[Debbie P.]

Hi everyone,

This is my first ever post, so be gentle with me!

My husband and I are in the first stages of considering moving to NZ - we've visited there, got friends who have moved there, and we love the place - but we're being cautious because we realise that going on holiday is not the same as living somewhere! There's lots of stuff to think about but we have one major dilemma:

After 15 years in the teaching profession, hubby's getting really fed up with the way schools are going - ungrateful kids, unsupportive management etc., and he can't decide whether he'd really want to move to NZ and be in the same boat. We get the impression that kids in NZ are nicer, more laid back and polite, but we don't know if that's really true. Are there any teachers on the forum (or anyone else who knows these things) who could give us an honest opinion?

Thanks very much.

[Marie P]

Welcome to the forum Debbie ,

best wishes,

Marie x

[Carol]

I'm a teacher!!

:nice1

Love teaching here....but then I loved teaching in England.

There cannot possibly be any less paperwork here - cause I already work every hour god sends!!!

:eek

[Debbie P.]

Hi Carol,

Thanks for your reply. Do you teach primary or secondary? I know that primary teachers have more paperwork than secondary - or at least that's what the other half tells me! He teaches secondary school. He still loves teaching itself, but he's getting bored by the curriculum and he's had so many hassles with children and parents recently.

For example: 2 boys were having a particularly violent fight. My husband got between them and pulled the smaller boy away to protect him, tearing his coat slightly in the process. The next thing that happens is that he's called in to the head because the parents of the smaller boy have complained about the coat being torn and accused him of assaulting their son! The head didn't support him at all, even though other teachers witnessed the incident and said it wasn't his fault. In the end, he had to threaten to call his union rep in - at which point, the head backed down.

Maybe he's just in a particularly bad school at the moment, but it's not his first experience of unsupportive management over the years, and he's worked in five different schools over the years.

I guess I was wondering what your experiences of the job were in terms of parents', children's and management's attitudes to teachers. Do they get a reasonable amount of respect and the freedom to do a good job, or is it similar to the situation in the UK, with demoralised teachers leaving the profession in droves?

[A & M]

My husband is a secondary teacher in the South Island, and he reckons it's just as bad here. Obviously he can only comment on the particular school he works in, and this is only his second term, but on the whole he is unimpressed. Just as in the UK, it depends very much on the school and the head.

Drop us a pm with any more questions and I will get him to reply to it so you get the info from the horse's mouth.

What subject does your husband teach?

Mandy

[veronica]

think that the school you get a job at will have a huge bearing on the attitudes of the pupils. Might be worth looking into what are known as the 'good' schools and applying for a job with them. Would probably pay you to spend a lot of time on research into it as there is going to be a lot of variety depending on socio-economic area/size of school/public or private etc.

[Graham Barnes]

My brother teaches in a secondary Decile-3 school in Northland.
And is really enjoying it-the lifestyle helps of course.

As other posters have said-the key is a sufficient number of quality teaching staff who really put in the time, and a good head. He's got both-although they have the usual problems of arsey parents, absentee pupils, etc. NZ also have the same National Curriculum problems-one size does NOT fit all!!
But how you look into a particular school before you get there, I don't know-he (and his UK girlfriend who also teaches there) got lucky. And don't trust the ERO reports-like OFSTED, schools put on a good show for the week in question!

The main recruitment season is October onwards-if you know roughly where you want to live, send introduction letters/CVs to 'good' schools in that region before that, and you might well get lucky. But get your teacher registration done first, or they are unlikely to consider you.
Of course, if you could be in NZ for a couple of weeks to meet schools for interviews, you could well be in business. :nice1

[Wannaway]

There was an article in the Herald the other day about some professor or other addressing newly graduated teachers and educators at Massey Uni. He had a bit of a rant about the shift in teaching in NZ, moving away from actually teaching kids things to just preparing them for work, less pastoral care, too much management and form filling etc. Caused a bit of a stir of course, given that he was addressing a bunch of newly graduated, shiny smiley would be teachers etc. Did sound horribly similar to common complaints about teaching in the UK.

[Debbie P.]

Dear all,

Thanks for all your replies - it does sound like teaching there is very similar to here ... with even less money invested!

Hopefully, if we do make the move, the lifestyle will make up for it... that's a long way off yet, though. I really enjoy reading all the topics on these forums - they're such a good way of finding out what a place is really like when you're not on holiday.

