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I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. There are a number of employment dispute avenues in New Zealand, dependent on what industry you're in. If you're one of the one hundred and fourteen thousand registered teachers in this country, you have to appear before something called the teacher's Disciplinary Tribunal.
Last year, there were five hundred and twenty four complaints, mandatory reports and self reports received by the Teaching Council, which is about zero point five percent of the total number of teachers who held a practicing certificate. Now, while it's more than twenty twenty three, which saw four hundred and sixty two complaints, that accounted for just zero point four percent. For the latest in our series looking at how different tribunals work today on the Front Page, we're
joined again by Open Justice reporter Jeremy Wilkinson. So tell me, Jeremy, what actually is the teacher's disciplinary Tribunal.
Yeah, So, the Teacher's Disciplinary Tribunal is an arm of the Teaching Council who will appoint a what's called a professional conduct committee to charge or prosecute teachers before the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal, and that's for breaches of their professional obligations, so that they're not breaches that are illegal in a criminal context, but they are breaches of their code of ethics.
So that might be drug use or an inappropriate relationship with a student, or in some cases they're kind of taking a second bite out of the cherry. If, for example, there's a teacher who's been caught drink driving and is charged through the district court, then they might well, they probably will end up before the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal as well because it's a brief of their code of efforts.
So what kind of powers does the tribunal have.
They can cancel a teachers registration so that that person can no longer teach in New Zealand. That really only happens for the most serious of breaches, but we do see it happen often. We will see a suspension or a fine or conditions imposed on their practice, and that those conditions might be they need to complete a course or have supervision while they teach, or inform a prospective employer that they've had a censure or a mark against them at the tribunal.
What kind of cases have you seen.
Yeah, I've seen quite a few in my time. There's a few. I think one that stands out is probably Sealin Romiah. He was the Jamescott High School deputy principal and he was caught sending explicit images and text messages to several students and another staff member, and he actually ended up in prison because one of those students was under the age of sixteen.
Are all of the cases that the tribunal rules on made public? What's the threshold for keeping a teacher's name out of the public records? Say?
Yeah, So my understanding was that all of the tribunal's decisions are made public, but the teacher might get suppression. Basically, the tribunal will maker an assessment similar to the courts, about whether someone is entitled to suppression, and they'll take him into account a range of things. But the decision will be published, but whether that person's name is in it is a different thing.
I saw a case recently that you reported on. It was a seventeen year old girl who said she was offered ten thousand dollars to drop a complaint against a family friend who came into her room in the hope that she would sleep with him. Now he wasn't her teacher, but he was a registered teacher. She took her complaint to the police, who then referred it to the Complaint's Assessment Committee of the teacher's Council, which then later che
charge against him. So I guess this is an example of the kind of case that maybe police wouldn't be able to take to court and successfully convict, but the council could. Is that right?
So the police will obviously charge someone where they can where they have enough evidence too, but in some cases the charge doesn't meet the threshold for a criminal charge.
So I suppose a good example of this is that the age of consent in New Zealand is sixteen, So it's not illegal for a teacher to engage in a physical sexual relationship with a sixteen year old student, and purely in the terms of it not being criminal, but it is deeply and fundamentally ethically morally inappropriate in terms
of a professional conduct context, so not illegal. They wouldn't be criminal criminally charged, but they would end up before the teacher's disciplinary tribunal and probably lose their teaching registration for it.
Also recently, there was an interesting case from christ Church Boys High School where an ex teacher accused the headmaster of leaving feces on her property on eight occasions in retaliation for her raising concerns about him with the board and police. Now, this case was going through the Employment
Relations Authority rather than the teaching council. But you then have a teaching council case processed in the year to June twenty twenty four where a Fielding daycare owner was found guilty of serious misconduct for her behavior towards children and staff members, including telling one staffer that she was quote too fat to eat KFC. So what is the threshold for a case to go to one tribunal over another When it comes to teachers.
My understanding was that with the er, you needed to lodge your complaint to yourself. It's not a quasi judicial professional body that is prosecuting or laying charges against a professional like a teacher, a doctor, or a lawyer. Instead, you have a disgruntled employee who was taking their employer proactively through the court. I suppose and effect the employee
becomes the prosecution. You know, they might hire a lawyer or an employment advocate to take the case on their behalf, whereas with the teacher's disciplinary tribunal, it is a professional conduct committee of the Teaching Council who will lay charges against a teacher for breaches of their conduct, and the same way that the Medical Council as a professional conduct committee or the New Zealand Law Society they have standards committees who will lay charges against lawyers on behalf of
the law Society to take them to the lawyers and conveyances disciplinary tribunal. So I suppose that's whether the difference is one is person or complainant led the other side is led by the professional body.
