“The people themselves are extraordinary.
“They are responsible for a huge number of schools and, quite often, they spend a lot of time driving between schools and not enough time in classrooms.”
She said she was looking at using their skills differently, with “some big announcements at the Budget”.
While the uncertainty was difficult and a tricky situation for teachers, there would be opportunities for them, Stanford said.
“We are trying to get resources directly into classrooms and working with children.
“There are a number of things to come, and I think [teachers] will feel very comfortable in the next month or so.”
The Budget will be delivered on May 22.
In March, Whanganui resource teacher of literacy Nicky Collins said she supported making the service more equitable, but that meant improving it, not cutting it.
“We’ll just have to see what happens but this is critical for those children that struggle the most,” Collins said.
“I’m still running multiple workshops every term. All those sorts of programmes will just be gone.”
Meanwhile, Stanford said the Government’s decision to introduce economic literacy classes for Years 1 to 10, starting next year, was something parents had been calling for.
“You learn a lot of stuff at school that is interesting and might lead to a career, but isn’t something that will help you in your everyday life,” she said.
“It would be nice to say that we could leave it up to parents to do, but this has been ongoing for such a long time that parents haven’t had that education themselves.”
Figures from January for the Manawatū-Whanganui region showed 73.4% of students stayed at school until they were 17, and a decade previously it was 83.4%.
Stanford said students should be staying at secondary school and the Government was working to make changes to NCEA - “three years of high-stakes assessments”.
Last November, the Education Review Office’s head of Education Evaluation Centre, Ruth Shinoda, said most countries did not have assessments across all three years (11, 12 and 13).
“If we keep NCEA Level 1, we need to reduce flexibility so there is more consistency and students don’t miss out on key knowledge, and reduce variability so different subjects and assessments are an equal amount of work and difficulty,” Shinoda said.
Stanford said if students were going to leave after Year 11, they should still have good literacy, numeracy, English and maths skills.
“If you are going to leave into the workforce or into further training, what do you need?
“Those are the considerations we are looking at.”
The minister said speaking directly to teachers was her “absolute favourite thing in the world” and she would spend most of her time in Whanganui doing that.
“We are indicating a system reform, and it’s all very well for me to stand up and say ‘we are going to do this’,” she said.
“The people who implement it on the ground are our principals, who lead the change in schools, and our teachers who do it every day in the classroom.”
Mike Tweed is a multimedia journalist at the Whanganui Chronicle. Since starting in March 2020, he has dabbled in everything from sport to music. At present his focus is local government, primarily the Whanganui District Council.
