DANZ QUARTERLY - Issue No 9: October, November, December 2007

Tenacity and Frustration: The battle to get your private sector dance teaching experience recognised by the Ministry of Education in primary schools. 

Jenny Cossey reviews the teaching environment, recounts her experiences, and offers insight into the difficulties.

Dance teachers who wish to be employed in state schools are usually employed in one of three ways:
a GST registered self-employed dance teacher on a fixed term short contract;
a teacher-aide employee;
or after completing a degree and teacher training, as a classroom or specialist teacher, for a variable number of hours per week.

While the latter two pay rates are determined by the Ministry of Education (MOE) the legal employer of teachers is the Board of Trustees (BOT). The MOE fund teacher’s salaries, but it is the BOT who employ staff and choose the level of specialist art activities in their schools.

There are private sector dance teachers, whose experience includes skills in teaching and behaviour management, who would like MOE financial acknowledgement. Principals and BOTs acknowledge this by employing skilled dance specialists - DANZ QUARTERLY issue no 8 explored these issues.

Private sector teachers can negotiate their own pay rates, but schools are often hampered by financial restraints and procedures, which commonly result in low pay. The funding may come from the operations budget or fundraising, or the teacher may be paid a project fee rather than an hourly contact rate.

Schools may prefer to pay qualified dance teachers as teacher aides, resulting in limited job security and irregular hours. Some prefer dance as an afternoon activity which can clash with private studio teaching time.

Primary teachers can teach in NZ secondary schools, but not visa versa unless they re-train as primary teachers. This appears arbitrary to private dance teachers who teach all age groups.

After completing teacher training, a graduate applies to the NZ Teachers Council for provisional registration. After two years as a full time provisionally registered beginner, a teacher then can apply for registration. The MOE set the pay rates for both. From graduation, pay incrementally increases by the number hours of employment, providing professional standards are met in the annual appraisal.

Experienced private dance teachers who gain teacher qualifications, may wish to have their private sector work valued and recognised financially by the MOE. Though successful, I found the application for recognition frustrating as the MOE and their payroll agencies had little understanding of the private dance sector. And the MOE will not consider an application unless the teacher is in a fixed term or permanent school teaching position.

The MOE’s criteria for recognition are the number of teaching hours, and this has to proven to the local pay agency. This can cause problems as most private dance teachers are self-employed, and manage and produce their own annual accounts, tax and ACC payments. They seldom keep records of their teaching hours, as their record keeping is primarily for IRD, who are only interested in income.

The collective agreement of employment for teachers in primary and intermediate state schools allows up to four years fulltime teaching to be half accredited towards a school teacher’s salary (i.e. the maximum of four years fulltime work that can be credited, correlates to two years of fulltime classroom teaching on the pay scale). Hence a private sector dance teacher with four years fulltime private sector teaching experience accredited by the MOE, can within three years of graduating from Teachers College, be at the top of the A scale school teachers salary scale. If their prior work experience is not recognised it will take an additional two years to reach this level.

To credit previous work, MOE counts from the time the appropriate vocational qualification is completed i.e. private/public sector dance teaching qualification. Copies of qualifications are assessed by the NZ Qualification Authority (NZQA). If they are overseas qualifications it will cost a few hundred dollars and take a few weeks. NZQA will rank them at an equivalent NCEA NZ level and for MOE approval they must be at NCEA level three or higher.

Relevant work experience has to be within the last ten years and certificates of service from previous employers are required so credits can be counted. This is problematic for self-employed teachers who are often both employer and employee, do not usually write themselves contracts for service or keep hourly records. I was very frustrated when seeking clarity in this area from MOE. I had received grant money for dance projects with young people, hired halls, maintained annual accounts for IRD, but was not able to show statements of service. MOE finally asked for audited accounts of my hours of work. Although I had produced annual accounts for IRD, they were not independently audited.

It was unclear from MOE how I was to prove my teaching hours and what fulltime meant. My accountant was equally bamboozled by the “bean counting” nature of proving every hour of dance teaching from the previous10 years through my 10 boxes of neatly filed GST receipts. (IRD only requests that paperwork is kept for seven years.)  My accountant and I based “fulltime” on the school teaching year, but MOE was not keen to allow a private sector teacher the 12 weeks annual non-contact time in the calculations. So, we based our calculations on a 5 hour contact teaching day and four weeks annual leave.

Project funding money from Creative NZ, Creative Communities, MOE (via a DANZ project), hire of halls to teach community classes etc were reconfigured into the number of contact hours of teaching. As this was public money it was reported as expenditure by the funding organisations, but not hours of work. Thus there were two incompatible accounting systems. This took months of work.

Once these certificates of service/audited accounts used as proof of vocational qualification were collated, they were forwarded to MOE via the local pay agency. The agencies forward all correspondence to the Industrial Relations Unit at the MOE, as MOE does not deal with teachers directly. Statutory declarations of statement of service are not accepted on their own, even though early correspondences from the MOE inferred this. I suggest all statements of service, which are not based in schools, be signed as statutary documents to assist your cause. Once all this paperwork is prepared the pay agency process can be quite fast, but I advise anyone to check the figures.

I hope my adventures in proving prior experience will be of benefit to others.

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