Letters: A degree won't make us better teachers

A degree wouldn't make people better teachers, but teachers with forty plus years experience are stuck on a salary $59,621, a reader says.

A degree wouldn't make us better teachers, but we are teachers with 40 plus years experience stuck on a salary $59,621 because we don't have one.

Why?

Because, when we trained in the 70s, a Trained Teacher's Certificate was the standard primary teaching qualification.

The inequality arose in 1998 when a unified pay scale for primary teachers was introduced and parity was granted with secondary teachers with the same qualification and experience.

This gave the degree holders a boost of approx $12,000.

By 1998 the standard qualification was no longer called a Trained teacher's Certificate, it was now a Bachelor of Teaching Degree.

Those of us with the old title for our qualification were locked out and told to "Upgrade to a Degree or miss out and have your salary capped!"

Our three years' training was exactly the same as the newly named Bachelor of Teaching Degree ... same papers, same content, same practicums ... same everything.

We were gutted and thought this anomaly would be adjusted but 20 years later we are still waiting and still feeling totally undervalued.

There has been some movement to shift the salary caps for us by NZEI but the Ministry of Education continues to be slow-moving and ignorant of our plight.

The Ministry of Education must reinstate our Trained Teacher's Certificates as Degrees to rectify the injustice we have had to bear for twenty years.

Dare we ask for twenty years back pay or is this a case for the Employment Relations Authority.

Eileen Gilmour
Whakamarama

Land confiscation

Bryan Johnson (Letters October 6) seems to support the idea that Māori land confiscations were justified.

Bryan writes that the Kohimarama Conference of Māori chiefs in 1860 concluded that Tainui Kingites were in rebellion and deserved their lands being taken.

The conference made no such conclusion.

The chiefs did consider a proposal "That this Conference is of opinion that the project of setting up a Māori King in New Zealand is a cause of strife and division, and is fraught with trouble to the country" but only half of the chiefs supported this.

The government has now apologised to both Tainui iwi and Tauranga iwi that it was government breaches of the Treaty that led to the land wars of the 1860s, and it now accepts that Māori defenders were not in rebellion.

Peter Dey
Welcome Bay