One in three new teachers gets job

Only one in three trained primary teachers finds a full-time teaching job a year after graduating.

Figures issued to the National Party under the Official Information Act also show that only half have found teaching jobs three years after graduation.

The figures are in an Education Ministry paper that tracks the full-time employment rates of primary teacher graduates between 2001 and 2006.

Of the 16,343 primary teachers trained in the six-year period, more than 10,300 were not employed as teachers a year after graduating.

Beginner teachers are "very time and resource intensive" for schools, the paper says. They do not have a full teaching load and experienced teachers have to take time out of their own duties to mentor them.

"Ideally, beginning teachers should make up no more than 15 per cent of a school's teaching staff. This is because a school must have sufficient experienced teachers on [its] staff to carry out the mentoring responsibilities that accompany beginning teachers."

National's education spokeswoman, Katherine Rich, said the loss of the graduates was huge. "Some 40 per cent of experienced teachers are due to retire in the next 15 years and we need at least that number of smart newcomers to replace them."

The Government spent "tens of millions of dollars" every year in scholarships and contributing to the cost of training graduates.

The primary teachers' union, the Educational Institute, has previously described the low employment rate for graduates as a "massive skills wastage". It has called on the Government to introduce a scheme to ensure permanent positions for new graduates.

The ministry's briefing notes to incoming Education Minister Chris Carter, made public last month, said the introduction of increased staffing in primary schools this year would mean the supply of experienced teachers would be "tight".

The Government is due to reduce the teacher-pupil ratio for new entrant children in May, from one teacher for every 23 pupils to one teacher for every 18 pupils. Teaching new entrants is generally not a task given to beginning teachers.

Ministry spokesman Iain Butler said yesterday that the rate of graduates entering teaching in their first year after training had been reasonably constant for some time. Not all students intended to teach when they entered training.

Employment rates were likely to increase this year because of the government initiative to boost entrant teacher numbers.

"It's important to emphasise that, while there are theoretically enough graduating teachers to fill all vacancies across the country, there is a limit to the number of beginning teachers a single school can employ," he said.

The ministry was trying to help schools recruit experienced New Zealand and overseas-trained teachers to fill gaps. Teaching had been added to the Labour Department's skills shortage list to fast-track immigration formalities.

- © Fairfax NZ News