‘Goal to have barrier-free education’: Minister Tinetti

The education sector plays an integral role in the success of any country, and New Zealand is no different. Jan Tinetti became the education minister following a cabinet reshuffle earlier this year. 

In an exclusive chat with The Indian Weekender, the minister spoke about her priorities, challenges and plans to make New Zealand a sought-after global education destination.  

Q1. What are your key priorities at this stage as the education minister?
My key priority is to help students, teachers, and other professionals in the education sector succeed at every level to the best of their ability. 

At this point, my key priorities to address include:

• Supporting the teacher workforce, including through remuneration, attracting and retaining teachers.
• Supporting the tertiary sector through the difficult times they are having.
• Helping to re-engage students and further increase attendance.
• Delivering the updated secondary school curriculum.
• Removing obstacles to students’ learning, for example, through school lunches and free period products.

Q2. How do you respond to those who say the NZ education system is in crisis?We know there are issues, and we have work programmes to address them. These both centre around improving the key priority areas I have listed above, as well as our other priorities. For specific issues, it will take time to make changes and see the results of our work. We will continue with it until we achieve our goal of barrier-free education.

Q3. What are your biggest challenges? 
We need our children and young people to attend school and be engaged in their learning. The term one attendance data, which has recently been released, shows things are improving but more work is needed.

We need to remove barriers to education to ensure all students have access. We are addressing barriers through free healthy school lunches to those in the greatest need, providing over a million lunches nationwide and free period products in schools. We're also investing in supporting our students who need additional support.

Ensuring we have an education system which supports all students to fulfil their potential is essential, this means providing a curriculum that supports, extends and nurtures.

Q4. How do you plan to deal with the labour shortage in the education system?
The government has invested $24m in 2022-23 and a further $24m in 2023-24 to enhance teacher supply. Interventions aim to attract high-quality candidates from diverse backgrounds, through multiple pathways.

Some of the initiatives include:?? 

• Fully subsidising the Teacher Education Refresh programme to attract former teachers back to teaching.? ? 
• Speeding up the processing of domestic teacher applications and  overseas teacher applications to increase the speed teachers enter classrooms.? 
• Scholarships for people that want to make a career change to start a career as a teacher.? 
• Supporting schools to recruit overseas teachers by offering the Overseas Relocation Grant at a higher rate of up to $10,000 per teacher.? 
• Reducing financial barriers for overseas teachers for International Qualification Assessments and adding all qualified teachers to the Accredited Employer Work Visa Green List.?
• Navigators who provide schools and Kura with 1:1 support to navigate the steps in the overseas teacher recruitment process. They also support overseas teachers to take the necessary steps to be able to teach in Aotearoa.
• Providing the Overseas Finders Fee of $3,450, which helps offset overseas teacher recruitment costs for schools and kura.? 

Q5. What is your plan to get young people back into the classroom?
In June 2022, the government introduced a nationwide strategy called ‘All in for learning’. This multi-year plan includes 13 priority actions to influence attendance and engagement positively. It builds on the $88-million attendance package announced in Budget 2022, which allocated funds for a Regional Response Fund, improvements to the Attendance Service, and Alternative Education.

The ministry continues to support the $10-million annual Regional Response Fund, created through the 2022 Budget, to provide takiwa with immediate resources needed to design and deliver local attendance initiatives that meet the community's specific needs. 

Budget 2023 funded new attendance officer roles to bolster the 275 full-time and part-time people employed by existing attendance services providers.