The teacher unions - NZEI and PPTA - have called a paid union meeting during school time to discuss the upcoming Collective Agreement campaign.

The Primary Teachers' Collective Agreement is due to be re-negotiated this year. The Teacher Unions are worried about a number of key areas:

• Sufficient and timely access to learning support for students with additional learning or behaviour needs
  
• Teacher shortages
• Too much administration time for teachers, affecting the amount of time they have to focus on teaching and learning

NZEI Te Riu Roa and PPTA are the unions that represent more than 60,000 teachers and support staff who work with children from birth to year 13. They have asked all members at our school to attend meetings in March to hear more about the upcoming Collective Agreement campaign and help determine the education sector’s key focus areas.

The meetings are paid union meetings. The meeting our staff will attend is being held during the teaching day on Tuesday 13th March, which means Amesbury School will be open with only a skeleton staff between 12.30pm and 3pm while staff attend the 1.30pm meeting at the Newlands Community Centre.

It is important for union members in our school to attend these meetings to have a say about the proposed changes.

We encourage you to pick your children up at 12:30pm on Tuesday 13th March  to enable teachers to attend this paid union meeting (or arrange someone else to do so). If this is impossible, please let the school know as early as possible so that we can ensure appropriate supervision is available for the afternoon. Kelly Club will be operating as usual from 3pm onwards. Please complete this form if you need your child to stay at school until 3pm on this day. 

If you will be picking your child/ren up early and they usually attend Kelly Club After School Care, please let Kelly Club know that they will not be attending on this day. 

Thank you.

Nga mihi

The Amesbury team