Opinion: Unions and Government officials who are negotiating to reach an agreement for teachers need to hurry up now, and move forward.
The negotiations stalled and that’s why we saw the protests yesterday – and while I 100 percent back the rights of teachers to protest - let’s not lose sight of the fact that in the middle of all of this are children.
And our children need routine.
Unions and the Government need to start edging towards each other to reach a compromise. No one will win from continued industrial action but there will be losers -- and those losers will be our children.
Everyone looks at politics through their own lens, and that lens is usually shaped by personal circumstances and your age and financial demographic.
Ask yourself how has this Government served you? and for me, I will forever remember this Government for letting down our children -- for never considering the needs of our youngest generation.
Throughout our response to COVID, they were forgotten. Never once did this Government consider what was right for our kids. They were focused on the death toll, and the need to protect adults – those who were vulnerable, those who were ageing, and those who for whatever reason were vulnerable to the virus. And while I understand those decisions in the early stages of COVID, two years passed and the Government still didn’t consider the ongoing impact on children.
What has always troubled me the most during COVID is the impact the restrictions were having on children. Remember, in the upper North Island, children spent months and months and months locked at home.
In some cases, no access to education. None at all. For others, delayed educations. No sport. No social interaction. No play with peers. No end-of-year school balls. School camps cancelled. And crucially, no consideration was given ever to the impact on juvenile mental health.
Teachers I have spoken to have told me that when children returned to school after lengthy lockdowns – it was hellish. They were dealing with huge social issues, anxiety, and fraught emotions. Today teachers are still dealing with these same issues.
It is for this reason that I was so frustrated with our Education Secretary when she announced that Auckland would shut down for a week because of the floods. It was a rip-cord response that hadn't been thought through. They later revised it. But our children’s educations and lives should never become some sort of political lever that can be turned on and off at a council's or government's will.
So, while I support teachers protesting, I don’t want to see teachers on the streets again. Our children have missed out on so much. Our education standards have fallen dramatically and are continuing to do so.
This now sits squarely with the Unions and the Government. Reach an agreement – and do it for the sake of our children. For once, put your egos and ideologies to one side, and do what's right for our kids.
For more than three years, our children have been an afterthought. They, just like us, deserve the right to live and to learn.
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