April 20, 2025 • 13 mins
There are a number of employment dispute avenues in New Zealand, dependent on what industry you’re in.
If you’re one of the 114,000 registered teachers in this country – you have to appear before something called the “Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal”.
Last year, there were 524 complaints, mandatory reports, and self-reports received by the Teaching Council - which is 0.5% of the total number of teachers who held a practising certificate.
It’s more than 2023, which saw 462 -- that accounted for 0.4%.
For the latest in our series looking at how different tribunals work, today on The Front Page we’re joined again by Open Justice reporter Jeremy Wilkinson.
Follow The Front Page on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can read more about this and other stories in the New Zealand Herald, online at nzherald.co.nz, or tune in to news bulletins across the NZME network.
Host: Chelsea Daniels
Sound Engineer: Richard Martin
Producer: Ethan Sills
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hilda.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There are
a number of employment dispute avenues in New Zealand, dependent
on what industry you're in. If you're one of the
one hundred and fourteen thousand registered teachers in this country,
(00:25):
you have to appear before something called the teacher's Disciplinary Tribunal.
Last year, there were five hundred and twenty four complaints,
mandatory reports and self reports received by the Teaching Council,
which is about zero point five percent of the total
number of teachers who held a practicing certificate. Now, while
it's more than twenty twenty three, which saw four hundred
(00:47):
and sixty two complaints, that accounted for just zero point
four percent. For the latest in our series looking at
how different tribunals work today on the Front Page, we're
joined again by Open Justice reporter Jeremy Wilkinson. So tell me, Jeremy,
what actually is the teacher's disciplinary Tribunal.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, So, the Teacher's Disciplinary Tribunal is an arm of
the Teaching Council who will appoint a what's called a
professional conduct committee to charge or prosecute teachers before the
Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal, and that's for breaches of their professional obligations,
so that they're not breaches that are illegal in a
(01:34):
criminal context, but they are breaches of their code of ethics.
So that might be drug use or an inappropriate relationship
with a student, or in some cases they're kind of
taking a second bite out of the cherry. If, for example,
there's a teacher who's been caught drink driving and is
charged through the district court, then they might well, they
(01:54):
probably will end up before the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal as
well because it's a brief of their code of efforts.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
So what kind of powers does the tribunal have.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
They can cancel a teachers registration so that that person
can no longer teach in New Zealand. That really only
happens for the most serious of breaches, but we do
see it happen often. We will see a suspension or
a fine or conditions imposed on their practice, and that
those conditions might be they need to complete a course
(02:26):
or have supervision while they teach, or inform a prospective
employer that they've had a censure or a mark against
them at the tribunal.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
What kind of cases have you seen.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, I've seen quite a few in my time. There's
a few. I think one that stands out is probably
Sealin Romiah. He was the Jamescott High School deputy principal
and he was caught sending explicit images and text messages
to several students and another staff member, and he actually
(02:59):
ended up in prison because one of those students was
under the age of sixteen.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Are all of the cases that the tribunal rules on
made public? What's the threshold for keeping a teacher's name
out of the public records? Say?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, So my understanding was that all of the tribunal's
decisions are made public, but the teacher might get suppression. Basically,
the tribunal will maker an assessment similar to the courts,
about whether someone is entitled to suppression, and they'll take
him into account a range of things. But the decision
will be published, but whether that person's name is in
(03:34):
it is a different thing.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I saw a case recently that you reported on. It
was a seventeen year old girl who said she was
offered ten thousand dollars to drop a complaint against a
family friend who came into her room in the hope
that she would sleep with him. Now he wasn't her teacher,
but he was a registered teacher. She took her complaint
to the police, who then referred it to the Complaint's
(03:56):
Assessment Committee of the teacher's Council, which then later che
charge against him. So I guess this is an example
of the kind of case that maybe police wouldn't be
able to take to court and successfully convict, but the
council could. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (04:10):
So the police will obviously charge someone where they can
where they have enough evidence too, but in some cases
the charge doesn't meet the threshold for a criminal charge.
