Review of teacher PLD shows sector voices are being heard

MEDIA RELEASE
5 December 2013

Review of teacher PLD shows sector voices are being heard

NZSTA President Lorraine Kerr has welcomed the announcement that the provision of teacher professional development (now known as Professional Learning and Development, or PLD) is being reviewed.

“It’s boards of trustees who employ the people who teach in our schools, and so we are very interested in making sure that we get the best people into those positions, and that they get the best possible support once we’ve employed them,” she says. “Many of us in the sector, including boards and principals’ groups have been saying for some time that the way professional development for teachers is currently managed has not been working well enough. It is good to see the Minister responding to these concerns, and good to see that the sector is going to be actively involved in working out how to fix it.”

NZSTA will be one of the sector groups represented on the Advisory Group the announced by Minister Parata yesterday.

“We still have a lot of work to do in our schools to make sure that every New Zealand student gets a fair go. Making sure that professional development is available at the right time, in the right place, and in the right way for the teachers who need it and want it so they can give those students a fair go is really, really important.

“There’s been a lot of antagonism in the sector for a long time, with all the chopping and changing of policy from one government to the next. It’s taken quite a long time to reach a point where we can all sit down together again as professionals and work out a strategy that will benefit all our students. Every time we’ve reached that point over the past few decades, the rules have changed and we’ve had to watch it all fall apart. We finally seem to be reaching that point again, so NZSTA is looking for a good win-win result from this” says Lorraine.

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