Nickie Muir: Risk and reward for teachers

Nickie Muir.

You have no hope. Face the facts: you are keen, work hard and want to own your own property but will never be able to in Auckland.

Here's my suggestion. Give up now. If you are over wasting half of your life and that of the planet sitting in a car on the way to and from the house that you can not afford - give up! Give up and come north.

If the Government or the PPTA think the answer to teacher shortages in Auckland is giving an allowance to further subsidise the unrestrained madness that is the Auckland property market, there will be a revolution among teachers living in very low socio-economic communities in the regions.

Many of these teachers (and I have been one for the past two years) spend more than $100 a week on petrol.

They also spend disproportionately more on rental because, to live in what would elsewhere be considered adequate housing, they have to rent holiday houses that are normally not rented out at all.

The owners don't need the money. They can get more for it if it's on the coast, renting it for a month than they would renting it to a family for a year.

When one of the main sources of industry in a region is meth, why would you rent out your land-banked piece of paradise when you really only want it for its capital gain?

Other options are the uninsulated, mouldy nightmares that litter the Far North and I would imagine in places like the West Coast of the South Island.

You can buy or build a house cheaply enough here but when schooling can be sketchy because of an apartheid education system which sees the "high performing" school in the region referred to by the children as the "white school", it is more risky, unless you're retired or have no kids.

These same schools get to exclude children for behaviour that other schools in the area are forced to accept and have an easier road to statistical happiness than those schools unable to attract core subject teachers for maths, science or English.

If the Government really wants to help the regions, it would initiate the system that many countries, including Australia, have developed to ensure every school gets the teachers it needs.

That's an education board that decides where teachers go - especially for the first five years of their career based on community need.

When you've done the hard yards in the tough schools, then you get to choose where you want to work.

If we really want to address the chronic teacher shortage, that is happening in many low-decile rural schools, encourage our brightest and our best into the hard-to-staff schools by offering to wipe their student loans if they stay five years.

Who knows? We might all get lucky and they'd decide to stay.