So I suppose a good example of this is that
the age of consent in New Zealand is sixteen, So
it's not illegal for a teacher to engage in a
physical sexual relationship with a sixteen year old student, and
(04:32):
purely in the terms of it not being criminal, but
it is deeply and fundamentally ethically morally inappropriate in terms
of a professional conduct context, so not illegal. They wouldn't
be criminal criminally charged, but they would end up before
the teacher's disciplinary tribunal and probably lose their teaching registration
for it.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Also recently, there was an interesting case from christ Church
Boys High School where an ex teacher accused the headmaster
of leaving feces on her property on eight occasions in
retaliation for her raising concerns about him with the board
and police. Now, this case was going through the Employment
Relations Authority rather than the teaching council. But you then
(05:13):
have a teaching council case processed in the year to
June twenty twenty four where a Fielding daycare owner was
found guilty of serious misconduct for her behavior towards children
and staff members, including telling one staffer that she was
quote too fat to eat KFC. So what is the
threshold for a case to go to one tribunal over
(05:34):
another When it comes to teachers.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
My understanding was that with the er, you needed to
lodge your complaint to yourself. It's not a quasi judicial
professional body that is prosecuting or laying charges against a
professional like a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer. Instead,
you have a disgruntled employee who was taking their employer
(05:57):
proactively through the court. I suppose and effect the employee
becomes the prosecution. You know, they might hire a lawyer
or an employment advocate to take the case on their behalf,
whereas with the teacher's disciplinary tribunal, it is a professional
conduct committee of the Teaching Council who will lay charges
(06:19):
against a teacher for breaches of their conduct, and the
same way that the Medical Council as a professional conduct
committee or the New Zealand Law Society they have standards
committees who will lay charges against lawyers on behalf of
the law Society to take them to the lawyers and
conveyances disciplinary tribunal. So I suppose that's whether the difference
is one is person or complainant led the other side
(06:41):
is led by the professional body.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Nothing was done to prevent it. There were no talks
to students about specific things. It was just kind of
a don't connect with teachers on social media. There were
never any hard lines about it and it was really
up to the discretion of teachers at the end of
the day. I think the issue is with these apps
where you can erase all of the previous messages, you
can delete texts, you can erase cool history, snapchats disappear,
(07:11):
but having a platform where the it or the school
department is able to have access to those records.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
I think that's really important. I stumbled upon your reporting
of teachers and the use of social media. Can you
tell me a little bit more about that?
Speaker 3 (07:29):
So I went through the numbers last year and looked
at how many inappropriate relationship cases there were before the
tribunal and of those, how many of those was social
media a factor? And so the data showed that since
twenty ten, there have been fifty three cases of teachers
using social media to groom young people in their care,
(07:52):
which makes up about sixty percent of the eighty nine
cases involving that type of behavior in the last fourteen years.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Have you spoken with anyone who feels that we need
some kind of law around teachers student interactions updated given
how social media controls our lives these days.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I spoke to a few people for that article. One
of them was Professor Michael McCauley. He's form a judge
from the United Kingdom, a lecture at Victoria University School
of Government, and he focuses on ethics and integrity with
his own research. He said, be really simple and not
really that controversial to ban social media contact between teachers
(08:42):
and students, even in a digital age where students and
teachers do actually need to be able to email or
have some kind of communication for their assignments or their
homework or whatever it is. Has point, I suppose was
that you could just have one official point of contact
basically so that there can be a site so that
the messages can't be deleted. Like we saw with Seale
(09:03):
and Remia from James Cook High School. He asked three
students to download Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app,
and the messages are deleted after a certain period of time.
And that's I suppose a common theme that I saw
among that data, with those sixty percent of those eighty
nine cases was that it starts with emailing in the
pre Facebook era, and now these days it is primarily
(09:26):
texting or Facebook or Instagram, where these teachers are starting
a point of contact that begins quite innocently and then
progresses into something that is quite deeply inappropriate.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
When we spoke last, we talked about the length of
time it takes to go through the human rights justice process.
What's the turnaround for these cases.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
They're a good couple of years old generally by the
time I see them come through into the written decision phase.
