Ensuring that our students get the investment of time and attention from New Zealand’s world class teachers is one of the best things that we can do to ensure better educations for our future generations.
An easy and effective way we can achieve that is to reduce the size of the classes for teachers in order to ensure more one-on-one time between an individual student and their teacher.
Our motivation is simple; we want to ensure a future where our students, parents and teachers feel like they are getting more out of our education system.
That’s why National has announced our commitment to increasing the number of primary teachers to reduce class sizes and give kids more teacher time.
By seeking to increase the number of teachers and decrease class sizes we can help ensure that every child has the help to reach their potential.
All of us will be able to remember the positive effect a good teacher had on our education and smaller class sizes helps to harness that positivity. By allowing more time with individual students, teachers can focus on a more tailored approach to each student in their class and that can only be a good thing.
This is a policy that is good for students but also continues to recognise the need to support teachers.
Schools currently get one teacher for every 29 nine and 10-year-olds. It’s lower than that for younger children.
By bringing that ratio down, we can help to ensure that schools are staffed in such a way to give teachers more time to invest in individual students at a stage of their lives when they need it most.
This is an idea that provides the support to teachers to connect with individual students and tailor our curriculum to better suit those students’ needs.
We’ve put the idea on the table and we’re committed to seeing it through. Over the next two years,we will be working hard with teachers, parents and communities to ensure that we can put forward a detailed and comprehensive plan to implement in 2020.
– Jami-Lee Ross, Member of Parliament for Botany
