Schooling Workforce Data Services

This is the main index page for schooling workforce data series, measures and analytics products. Objectives of these products are to improve our understanding of the teacher demand and supply landscape at Primary and Secondary school levels.

Key Findings

Statistics

Data series are made available in the form of spreadsheets and visualised.

Why is the Ministry collecting this data?

Schooling workforce data are core information required for managing the schooling sector.  The Ministry uses schooling workforce data:

  • to support the payment and management of schooling staff
  • to monitor the staffing resources in the New Zealand education system
  • to support policy analysis
  • for national and international reporting

Schooling workforce data are also used for general research and statistics, in accordance with the Privacy Act 1993.  Care is taken that no individual can ever be identified from published analysis.

The Data Series

There are currently three schooling workforce data series: teacher numbers, teachers entering and leaving the workforce and teacher turnover.

Teacher numbers measure the number of teachers (both regular and day relief) by standard breakdowns (e.g. age, gender, sector, school type). This data series is available in headcount and full-time teacher equivalents (FTTE). Collection methodologies of the teacher workforce data series were revised in 2018, read about the difference between the old and new methodologies.

Entering and leaving teaching looks at teachers who move into or out of our schooling teacher workforce each year in state and state-integrated schools.

Teacher turnover looks at the rate at which teachers are leaving and being replenished within schools.

The Data Source

We receive the data from our payroll provider, Novopay, every fortnight.  The data includes detailed records of every payment made via the payroll system to teachers employed at state and state integrated schools. We take this transactional information and aggregate it into an annual series which we use for virtually all of our reporting, modelling or analysis of teachers.

We applied consistent business rules when constructing the annual series for the period between 2004 and 2018.  The key business rule that we use to construct this is to aggregate the multiple teacher payment records into one record per teacher, per year.

In the case of teachers working in only one role during the year, we simply add up all of the payments they received and the hours they worked during the year and record this along with basic demographic details about the teacher and details about the role they are employed in. In the case of teachers who have worked in multiple teaching roles during the year then we record their details against their main role, being the role in which they worked the most time during the year.