A border exemption will allow 300 overseas qualified teachers to enter New Zealand under a new class.
Education Minister Chris Hipkins made the announcement and said there was a teacher shortage from the early childhood education level through to secondary school. Some subjects and areas of the country had been particularly difficult to find teachers for, he said in a statement.
The exemption would help meet some immediate needs, especially for 2022 recruitment. To put it into context, in a typical year before the border was closed we'd expect to get about 600 teachers coming in, so the 300 exemption is a start, it gets us halfway to what we would normally get from abroad if there were no border restrictions in place.”
The spaces would be made available on a priority system, and the Ministry of Education would be in charge of making sure schools with the “greatest recruitment needs” got access.
“The need for additional teachers is uneven through the system,” Hipkins said. “We know early childhood centres are often really struggling to recruit – particularly some of our lower socio-economic early childhood centres.
Applications for the teachers will open from September.
“We are working really hard to train more teachers, but that takes three to four years,” Hipkins said.
“So there's a demand here and now that we need to be able to meet. So the border exemption will allow us to bring in 300 qualified teachers from abroad to fill the immediate gap.”
Teachers who had been working in New Zealand, but had been shut out by border closures may also be able to return under the scheme, he said. And a separate family reunification border exemption was being created for the partners and dependent children of teachers who were already in New Zealand on temporary visas.