So what happens is they held a hearing, and that
hearing is it was similar to a courtroom, except a
lot more informal, and then the tribunal panel members will
go away and write a decision and a penalty for
(10:11):
the teacher and it will often be given to the
parties while in advance of it being made.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Public schools could be more than twelve hundred teachers short
this year with demand outstripping supply. And it's not just here.
Data show it's a global issue, but in New Zealand
the Ministry is projecting it's twelve hundred and fifty teachers
short of what's needed.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
Ali Mattia used to be adopted. Now she wants to
be here inspiring the next generation to pursue science.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
Being able to teach academics or especially a subject that
I'm passionate about, but also being able to mentor students.
I feel like that just adds another layer of value
and impact to the students.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
High schools are said to face a teacher's shortage through
to twenty twenty seven. According to the Education Ministries modeling.
We have very few qualified applicants who have the right
set of skills to be able to teach our school
for any position.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
When you're ever reviewing these kind of cases, Jeremy, does
it ever feel like there should be more standards in
place for teachers or even just better checks and balances
around who actually becomes a teacher?
Speaker 3 (11:23):
The Teachers Counsel I think they do a really good
job of vetting teachers before they enter the profession. And
the Teachers Council will be the first to say that
the people who end up before the tribunal are a
really small minority, and it is something that they stress
when we ask them questions about people who have been
suspended or had their registration canceled.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, of course, I mean how many cases do we
see on average a year, say just off the top
of your head, because there's more than you know, there's
over one hundred thousand registered teachers or something like that
in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Hey, we might see on average around thirty thirty decisions
a year. To throw an number out, to just throw
a number out that seems about right, and we would
cover actually quite a small percentage of those. So there
are several decisions that have been uploaded this year, for example,
which involve teachers who have struck a child. But it
(12:15):
might be in quite a minor way, so they might
have pulled on their shirt, you know, to get them
to stop misbehaving or to direct them somewhere, and you're
not allowed to You're not allowed to do that in
New Zealand anymore. You're not allowed to lay your hands
on a child in that way. But does it make
media threshold for us to cover in most cases, No,
(12:38):
unless it's quite severe.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Thanks for joining us, Jeremy no Worrith no Worth. That's
it for this episode of the Front Page. You can
read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at
enzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page, which is
(13:00):
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front
Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and
tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
Hilda.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a
daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There are
a number of employment dispute avenues in New Zealand, dependent
on what industry you're in. If you're one of the
one hundred and fourteen thousand registered teachers in this country,
(00:25):
you have to appear before something called the teacher's Disciplinary Tribunal.
Last year, there were five hundred and twenty four complaints,
mandatory reports and self reports received by the Teaching Council,
which is about zero point five percent of the total
number of teachers who held a practicing certificate. Now, while
it's more than twenty twenty three, which saw four hundred
(00:47):
and sixty two complaints, that accounted for just zero point
four percent. For the latest in our series looking at
how different tribunals work today on the Front Page, we're
joined again by Open Justice reporter Jeremy Wilkinson. So tell me, Jeremy,
what actually is the teacher's disciplinary Tribunal.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Yeah, So, the Teacher's Disciplinary Tribunal is an arm of
the Teaching Council who will appoint a what's called a
professional conduct committee to charge or prosecute teachers before the
Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal, and that's for breaches of their professional obligations,
so that they're not breaches that are illegal in a
(01:34):
criminal context, but they are breaches of their code of ethics.
So that might be drug use or an inappropriate relationship
with a student, or in some cases they're kind of
taking a second bite out of the cherry. If, for example,
there's a teacher who's been caught drink driving and is
charged through the district court, then they might well, they
(01:54):
probably will end up before the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal as
well because it's a brief of their code of efforts.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
So what kind of powers does the tribunal have.
