Ready, set, teach: How prepared and supported are new teachers? also found 60 per cent of school principals say their graduate teachers are coming into their roles unprepared.   

Vaughan Couillault, president of SPANZ and principal of Papatoetoe High School, says the findings are not surprising.

 “[They’re] beginning teachers, you don’t expect them to be a master of their craft on their first day of work,” Couillault admits.

“[But many are] just not as prepared as we would like, particularly in the areas where you’re engaging with humans.

“So engaging with bits of paper and lesson planning and all that sort of thing, not a problem, but when engaging with people in terms of adults or students, they’re not quite as prepared,” he adds.

More than a third of new teachers reported they were not able to manage behaviour, and working with parents and whānau, adapting their teaching and using assessment were other key areas of concern.

ERO (Education Review Office Te Tari Arotake Mātauranga) has found that teacher education is often not preparing new teachers for the role.

“We know that schools are working hard to support new teachers and they quickly learn on the job, but we need to ensure initial teacher education better prepares new teachers,” Ruth Shinoda, head of ERO’s Education Evaluation Centre said in a statement.  

“We are particularly concerned that there is so much variation in the quality of teacher education across New Zealand.

“Some courses are setting up teachers well, but we need all courses to do this.

Shinoda says ERO found that more than a quarter of new teachers claim their teacher education was ineffective.

Stephanie Martin, adjunct fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, is also unsurprised by ERO’s findings.

Martin recalls feeling underprepared herself, as a graduate teacher, and is now working for New Zealand Tertiary College, developing some new teacher training qualifications.

In her role, Martin spends a lot of time in conversations with principals around teacher training, and the message is pretty consistent.

“I just don’t feel like we’re giving teachers a fair shot,” she tells EducationHQ.

“I think there’s real concerns about our future workforce and the level of attrition that’s going on early in careers, and it just seems to me that we really have a responsibility here to take this seriously and to be looking at ways to support our teachers better to actually thrive when they come to the job.”

Martin co-authored a report last year with, then senior research fellow at The New Zealand Initiative, Michael Johnston.

She says the findings of that report, Who Teaches the Teachers? Reforming Initial Teacher Education in New Zealand, and new research by ERO are like two sides of the same coin.

“So what we were looking at was the provision of ITE itself and suggesting that the ITE that’s on offer through the university-based model is generally not preparing our teachers well for the classroom.

“This ERO report just shows the other end of that, that as teachers are entering into the profession, they’re not feeling prepared.”

ERO found that new teachers who spend more time in the classroom during their education are more prepared and recommends expanding programmes with more in-classroom training. 

The most significant relationship ERO uncovered, was that between the amount of time spent in the classroom during their course, and a teacher’s preparedness in their first term of teaching.

“They’re just better prepared if they’ve done more on-the-job training. It’s not rocket science is it?” Couillault comments on the finding.

ERO has identified three action areas which include attracting new teachers who are most likely to succeed in the role, strengthening ITE, particularly in areas where teachers feel least prepared, and providing better support for new teachers in their first two years.

Martin feels there needs to be a bottom-up approach to reforming ITE, which involves a more rigorous set of professional teaching standards.

“A lot of this really hinges on the teaching standards themselves, because all ITE providers need to focus what they’re teaching student teachers, in terms of the teaching standards,” Martin says.

“Our recommendation was that we think the Education and Training Act should be amended to allow other professional bodies to exist alongside the teaching council and set their own standards, so that we could explore different constructs of standards to see what would be most effective,” Martin explains.

“The idea is that the ones that were most effective will triumph in the end.

“Because, we have doubts that the current teaching standards for the profession are effective.”