Secondary school students. Photo / Getty Images
By John Gerritsen of RNZ
Secondary principals say the worsening shortage of teachers is forcing schools to cancel subjects and hire untrained teachers.
Education Ministry figures showed schools this year faced a bigger shortfall of secondary teachers than previously expected.
It forecast a shortage of secondary 710 teachers this year, 510 next year and 190 in 2028 – higher than last year’s estimate of 550, and 330 for this year and next.
The ministry said parts of Auckland were among the worst-affected areas and Otahuhu College principal Neil Watson said he was seeing it.
“There’s a real shortage of good-quality candidates coming through,” he said.
“The time it takes to actually make an appointment would be about the longest I’ve experienced. You’re starting to recruit for next year almost constantly.”
Watson said he had enough teachers for 2026 – but only just.
“We’ve been very lucky. We got our last teacher for this year – they got their visa yesterday, so they’ll be turning up in 10 days,” he said.
“So we are really fortunate here at Otahuhu College that we’re fully staffed now, but it’s been a lot of hard work to get there.”
Auckland Secondary Schools Principals’ Association president Claire Amos said the city’s schools had been complaining about teacher shortages for years.
She said schools had been forced to abandon some subjects and squeeze more students into classes.
“The way that this gets dealt with is that you do cut back on the offering of classes,” she said.
“It might mean that smaller subjects are no longer a viable option so you start cutting back on the variety of subjects that you offer. It also means that classes end up getting bigger. I’ve heard of local schools that have up to 35 students in a senior class and we know that in senior secondary classes the ideal number is about 20 to 25.”
Amos said the shortage was also prompting schools to hire people who were not trained teachers.
“It means that a whole lot of untrained teachers are actually in front of our young people, so people are relying on things like Limited Authority to Teach in order to have a living, breathing human being in front of the young people,” she said.
Watson said Otahuhu College stopped offering accounting as a subject in 2024 because it could not find a teacher, and it stopped offering the technology subject, hard materials, for the same reason.
He said his school had several people working under Limited Authority to Teach, but that was part of an in-school teacher education programme for people studying to become fully registered teachers.
The ministry’s figures showed that while there were too few secondary teachers, there was a surplus of primary school teachers.
It previously forecast a shortage for this year but now an over-supply of 530 teachers was expected, with ongoing surpluses in successive years.
However, the ministry’s report said primary schools in Taranaki, Northland, Waikato and Bay of Plenty faced persistent shortages over the next three years.
Education Minister Erica Stanford said there had never been so many teachers in New Zealand schools.
“Currently, we have more teachers in the workforce since records began in 2004, with the largest year-on-year increase for primary teachers in 2024 and for secondary teachers in 2025,” she said.
– RNZ