Teachers to stop work

Otago secondary school teachers will join their counterparts around the country in stopwork meetings with the Post Primary Teachers Association during the next three days to discuss future industrial action.

The teachers carried out rostered strikes in term four last year in response to stalled pay negotiations with the Ministry of Education.

A PPTA spokeswoman said the meetings would be to discuss and vote on any future industrial action.

It was hoped an announcement would be made later this week about what the PPTA's plans for the coming months will be, she said.

Secondary principals reached a settlement with the Ministry for their collective agreement yesterday, and hoped the same flexibility and willingness to spend money will be shown for secondary teachers.

New Zealand Secondary Principals' Council (NZSPC) chairwoman, Julia Davidson, and Secondary Principals' Association of New Zealand (SPANZ) president, Patrick Walsh, said the settlement represented a major step forward in terms of career structure by recognising the complexity of the secondary principal's job.

The settlement provided a ground-breaking way of reformulating remuneration for secondary principals which had no flow on to primary, Mr Walsh said.

This meant the needs of secondary principals could be met without being fettered by the additional costs of having to factor in the wage pass-on to primary principals through the entrenchment clause, Ms Davidson said.

She believed an offer that similarly recognised the work secondary teachers did would be successful in getting secondary teachers back to the bargaining table.

"If the ministry is prepared to show the same flexibility and willingness to put in a reasonable amount of money that was demonstrated with principals, I believe a settlement could be easily reached," she said.

This was the first settlement bargained jointly by NZSPC and SPANZ and the leaders of both groups paid tribute to the bargaining team.

"It has been a lengthy, and at times frustrating, process, but the team has worked collegially and with undivided determination to deliver a settlement that recognises principals' workload, career plans, professional learning needs, and the requirement for better industrial safeguards," Mr Walsh said.

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