Principal’s Pānui:
Tēnā koutou katoa,
At a principals meeting I attended this week, there was a robust discussion about the ongoing barrage of media surrounding teachers and education more generally. Lately it has felt like there has been a concerted effort from the media to blow up any story of a teacher doing something wrong or for politicians to take any opportunity to suggest that teachers are collectively either complacent or failing our learners.
Conversely, among the principals in the room, the collective feeling was that, day in and day out, we see teachers working incredibly hard and with a great amount of care and passion about the success of their students. Naturally, teachers don’t always get it right – we are humans working under pressure and things won’t always go as planned – but it seems farfetched to so regularly see headlines about teacher misconduct in the news.
I decided to investigate this a bit more to try to figure out how these two things might exist together at the same time. The estimated number of primary and secondary teachers in New Zealand is just under 70,000. Based on that number, if we had a headline grabbing story once a week in the media where a teacher has been reprimanded by the teaching council, that would amount to 0.07% of the teaching workforce. Another way of looking at that is that 99.93% of the teaching workforce is out there doing great things with the youth of Aotearoa. Even if we increase the frequency of these stories to a daily occurrence, which I’m confident is not the case, this would represent 0.5% of the workforce or 99.5% of the teachers of Aotearoa working effectively with our young people.
I’d say the true number is likely somewhere in the middle of those figures, but this is lost in something of a barrage that is designed to remind us regularly that teachers are failing our students. It seems to me that the collective lived experience of principals can be true, and so can the current situation with the media consistently reporting the biggest mistakes of our profession in large print. Sadly, the bias toward the negative stories loses most of what is important to celebrate and can contribute to whānau feeling less confident in our education system and, in particular, our educators. What I feel is getting lost is the missing statistic where 99.8% of the time, parents should be confident that teachers in New Zealand are working very hard and generally achieving great results with their students.
The paradigm in the media seems to trend heavily toward the negative – which is a shame, because there is so much to celebrate, but perhaps it doesn’t generate the revenue when compared to that which shocks and causes consternation.
As for myself, I wanted to take the opportunity to use my small media reach to provide a counter to the narrative and show that, overwhelmingly, teachers in New Zealand are hard working, professional and highly skilled, and that parents should be confident that all across New Zealand – Waiheke included – our teachers are overwhelmingly doing great work, and our students are overwhelmingly achieving great things.
Ngā mihi mahana,
Cameron Flude
