Government Announces $300m For Classes While Teacher Attrition Rates Increase

The Prime Minister, in conjunction with Education Minister Jan Tinetti, made a pre-budget announcement for funding NZ$300 million explicitly for building classrooms and accommodating additional student attendance. Trend analysis reveals that this funding appears to be disproportionate to the rate of hiring front-line Teachers.

Data analysis shows a potentially decaying rate of Teacher hiring, while the Ministry of Education has improved the success rate for hiring advisors, management, and non-frontline staff.

Statistics gathered from Ministry of Education website, jobs.govt.nz, and gazette.education.govt.nz, indicate a success rate for hiring front-line workers is currently less than half the same rate of hiring non-frontline employees.

Moreover, the job statistics may also indicate that front-line school staffing shortages are expanding at an increasing rate.

Trend analysis shows that during the analysis period, there were over 1200 unfilled vacancies listed for the role of Teacher on the education.govt.nz website.

The combination of hiring non-frontline workers, while seeing trends for attrition of Government specific frontline employees, is creating two diametrically opposed trends.

Teachers continue to see an increase in attrition rates as staffing shortages compound frontline stressors, while simultaneously Government expenditures for the Ministry of Education increase.

Trends also indicate that the Government attempts to hire frontline staff is not effectual. This may be a result of the Government negotiating salaries while attempting to address teacher shortages. This is potentially validated through the on-going pay negotiations and demonstrations by secondary and area school teachers (10 May 2023) intended to improve pay as well as work conditions.

In today's pre-budget announcement, the government leadership verifies it is increasing money allocated to the Ministry of Education, without directly enhancing the total number of teachers.

Teacher attrition rates and teacher strikes may see continued long term trends, unless specific incentives are introduced in the full education budget, to be announced this Thursday, 18 May 2023.

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