Judicial review further information

Kia ora koutou 

I just wanted to touch base and give another update around the judicial review decision that came out last week in case you didn't see that email, the High Court ruled in favour of the PPTA on five of the six grounds being reviewed.  

Although there's now work to be done, we feel certain this will ultimately place the Council in a position to do the mahi that's so needed to support the profession moving forward.

Here's a high-level summary of the outcome of the review: 

• The Council should have consulted with the profession before making the decision to move to an annual practising certificate because of the potential detriment to some teachers, and has set that decision aside
• The information provided in the Council’s consultation document on the new fees was sufficient and the court did not make any finding that the new fee was not justified 
• However, the legislation relating to the Council’s powers to charge fees has not been updated since 2002 and statutory functions have been added over time, meaning that it was unlawful to charge a fee to cover the full range of the functions the Council is required to perform   
• The establishment of the leadership centre (known as Rauhuia | Leadership Space) work by the Council was lawful

We've accepted that decision and are working to make the required changes. We'll continue to communicate what's happening as we move forward. This is what we know so far, with the caveat that things are moving quite rapidly: 

• We have been focusing on making sure that teachers who have been issued with one-year certificates have a valid three-year PC – and how we are going to do that and when that will happen
• The Council will be issuing a new Gazette Notice that confirms that the issue and renewal term of certificates and LAT revert to three years 
• We will provide an update on what is going to happen about the additional fee to cover the change from one year to three years when we can
• We will need to take down our online system, Hapori Matatū, to make the technical changes required, so that future applications will be issued for three years. In the interim, this will only ask you to pay the fee under the old fees schedule, while we work through the issues about new fees.

We'll stay in touch with you when we have a clearer way forward, but we do want to keep you in the loop. Teachers are our priority and we want to ensure they are not inconvenienced as we seek to understand and implement this court decision. As I say, our first priority was to get new certificates issued to those on an annual one and to change our systems to issue three-year certificates from Monday.
 

Ngā mihi 

Lesley Hoskin  
Chief Executive 

Nicola Ngarewa 
Teaching Governing Council Chair, Spotswood College Principal