Thousands of striking teachers rallied, chanted and shouted at Education Minister Jan Tinetti in the first ever strike involving kindergarten, primary and secondary school teachers.<\/p>\n
The members of the Post Primary Teachers Association and the Educational Institute took the action after rejecting similar offers including pay rises of $6000-7000 over two years.<\/p>\n
At Parliament grounds in Wellington, secondary teacher Melanie McGrath said teachers were under paid, but the real problem was working conditions.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt as desperate as I do right now for our education. It’s very scary the situation in schools at the moment, the amount of I guess feeling like we’ve got to cut corners to do our job,” she said.<\/p>\n
Helen Tuapola said conditions had worsened in the 30 years she had been a kindergarten teacher.<\/p>\n
“I think we’re feeling really angry to be quite honest,” she said.<\/p>\n
“During Covid the expectation was that teachers would carry on and continue to educate in whatever way we could and we were seen as people that were necessary but when life goes back to normal we’re forgotten.”<\/p>\n
Second-year maths teacher Jordan Hallas said she made more money per hour in her previous job as a bar manager because teachers were not paid for all the extra hours they worked.<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty abysmal. I’ve had to budget quite a lot, money’s a stress for me, which it shouldn’t be as a teacher. I have two undergraduate degrees, I have a postgraduate degree in order to be a teacher. None of that’s required for hospitality,” she said.<\/p>\n
Primary teacher Debs Burson said she was striking for the tamariki.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
source rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thousands of striking teachers rallied, chanted and shouted at Education Minister Jan Tinetti in the first ever strike involving kindergarten, primary and secondary school teachers. The members of the Post Primary Teachers Association and the Educational Institute took the action after rejecting similar offers including pay rises of $6000-7000 over two years. At Parliament grounds […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3733,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3732"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3734,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3732\/revisions\/3734"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}