Vaughan Couillault: Secondary Principals' Association President concerned about teacher shortage amid surging migration stats

Schools are struggling to find enough specialist teachers for students with English as a second language.

Stats NZ data shows a net figure of almost 22,000 5-to-17 year olds arrived in the year to May this year.

The Education Ministry expects to add a further 371 classrooms by the end of the year, to meet roll growth.

Secondary Principals Association President Vaughan Couillault says those figures can mean a few hundred more teachers are needed.

"There's not enough teachers - full stop. You can end the sentence there, particularly in the secondary space. But at the moment, there's particular pressure on the ESOL area."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
We've got migrant trouble to some degree in our schools.
Last year, twenty two thousand school age migrants arrived in
the country, which is allegedly now pushing the schools and
the staffing to their limits. The Ministry of Education building
new classrooms, but they're not coming quickly enough. The Secondary
Principals Association president as Waye Koyo, who is with us,
born very good morning to you. Do you have any

(00:21):
suggestion that maybe this is going to get sort of
because the numbers flooded into the country. Now those numbers
start to tail off and you will eventually see that,
won't you.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Yeah. Absolutely, And most of those migrants land and in
the main centers. It doesn't spread evenly across the country.
So in the conversations that I think with local Mastrip education,
they know where the problem is and they're trying to
get as many temporary classrooms, you know, those prefames that
you may have seen around schools built as quickly as
possible and on site and ready for February.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
Are you guys in the link to the criteria, In
other words, when the government set the rules as to
who can come in, do the schools get involved in
any stage saying we're letting these people in and they
bring in two kids, and this is what you can expect.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
Well, the schools aren't. No, not at all. One assumes
that Immigration are communicating with the network planning team from
the ministry. But that's sort of above my grade pay grade,
to be honest.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Right, and so should they be more involved? In other words,
do you have any clue as to who's coming in
numbers or none whatsoever?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Historically I haven't had much faith in the predictive numbers
that you get sort of around this time of the year.
We get a predicted number of students for the following year,
and in my school's example, the predicted final number was
sixteen oh four. For this year, we've ended up at

(01:42):
significantly higher than that, closer to seventeen hundred. And when
you're thinking twenty five kids, as a teacher, I they're
about rough gage. That's quite a way out. So there's
something that isn't talking between Immigration and the network team
or whoever it may be, where the accurate data just
this is getting.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
There, And how much pressure you under when these kids
suddenly turn up and it's day one and you need
teachers and classrooms. What do you do?

Speaker 2 (02:05):
It varies from suburb to suburb to be fair, but
places like Ormiston where there's not only a new and
developing community, although that's where migrants seem to be going,
you do things like take the books out of your library,
stick them on a trolley and wheel them around your school.
One of my local schools doing that, and so the
library becomes classrooms. Halls get chopped up into teaching spaces,

(02:28):
so you don't have an assembly hall anymore. You have
six or seven classrooms in it, whatever the size of
your hall allows you. In one case, you have a
math class under a stairwell because it's a big enough
vacant space. So you either take up the spaces that
are good for learning in other parts of the school,
you make your class sizes bigger, or cancel things, or

(02:50):
have non specialists in front of students where you've grabbed
or liever room to cover for a class and you're
not giving them the best deal necessarily. So it's a
challenging space.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Sure good insight born as always appreciate it. Bon Koya,
who's the Secondary Principles Association.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
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