Speaker 3 (02:04):
They can cancel a teachers registration so that that person
can no longer teach in New Zealand. That really only
happens for the most serious of breaches, but we do
see it happen often. We will see a suspension or
a fine or conditions imposed on their practice, and that
those conditions might be they need to complete a course
(02:26):
or have supervision while they teach, or inform a prospective
employer that they've had a censure or a mark against
them at the tribunal.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
What kind of cases have you seen.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Yeah, I've seen quite a few in my time. There's
a few. I think one that stands out is probably
Sealin Romiah. He was the Jamescott High School deputy principal
and he was caught sending explicit images and text messages
to several students and another staff member, and he actually
(02:59):
ended up in prison because one of those students was
under the age of sixteen.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Are all of the cases that the tribunal rules on
made public? What's the threshold for keeping a teacher's name
out of the public records? Say?
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Yeah, So my understanding was that all of the tribunal's
decisions are made public, but the teacher might get suppression. Basically,
the tribunal will maker an assessment similar to the courts,
about whether someone is entitled to suppression, and they'll take
him into account a range of things. But the decision
will be published, but whether that person's name is in
(03:34):
it is a different thing.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
I saw a case recently that you reported on. It
was a seventeen year old girl who said she was
offered ten thousand dollars to drop a complaint against a
family friend who came into her room in the hope
that she would sleep with him. Now he wasn't her teacher,
but he was a registered teacher. She took her complaint
to the police, who then referred it to the Complaint's
(03:56):
Assessment Committee of the teacher's Council, which then later che
charge against him. So I guess this is an example
of the kind of case that maybe police wouldn't be
able to take to court and successfully convict, but the
council could. Is that right?
Speaker 3 (04:10):
So the police will obviously charge someone where they can
where they have enough evidence too, but in some cases
the charge doesn't meet the threshold for a criminal charge.
So I suppose a good example of this is that
the age of consent in New Zealand is sixteen, So
it's not illegal for a teacher to engage in a
physical sexual relationship with a sixteen year old student, and
(04:32):
purely in the terms of it not being criminal, but
it is deeply and fundamentally ethically morally inappropriate in terms
of a professional conduct context, so not illegal. They wouldn't
be criminal criminally charged, but they would end up before
the teacher's disciplinary tribunal and probably lose their teaching registration
for it.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
Also recently, there was an interesting case from christ Church
Boys High School where an ex teacher accused the headmaster
of leaving feces on her property on eight occasions in
retaliation for her raising concerns about him with the board
and police. Now, this case was going through the Employment
Relations Authority rather than the teaching council. But you then
(05:13):
have a teaching council case processed in the year to
June twenty twenty four where a Fielding daycare owner was
found guilty of serious misconduct for her behavior towards children
and staff members, including telling one staffer that she was
quote too fat to eat KFC. So what is the
threshold for a case to go to one tribunal over
(05:34):
another When it comes to teachers.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
My understanding was that with the er, you needed to
lodge your complaint to yourself. It's not a quasi judicial
professional body that is prosecuting or laying charges against a
professional like a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer. Instead,
you have a disgruntled employee who was taking their employer
(05:57):
proactively through the court. I suppose and effect the employee
becomes the prosecution. You know, they might hire a lawyer
or an employment advocate to take the case on their behalf,
whereas with the teacher's disciplinary tribunal, it is a professional
conduct committee of the Teaching Council who will lay charges
(06:19):
against a teacher for breaches of their conduct, and the
same way that the Medical Council as a professional conduct
committee or the New Zealand Law Society they have standards
committees who will lay charges against lawyers on behalf of
the law Society to take them to the lawyers and
conveyances disciplinary tribunal. So I suppose that's whether the difference
is one is person or complainant led the other side
(06:41):
is led by the professional body.
Speaker 4 (06:48):
Nothing was done to prevent it. There were no talks
to students about specific things. It was just kind of
a don't connect with teachers on social media. There were
never any hard lines about it and it was really
up to the discretion of teachers at the end of
the day. I think the issue is with these apps
where you can erase all of the previous messages, you
can delete texts, you can erase cool history, snapchats disappear,
(07:11):
but having a platform where the it or the school
department is able to have access to those records.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
I think that's really important. I stumbled upon your reporting
of teachers and the use of social media. Can you
tell me a little bit more about that?
