john","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-teacher"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581114","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=581114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/581114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=581114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=581114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=581114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}