When Uatesoni Filikitonga first walked into the classroom at Waitaki Boys’ High School, he thought he would be shadowing a real teacher. He was then surprised to hear the rector say, “Kia ora boys, this is your new teacher”, before leaving him alone, aged 21, in front of 30 teenagers,
some only three years younger than him.
After leaving Auckland Grammar School, he’d spent three years gaining a bachelor of arts in acting at the national drama school, Toi Whakaari. He never expected his first professional role would be Pacific Studies teacher at a high school in Ōamaru in a “limited authority to teach” role – which allows unqualified teachers with specialist skills to teach in subjects where there is a shortage of teachers.
As soon as the bell went, he says, his training kicked in. The one thing he knew how to do was perform, so perform he did.
The experience led him to apply for the flagship programme of Ako Mātātupu Teach First NZ, a teacher-training organisation. The part-state-funded programme is run by a charity launched 14 years ago. It has occasionally proved controversial in educational circles but is still relatively unknown outside the sector.
It works like this: after a “rigorous” selection process and intensive introductory course of just a few weeks, someone with no teaching experience at all can find themselves standing in front of a classroom of teenagers as a full-time teacher.
Modelled on similar programmes overseas, collectively known as Teach For All, its goal is to close the inequality gap between the country’s highest and lowest academic achievers. Its vision is to enable all young people to realise their potential.
To do that it aims to attract “exceptional people” into teaching, allowing them to skip the usual years of education before placing them in schools with high levels of socio-economic deprivation, where they begin teaching immediately while studying for their formal qualification.
Started here in 2012 by New Zealander Shaun Sutton, who had been through the equivalent programme in the UK, 400 people have completed the training, with another 130 currently signed up. All of them started their careers at high-needs schools, but not all have stayed there.
In their first year, new Teach First teachers have 0.6 of a normal teaching load and are assigned a mentor from the school, funded by the Ministry of Education, to provide support for one day a week. In the second year, they teach 0.7 of a full load and mentoring funding is reduced to half a day a week.
Chief executive Liam Munday says it has “a bigger purpose and a bigger mission”, which sets the organisation apart from traditional teacher-training programmes such as those run by universities.
Munday says New Zealanders don’t talk much about the gap between our highest achievers and lowest achievers and between Māori/Pasifika students and Pākehā/Asian students, but it’s there and it’s vast, and his organisation is trying to do something about it.
“I think that allows us to attract people who are aligned with that, who are both committed in the short term and the long term to seeing the change that is required within a particular community.”
“Change” is a word Teach First uses a lot. Conspicuously, its motto – “Growing leaders for change” – doesn’t even mention teaching.
Munday says it is looking for people who will strive for change throughout their career, “whether that’s moving into leadership in schools, or potentially taking a step outside the classroom environment and working in policy. I want one of our alumni to come to me and say, ‘I really want to start this organisation,’ [even if] it’s another non-profit organisation.
“Our theory is we’re trying to get great teachers, but we’re also trying to build this movement of leaders who are working in all different ways to create the systemic change that’s required to really affect the inequity that we have within our education system, but more broadly as well.”
Glowing report
Manurewa High School principal Peter Jones is a supporter of the programme and employer of trainees. This year, the school has three first-year recruits, who will join three starting their second year and two who have just graduated and are staying on.
“In terms of why it was set up, its purpose and what it’s doing and continues to do, it is absolutely on the mark,” Jones says. “There’s a real need and point of difference from other teacher-training programmes. Nobody does it with the cultural and equity lens that Teach First does.”
In August 2024, the programme received a glowing External Evaluation and Review Report from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, which gave it grades of “excellent” in every area.
It reported trainees “consistently outperform sector benchmarks across all demographics” and are “well equipped for teaching in culturally diverse environments”.
The course completion rate for Māori and Pasifika students in particular was significantly above that of the sector as a whole.
Jones says he sees real benefit in being able to train and shape people to fit the unique context of his school, New Zealand’s largest high-needs index school with more than 60 different nationalities, a strong indigenous educational framework and a focus on cultural identity.
If you can teach at Manurewa High School, you’ll be good anywhere.
Manurewa High School principal Peter Jones
He says the school faced challenges in the past with graduates of traditional training programmes arriving “very green” and without the experience to survive.
“It takes a special type of person to work in our context. And the more we get to shape them during that process, that very much helps.”
In the early days of the relationship with Teach First, the school struggled to keep graduates on after their initial two years. Jones felt Manurewa High was “doing all the hard yards”, after which graduates would take what they’d learnt elsewhere.
The school now finds people who are already part of its community, or who it believes would be a good fit, and recommends them to Teach First, which then puts them through its own selection process.
