Some local teachers haven’t been paid this year, prompting a protest by teachers at Richmond’s Garin College last week.
Teachers took to the streets with signs highlighting their plight caused by the botched Novopay system which is designed to pay all of the Ministry of Education’s 90,000 staff throughout New Zealand. Teachers’ pay packets has been affected since the software’s introduction seven months ago and Garin’s principal John Boyce says the time for excuses is over. “It is a complete botch-up and that’s a polite term.”
He says several of his teachers haven’t been paid since the start of the year and that is having a huge impact on stress levels. “Say an experience teacher suddenly finds she hasn’t been paid for six weeks, she’s got mortgage commitments, hire purchase things going out of her account. Come Wednesday she’s got a full days teaching then she’s got to go home and ring the bank and get around all the people she has made commitments to and say she can’t honour it. The stress that causes is just awful.”
John says when the system was first introduced he wasn’t too worried about the mistakes but as time has marched on it has become frustrating and “total chaos”. “I was a principal in ’94 when the previous system came in and there were lots of complaints and it went to parliament, all that sort of stuff. So I was really deemphasising it but when we got to Christmas and they still hadn’t sorted it, it became a panic.”
He says around half of his staff have been affected by Novopay errors and teachers got a “positive” reaction from motorists.
