Source: Radio New Zealand
The report highlights multiple short-comings in the disciplinary process and calls for improvements, including enforceable financial penalties. RNZ / Richard Tindiller
The Teaching Council’s penalties for dodgy teachers may be too light, an independent review says.
It also warned that incompetent teachers might be going under the radar.
The review commissioned by the council’s governing board and provided to media this week called for a major overhaul of the organisation with a greater focus on child safety and quality teaching.
The council registers teachers and also receives complaints about their conduct, many of which end up before a disciplinary tribunal.
The report highlighted multiple short-comings in the disciplinary process and called for improvements, including enforceable financial penalties.
The review was highly critical of the practice of asking teachers to agree not to teach if there were risks associated with continuing in their job or they might come into contact with complainants.
It said asking for a voluntary undertaking to stop teaching was troubling.
“Either the matter is such on its face that the teacher warrants formal suspension or not, pending the investigation. Once such an undertaking or suspension is in place, one would also think that these high risk cases would be fast tracked. It is not clear to me that this is consistently the case,” the report said.
It also questioned whether the penalties imposed by the Disciplinary Tribunal were too light.
“…some interviewees were not certain that the penalties being applied in some cases were proportionate to the risks or harm entailed. Some wondered if the rehabilitative view that guides competency decisions leaked into the conduct work,” the report said.
It warned that serious child predators were “manipulative, skilled at going under the radar and almost never rehabilitated” and suggested an audit of recent cases to check its decisions aligned with those made in courts.
“Such an audit should encompass both conduct and competence, and should also test all stages of the Council’s processes for compliance with relevant legislation and with child safeguarding principles.”
The report said interviewees spoken to during the review criticised the high cost to the council of the disciplinary process and its slow progress.
They also said support for victims and complainants seemed to be ad hoc and vary by investigator.
The review said not all of the council’s investigators were formally trained and the proportion of police-trained investigators had dropped.
It said that was not appropriate, especially in situations involving vulnerable victims.
“I would instead see formal training and external experience as mandatory, giving the sensitivity of the matters under investigation and the risk of traumatisation to vulnerable children or witnesses,” the report said.
It said the Disciplinary Tribunal’s penalties appeared to be unenforceable and appeared in the council’s accounts as doubtful debtors at a rate of 80 percent.
“In summary, there are significant opportunities to improve the targeting to risk, urgency, efficiency and timeliness of the conduct process. Justice delayed is very often justice denied.”
Incompetent teachers
The review recommended the council investigate whether schools are failing to report incompetent teachers.
It said the council received an average of 30 competence complaints a year, which seemed too few given the size of the teaching workforce.
“This appears to be an area of significant under reporting, in that principals and leaders may performance manage these cases out, or teachers may resign when competence is called into question,” the review said.
“Anecdotally, respondents suggested that such is the current teacher shortage, some of these teachers can dodge accountability by shifting between schools. ‘Some schools are just desperate’ one said, ‘…and they can’t afford to look too closely at performance’.”
The report said if schools were under-reporting, it would be of considerable concern.
It suggested the council engage with schools and agencies such as the Education Review Office to evaluate the size of the problem and possible treatments.
“The purpose of the competence process is to support teachers to build in an area they are not meeting. Unlike the discipline area, the competence process is designed primarily to be rehabilitative,” the report said.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
