Feedback for Education Minister Erica Stanford: Do better

Wednesday, 19 November 2025

Dr Jae Major is chair of the Teacher Education Forum of Aotearoa New Zealand.

OPINION: Initial teacher educators (those who teach our teachers) are shocked and angered by Education Minister Erica Stanford’s recent announcement to lift and shift some initial teacher education (ITE) responsibilities from the Teaching Council to the Ministry of Education, and to remove ITE representation on the governing council of the Teaching Council.

The ITE representative was elected by the sector, and the minister’s interference in the membership of the governing council is a significant and concerning overreach of power into teachers’ professional body.

Those of us working in the ITE sector (early childhood, primary and secondary) knew the minister sought to wrestle ITE responsibilities away from the Teaching Council, signalled in 2024, and had responded with detailed and evidenced-based feedback on why it was inappropriate and potentially harmful to the profession to do so.

What is deeply disturbing in the announcement is the rhetoric of failure that supposedly justifies this move, supported with cherry-picked references to reports, some of which have little substance, as other commentators have pointed out.

The continual negative positioning of the current state of education and teacher education is a concerted campaign to justify highly questionable actions, at a time when the whole education sector is reeling under the pressure imposed by this minister’s wrecking ball approach to “fix” everything that is supposedly broken.

As the peak body that represents initial teacher education, the Teacher Education Forum Aotearoa New Zealand (TEFANZ) rejects the minister’s negative framing of our sector.

We reject the notion that new graduates are unprepared for teaching, and that ITE providers are not responding to changes in teaching standards, curriculum, and assessment in our programmes.

Our collective experience suggests that many student teachers in the final term of their programmes secure jobs in schools and ECE centres ahead of completing their qualification, and many are working on a Limited Authority to Teach (LAT) or doing day-to-day relieving in Term 4.

The criticism that many new teachers are not confident to teach everything in the curriculum is perhaps not so surprising, especially for primary teachers who must teach eight learning areas.

There are two important things to know about ITE in New Zealand that factors into this response. First, ITE programmes here are significantly shorter than those of countries we like to compare ourselves to; undergraduate programmes are only three years and postgraduate are one year.

In Finland (the gold standard for education) for example, teachers must have a masters degree that takes between five and six years to attain. That’s every teacher in primary and secondary education, while in ECE, teachers must have a four-year bachelors degree.

In Australia, teaching qualifications take four years for undergraduate programmes and two at postgraduate level. New Zealand has some of the shortest programmes of teacher preparation, so perhaps the minister could consider resourcing longer ITE programmes if she really wants to enhance the readiness of new graduates.

The second thing is that the three (or one) years of ITE are only the first stage of teacher preparation. In addition to the period of formal study, there are two more years of teaching experience that must be completed prior to full certification.

In these two years, schools and ECE centres are funded to provide ongoing professional support and development. Teaching is highly complex work, and all new graduates will need support in some areas of their practice. However, unlike ITE programmes, there is no scrutiny or regulation of what happens in the two years of provisional registration.

ITE providers do not work in isolation, but in partnership with schools and ECE centres, with the Ministry of Education, the Teaching Council, NZQA, and with university approval processes. Our programmes are constantly monitored, moderated and reviewed to ensure high quality content and delivery.

ITE providers have worked hard for many years to build partnerships with schools and ECE centres to support not only the teaching practice experiences that student teachers complete during their formal programmes, but to work with the teaching community to continue to support the development of new teachers.

Unfortunately, the minister’s propensity for hasty and poorly designed change across the education sector has created a sense of overwhelm and fatigue among our teaching colleagues in schools and ECE centres, and this is impacting their ability to engage with ITE in preparing new teachers.

Coupled with Minister Stanford’s relentlessly negative rhetoric, TEFANZ is extremely concerned about the future of ITE in this country. If the minister wants to attract top candidates into the profession, which is currently experiencing shortages, constantly undermining and criticising the ITE sector seems like a poor way of going about it.

The ITE sector deserves to be properly consulted and represented in the decision making that determines the course of its development over the coming years. TEFANZ wants the Minister of Education to understand the reality and complexity of teaching and the time and resources needed to prepare teachers for that complexity.

We want the minister to understand that strong, resilient teachers draw from more than one model or theory of teaching and learning for their decision making, to stop dumping on initial teacher education and start engaging with our sector in productive ways: in other words, to do better.