Nothing was done to prevent it. There were no talks to students about specific things. It was just kind of a don't connect with teachers on social media. There were never any hard lines about it and it was really up to the discretion of teachers at the end of
the day. I think the issue is with these apps where you can erase all of the previous messages, you can delete texts, you can erase cool history, snapchats disappear, but having a platform where the it or the school department is able to have access to those records.
I think that's really important. I stumbled upon your reporting of teachers and the use of social media. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
So I went through the numbers last year and looked at how many inappropriate relationship cases there were before the tribunal and of those, how many of those was social media a factor? And so the data showed that since twenty ten, there have been fifty three cases of teachers using social media to groom young people in their care, which makes up about sixty percent of the eighty nine cases involving that type of behavior in the last fourteen years.
Have you spoken with anyone who feels that we need some kind of law around teachers student interactions updated given how social media controls our lives these days.
I spoke to a few people for that article. One of them was Professor Michael McCauley. He's form a judge from the United Kingdom, a lecture at Victoria University School of Government, and he focuses on ethics and integrity with
his own research. He said, be really simple and not really that controversial to ban social media contact between teachers and students, even in a digital age where students and teachers do actually need to be able to email or have some kind of communication for their assignments or their homework or whatever it is. Has point, I suppose was that you could just have one official point of contact basically so that there can be a site so that the messages can't be deleted. Like we saw with Seale
and Remia from James Cook High School. He asked three students to download Signal, which is an encrypted messaging app, and the messages are deleted after a certain period of time.
And that's I suppose a common theme that I saw among that data, with those sixty percent of those eighty nine cases was that it starts with emailing in the pre Facebook era, and now these days it is primarily texting or Facebook or Instagram, where these teachers are starting a point of contact that begins quite innocently and then progresses into something that is quite deeply inappropriate.
When we spoke last, we talked about the length of time it takes to go through the human rights justice process. What's the turnaround for these cases.
They're a good couple of years old generally by the time I see them come through into the written decision phase. So what happens is they held a hearing, and that hearing is it was similar to a courtroom, except a lot more informal, and then the tribunal panel members will go away and write a decision and a penalty for the teacher and it will often be given to the parties while in advance of it being made.
Public schools could be more than twelve hundred teachers short this year with demand outstripping supply. And it's not just here. Data show it's a global issue, but in New Zealand the Ministry is projecting it's twelve hundred and fifty teachers short of what's needed.
Ali Mattia used to be adopted. Now she wants to be here inspiring the next generation to pursue science.
Being able to teach academics or especially a subject that I'm passionate about, but also being able to mentor students. I feel like that just adds another layer of value and impact to the students.
High schools are said to face a teacher's shortage through to twenty twenty seven. According to the Education Ministries modeling. We have very few qualified applicants who have the right set of skills to be able to teach our school for any position.
When you're ever reviewing these kind of cases, Jeremy, does it ever feel like there should be more standards in place for teachers or even just better checks and balances around who actually becomes a teacher?
The Teachers Counsel I think they do a really good job of vetting teachers before they enter the profession. And the Teachers Council will be the first to say that the people who end up before the tribunal are a really small minority, and it is something that they stress when we ask them questions about people who have been suspended or had their registration canceled.
Yeah, of course, I mean how many cases do we see on average a year, say just off the top of your head, because there's more than you know, there's over one hundred thousand registered teachers or something like that in New Zealand.
Hey, we might see on average around thirty thirty decisions a year. To throw an number out, to just throw a number out that seems about right, and we would cover actually quite a small percentage of those. So there are several decisions that have been uploaded this year, for example,
which involve teachers who have struck a child. But it might be in quite a minor way, so they might have pulled on their shirt, you know, to get them to stop misbehaving or to direct them somewhere, and you're not allowed to You're not allowed to do that in New Zealand anymore. You're not allowed to lay your hands on a child in that way. But does it make media threshold for us to cover in most cases, No, unless it's quite severe.
Thanks for joining us, Jeremy no Worrith no Worth. That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzadherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page, which is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also a sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to The Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.