“And then we’ve got that real strong connection – it’s actually been a way of, if you like, training our own,” says Jones.
While Teach First’s main pathway is for degree holders, it also has a pathway for people without degrees but with relevant experience in the field.
This has been particularly useful for Manurewa in developing some of the “really strong people” it has working in the school, particularly as teacher aids, he says.
“A lot of our people haven’t gone through a traditional uni degree because they’ve not been able to do that for other reasons, not because they’ve not got the capability or the potential to do it.”
A path for te reo
Munday says the programme allows people from “the communities that we’re looking to serve” to help their own.
“A beautiful example of this is we’ve had teachers who have been working as te reo Māori teachers within a school for many years but have never had the chance to train as a teacher formally because of the financial barrier.”
He says 70% of those who have been through the programme are still teaching, although he doesn’t say what proportion have remained in low-decile schools.
It has trained 50 te reo Māori teachers, which is a fifth of the workforce of 250 reo teachers. More than 50% of the current cohort of graduates are Māori or Pasifika.
Katera Rikihana-Tukerangi is one of those teachers. A former social worker specialising in trauma, she was helping out at Ōtaki College, where her four children were students, when the te reo Māori teacher quit. She began teaching the classes herself, initially as a reliever. Then she was accepted into Teach First.
A few days into her initial intensive course, she got a call to say her mother was dying and had two to four weeks to live. Rikihana-Tukerangi considered quitting, but says her mother really wanted her to keep going, so she did. A week after burying her mum, she was back training.
“Being on this course has helped me to get through that,” she says. “The wraparound that this course offers is so beneficial. It’s not just a course, honestly. It’s a life-changing experience.”
She says she’s glad she decided to study later in life because she has so much more experience.
Now 44, she has finished her two years in the programme, has a postgraduate teaching qualification and is planning to go on to study for her masters and eventually a doctorate.
For her final project in the programme, she focused on kapa haka and its capacity “to help students stand proud and be their authentic selves”.
The result was Ōtaki performing in the regional competition for the first time in 20 years.
In her two years teaching, the number of students studying te reo has grown from 40 to 150, roughly a third of the school.
In Ōamaru, Uatesoni Filikitonga also found students keen to engage with cultural activities when he joined Waitaki Boys’ High. He grew the Polyfest team from just over 20 students cribbing routines from YouTube to a group of 53 choreographing and performing their own work.
He was also in charge of volleyball and rugby, and a team leader until his resignation late last year. He says Teach First gave him the confidence to believe that what he had to offer was valuable, “no matter your experience, no matter your age.
“You won’t get this experience if you’re stuck in a uni lecture room.”
Throwing shade
Teach First’s public relations team is currently making a push for attention, saying it has previously stayed out of the spotlight. But that is not quite accurate. Whether or not it has sought the media, it has been featured, and not always in the way it would have liked.
In 2012, the PPTA commissioned independent researchers at Perth’s Murdoch University to conduct a review of all existing studies into the overseas “Teach For All” programmes on which Teach First was based.
The review, and subsequent academic paper in the Journal of Pedagogy, found such schemes, some of which had existed for decades, were often marketed as providing an opportunity for successful graduates to “do their bit for students in poor areas” before moving on to “their real careers in business and the like”. The PPTA added such marketing was “very obvious” in New Zealand.
The review’s summary reads: “With its missionary zeal, Teach For All is heralded by some as one way to solve socio-educational problems that governments cannot. Others condemn such schemes as not only patronising, but also as part of an ideologically driven and deliberate neoliberal attack on public education, teachers, teacher professionalism and working class or ‘other’ communities.”
People who enrol in that programme may see teaching as a way to get into a change leadership career as opposed to staying in teaching.
Professor of education John O’Neill
In a 2017 New Zealand Herald article headlined “Putting graduates straight into classrooms does not always work”, graduate Sam Oldham criticised it for using the classroom as a classroom, maintaining vulnerable students “become subjects in someone else’s training”.
He wrote that the organisation tells trainees to “fail early, fail often”, and that he had seen the results of such failure in the classroom. “This is not the fault of the teacher, but of a system that throws them into the most challenging classrooms in the country after six weeks of lectures.”
He also criticised the public funding component of the organisation, stating there was no research to support the idea Teach First grads were any better than their “plebeian counterparts”.
He also threw considerable shade on how it chose participants. “The Teach First recruitment process leaves much to be desired. Participants are selected on academic records, their ability to demonstrate mysterious ‘leadership qualities’ and, ultimately, their ability to impress recruiters. None of these are a substitute for robust teacher education.”