Speaker 3 (07:29):
So I went through the numbers last year and looked
at how many inappropriate relationship cases there were before the
tribunal and of those, how many of those was social
media a factor? And so the data showed that since
twenty ten, there have been fifty three cases of teachers
using social media to groom young people in their care,
(07:52):
which makes up about sixty percent of the eighty nine
cases involving that type of behavior in the last fourteen years.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Have you spoken with anyone who feels that we need
some kind of law around teachers student interactions updated given
how social media controls our lives these days.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
I spoke to a few people for that article. One
of them was Professor Michael McCauley. He's form a judge
from the United Kingdom, a lecture at Victoria University School
of Government, and he focuses on ethics and integrity with
his own research. He said, be really simple and not
really that controversial to ban social media contact between teachers
(08:42):
and students, even in a digital age where students and
teachers do actually need to be able to email or
have some kind of communication for their assignments or their
homework or whatever it is. Has point, I suppose was
that you could just have one official point of contact
basically so that there can be a site so that
the messages can't be deleted. Like we saw with Seale
(09:03):
and Remia from James Cook High School. He asked three
students to download Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app,
and the messages are deleted after a certain period of time.
And that's I suppose a common theme that I saw
among that data, with those sixty percent of those eighty
nine cases was that it starts with emailing in the
pre Facebook era, and now these days it is primarily
(09:26):
texting or Facebook or Instagram, where these teachers are starting
a point of contact that begins quite innocently and then
progresses into something that is quite deeply inappropriate.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
When we spoke last, we talked about the length of
time it takes to go through the human rights justice process.
What's the turnaround for these cases.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
They're a good couple of years old generally by the
time I see them come through into the written decision phase.
So what happens is they held a hearing, and that
hearing is it was similar to a courtroom, except a
lot more informal, and then the tribunal panel members will
go away and write a decision and a penalty for
(10:11):
the teacher and it will often be given to the
parties while in advance of it being made.
Speaker 1 (10:16):
Public schools could be more than twelve hundred teachers short
this year with demand outstripping supply. And it's not just here.
Data show it's a global issue, but in New Zealand
the Ministry is projecting it's twelve hundred and fifty teachers
short of what's needed.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
Ali Mattia used to be adopted. Now she wants to
be here inspiring the next generation to pursue science.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
Being able to teach academics or especially a subject that
I'm passionate about, but also being able to mentor students.
I feel like that just adds another layer of value
and impact to the students.
Speaker 5 (10:52):
High schools are said to face a teacher's shortage through
to twenty twenty seven. According to the Education Ministries modeling.
We have very few qualified applicants who have the right
set of skills to be able to teach our school
for any position.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
When you're ever reviewing these kind of cases, Jeremy, does
it ever feel like there should be more standards in
place for teachers or even just better checks and balances
around who actually becomes a teacher?
Speaker 3 (11:23):
The Teachers Counsel I think they do a really good
job of vetting teachers before they enter the profession. And
the Teachers Council will be the first to say that
the people who end up before the tribunal are a
really small minority, and it is something that they stress
when we ask them questions about people who have been
suspended or had their registration canceled.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, of course, I mean how many cases do we
see on average a year, say just off the top
of your head, because there's more than you know, there's
over one hundred thousand registered teachers or something like that
in New Zealand.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
Hey, we might see on average around thirty thirty decisions
a year. To throw an number out, to just throw
a number out that seems about right, and we would
cover actually quite a small percentage of those. So there
are several decisions that have been uploaded this year, for example,
which involve teachers who have struck a child. But it
(12:15):
might be in quite a minor way, so they might
have pulled on their shirt, you know, to get them
to stop misbehaving or to direct them somewhere, and you're
not allowed to You're not allowed to do that in
New Zealand anymore. You're not allowed to lay your hands
on a child in that way. But does it make
media threshold for us to cover in most cases, No,
(12:38):
unless it's quite severe.
Speaker 2 (12:40):
Thanks for joining us, Jeremy no Worrith no Worth. That's
it for this episode of the Front Page. You can
read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at
enzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page, which is
(13:00):
produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also
a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front
Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and
tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.
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