Monitoring Teacher Supply 2009

Introduction

Background

Teacher supply is a major focus for the Ministry of Education and over recent years the government has introduced a number of initiatives aimed at ensuring a sufficient number of teachers in New Zealand schools¹. The Ministry has a role in monitoring the teacher supply situation, and this is carried out through several means. This includes the Survey of Staffing in all state and state-integrated schools at the beginning of the school year. The Ministry also receives information from the March roll returns² and through monitoring the advertisements in the Education Gazette. The Research Division has carried out the Survey of Staffing since 1997, and this report is a continuation of that annual series. It aims to provide a snapshot of the staffing situation in schools at the start of Term 1.

Method and Response Rates

As in previous years, information was sought on the staffing situation in schools at the beginning of the school year. Both primary and secondary principals were asked to complete a one-page survey outlining the situation in their schools as at their first day of school in 2009 (schools started in the week beginning 2 February 2009).

The 2009 survey asked principals to provide information on:

• the number of entitlement vacancies and re-advertised vacancies in their school at the beginning of the school year;
• the number of first year beginning teachers, as well as the number of relatively new overseas-trained teachers who were teaching in their school;
• the number of positions where an appointment had been made but the appointee was unable to start at the beginning of Term 1;
• the availability of relief teachers. This question asked principals to indicate if there were any days during terms 3 and 4 in 2008 when they needed a day reliever but no relief teachers were available;
• whether or not they had advertised for a permanent teacher (Scale A classroom teachers for primary schools, and various subject teachers³ for secondary schools) in the past six months, and if so, how many New Zealand trained teachers applied for the position;
• primary principals were asked to indicate how many vacancies were for Māori medium/bilingual or Samoan bilingual teachers; and
• secondary principals were asked to indicate the subject areas in which any of their vacancies occurred.
  

Schools were asked to fax the completed forms to the Research Division of the Ministry of Education. The 2009 survey was completed by 95 percent of all schools as shown in Table 1. Eighty-one primary and special schools and 33 secondary and composite schools did not return their surveys.

Points to Note

1. To enable comparisons to be made with data collected from the Survey of Staffing conducted in previous years, data from special schools are included with the data from primary schools and data from composite schools are included with the data from secondary schools.
2. Schools were asked to indicate whether they had any entitlement staffing vacancies. Some schools may have had vacancies at the beginning of Term 1 above their current staffing entitlement but it was beyond the scope of the survey in its present format to collect information on these vacancies.
3. An entitlement staffing vacancy was defined as any position which was not filled by a permanent teacher or a long-term reliever whose tenure was more than 10 consecutive weeks.
4. A re-advertised vacancy was defined as any position which had been advertised nationally more than once with no appointment being made after the first time advertised.
   

Table 2 provides details of the numbers of schools responding to the vacancy surveys since 2002 and for those schools, the total number of provisional entitlement positions, expressed as full-time teacher equivalents (FTTEs). The total number of provisional entitlement positions varies from year to year. Some of this fluctuation will be due to variations in the number of schools that responded to the survey. Other influences on the number of provisional entitlements include policy changes, such as the school staffing improvements introduced since 2001, which created additional teaching positions.

Footnotes

1. More information on these initiatives can be obtained from the TeachNZ website.
   
2. These returns are managed by the Data Management and Analysis Division of the Ministry of Education.
   
3. Subjects included: English; Te Reo Māori; Chemistry; Physics; General Science; Mathematics and Statistics; Health and Physical education; and Technology