In 2015, the PPTA took an Employment Relations Authority case against Teach First for appointing participants to jobs that hadn’t been appropriately advertised. The ERA ruled in favour of the PPTA.
In 2016, also in the Herald, Louise Green, then president of the country’s primary teachers union, NZEI Te Riu Roa, criticised the Teach First model, telling reporter Nicholas Jones, “Any teacher will tell you how daunting it is to teach a class just after graduating with a teaching qualification. It beggars belief that someone could hope to be an effective teacher with anything less.”
Public & private funding
Teach First is a registered charity. In the year ended June 30, 2024, it received $1.6 million in government funding on top of $890,187 in philanthropic donations.
Massey University professor of education John O’Neill is staunchly opposed to the organisation receiving money from the government.
He believes the education system should be publicly funded and publicly provided. “And if people want to operate outside that, then that’s fine, but they shouldn’t be subsidised by the public purse.”
Private providers have an advantage, he says, because they don’t have the same infrastructure costs as universities, which have to spend to retain their research function, as required by law.
He doesn’t have a problem with Teach First offering programmes targeted at creating potential community change leaders, but he opposes “the government putting money into that when the chances are that the people who enrol in that programme may see teaching as a way to get into a change leadership career as opposed to staying in teaching”.
You could argue that [Teach First] is a Band-Aid – that it’s kind of mission driven, but it hasn’t changed the system in any way to actually improve equity overall.
NZEI Te Riu Roa national secretary Stephanie Mills
These views may sound somewhat surprising given that O’Neill was on the academic advisory board for Teach First for several years, but he says they knew when they asked him to join the board he “wasn’t particularly well disposed” to the organisation and he saw his role as “a sort of critical friend”.
He is no longer on the board, having stepped away when it became a direct competitor to his employer, Massey University. He says throughout his involvement with Teach First he was impressed by both the commitment of the people and their commitment to a multicultural model.
“I couldn’t speak more highly of the people there: absolutely committed educators, absolutely committed to reducing educational inequalities, absolutely committed to te tiriti-based and Pacific values-based way of doing teacher education.
“And the board members at the moment are all people who’ve made similar commitments to addressing socio-economic disadvantage through education.”
His views about the organisation, he says, come down to his personal beliefs and ideology.
“Private education should be privately funded. There’s little enough money in state education as it is.”
Blossoming industry
Until 2019, Teach First was the country’s only employment-based teacher-training programme. That same year, then-education minister Chris Hipkins announced funding of nearly $12 million to develop to give trainees more employment-based options for teacher training.
To that end, Hipkins succeeded. Since 2019, an eruption of employment-based training providers has occurred.
In its first year, the School Onsite Training Programme that flowed from the announcement offered 240 places for student teachers to gain experience in secondary schools while studying toward their teaching qualifications. This year, it will offer 465 funded places in primary and secondary schools, including kaupapa Māori and Māori-medium kura.
The funding includes a bursary worth $19,930 to support the student teacher’s education and $2000 to the host school.
Some of the higher profile organisations being funded include the Teachers’ Institute, Auckland Schools’ Teacher Training Programme, and the Teacher Education in Schools Programme. There are many more. Students in these programmes – unlike Teach First – are not employees and are not paid a salary. Instead, they receive a much smaller bursary, from which they also have to pay their fees.
Gauging the impact
It’s unclear how much difference Teach First and similar programmes have made to the issue of inequality in our schools, though it is clear that the problem has not gone away.
Manurewa’s Peter Jones says he has “huge concerns” about inequity in education and doesn’t believe Minister of Education Erica Stanford is doing what’s necessary to fix it.
As to the benefits of the Teach First programme for his students, he praises its ability to enable people to get into teaching who may not have made it via traditional teacher training ‒ including those already connected to the school who have become “amazing” teachers.
Stephanie Mills, national secretary of NZEI Te Riu Roa, says, “You could argue that [Teach First] is a Band-Aid – that it’s kind of mission driven, but it hasn’t changed the system in any way to actually improve equity overall.
“Teach First might disagree with that, but I guess what we’d say is that all teachers in training should be given paid practicums and be funded in ways that they can actually sustain training.
“In some ways, having some models which the government can point to and say, ‘Well, if you can’t afford to go to your tertiary institutions, why don’t you just go and train in school?’ is letting the government off the hook.”
The final word goes to the independent researchers from the University of Perth, whose 2012 findings on the international Teach For All movement remain pertinent.
“In summary, at present, the story of TFA is neither black nor white, but rather a ‘shades of grey’ story.
“In other words, TFA is the type of story without straightforward or neat answers, that few want to hear, and few want to tell.”
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