Thanks,

Debbie

[GeorgeM]

Personal experience will always depend on the individual school one ends up in. If you come from a 'good' school in a 'good' area in the UK and end up teaching in one of the 'bad' schools in a 'bad' area in Chch you will probably end up thinking that NZ schools are a lot worse than in Britain.

There are good/bad and problems/issues wherever you care to look (doesn't Eton have a problem with some pupils needing teachers to fiddle their exams for them ;) ) but I would wager that the bad in Chch wouldn't match the worst you would get in a UK city of comparable size (c400K).

My wife has taught at the 'top' and 'bottom' end in the UK and is now in a state school in Chch. She finds the environment she is in one of the most supportive she has worked in (in 20 years), without the depth of problems you would find in a similar school in the UK, even given the huge range of abilities and social backgrounds within the school.

The unfortunate reality is that, unless you are very lucky, a new migrated teacher (or anything else) is not going to have the pick of the jobs and is likely to end up in a job or school that few natives want. This is especially true of Chch which is seen as one of the more desirable places in NZ to be with decent jobs in every sector tending to be heavily applied for. Having a local track record seems very important, as does the ability to give local names as references, when you apply for competative jobs. Chch is a very small place - employers often know each other very well and are more comfortable if they can ring up one of their mates and talk about a candidate for a job.

Britain has a bigger gene pool than NZ so the 'local effect' is much less striking, but I would think that it would still be at work when a newly arrived teacher from Oz or NZ turns up - lack of local experience or famililarity with the curriculum would be enough to lose them a place on the short-list if there were a large number of applicants (which would normally be the case for the better jobs).

[ruthyroo]

I would agree with virtually all the points made above especially:

1. Individual school experience will have the biggest impact. Mr Rr is teaching in a pretty dire school - unsupportive management, lack of IT facilities, lack of investment, poor socio-economic area, problems with drugs / gangs / kids totally uninterested in school. And as a result he really is finding it hard to like NZ at all.

2. Immigrant teachers will end up in crappy schools - this certainly happened to us. It's very hard to find out all you need to about a school from half a world away. It was only when he actually got here that he found that the position he was taken had essentially been vacant for 5 years - no kiwi teachers wanted to take it on.

The key points for us have been:
- yes kiwis are more laid back, less stressed - this can translate into total lack of respect, non-existent motivation to learn, lack of interest in education. parents as well as kids.
- schools here are essentially working as private entities. Levels of investment in education are shockingly low despite gov claims to the contrary. Mr Rr's school essentially relies on asian students to pay teacher salaries. It really is education on the cheap.
- school management, in our expereince, is all about marketing and keeping the pupils numbers up - not about discipline etc. Mr Rr has been told that all discipline issues, even threats of violence, are to be dealt with in the classroom - not sent to the Principle. Recently there has been a series of gang fights, and kids caught smoking pot in school. Mr Rr had his bag and wallet stolen from a locked room. Did any of this make it to the police, or the papers? No way.

Sorry to be so jaundiced. Advice would be - be prepared when you first arrive. But then if you stick it out, and find a decent school, you will be in a position to enjoy NZ more. Also, FWIW, try and avoid maori / PI areas - they tend to co-incide with the worst of the poverty / discipline / drugs / social problems, which are hard to deal with on top of adusting to a new system.

[GeorgeM]

It's all down to leadership (or lack of it).

In my wife's school the Principal and deputies seem spot on. They have a very mixed roll with a large number of asians and pacific islanders, many of whom are not particularly bright, but they have a real grip on discipline. Teachers are explicity told not to deal with things in the classroom but to refer miscreants out - they then have to come back and apologise to the teacher and negotiate their way back into future classes.

Same as in any country in the world, I suppose, you get some Heads who can manage, lead and inspire and others who are just plain hopeless. And it doesn't always come down to the socio-economic status of the school. There are bad principals in "posh' schools and brilliant principals in poor ones.

Just before we left the UK we watched a documentary about problems in a school in the Horfield/Knowle West area of Bristol (I can't remember the exact school, but it was a really bad one). The head tried to instigate a graduation programme with certificates, graduation evening etc for the kids who normally left school with nothing. There was a really encouraging list of what the kids had to achieve before being allowed to graduate. One of the strands of the documentary focused on a 5th form truant who had hardly been to school for years. The head kept dangling carrot after carrot in front of her to get her to school - she would go for a morning and then not bother for the rest of the week etc. In the end she was allowed to graduate after "achieving" a "target" of getting to school for a couple of mornings before the end of term. Aparently this allowed her to break a lifetime of failure. With wishy-washy standards like this is it any wonder that some heads lose control and respect?