Cook Islands Ministry of Education has announced plans to establish a teacher development centre in partnership with the University of Waikato, aiming to improve teacher quality and align the curriculum with the country’s language, culture and heritage.

Maraurau o te Pae Api’i/Ministry of Education has announced that the Cook Islands Teacher Development Centre will be operational in January next year.

In recent months, significant preparations have been conducted with the University of Waikato, the official programme provider for the Bachelor of Teaching (Primary) and the Graduate Diploma in Teaching (Primary or Secondary). 

Secretary for Education Owen Lewis acknowledges the criticism regarding the lack of collaboration with the University of the South Pacific (USP) Cook Islands on this initiative.

According to Lewis, USP offers the Bachelor of Education programme, not the Bachelor of Teaching.

“So, it doesn’t work for us. We need teachers,” he said. “We’ve got three years to make a sizable difference in this space, for these reasons we don’t think the USP model will work.”

Lewis acknowledged that there is likely to be some flak about their choosing the University of Waikato programme rather than USP, which is jointly owned and governed by the Cook Islands and 11 other member countries.

He expressed that while pursuing a Bachelor of Education is “perfectly acceptable”, the Ministry believes that better results for teachers can be achieved through the Bachelor of Teaching programme, part of the Cook Islands Teacher Development Centre.

Lewis says the development centre is not just about acquiring new students, it’s also for upskilling existing teachers and making them better “making them effective”.

He also explained that part of the model the Ministry was using involved its own staff teaching a diploma for which they were not accredited.

Lewis expressed that no one at the Ministry was a teacher of education and they are not an accredited establishment to do that.

The Ministry is also working on leadership, conducting some work with principals at the teacher development centre.

“It is a mammoth task but it starts at teachers. You’ve got to develop your own,” said Lewis.

Tania Morgan, Ministry of Education’s |executive director, said that the idea is to upskill the current teachers.

“We’ll be providing in service programmes that will develop our current teachers,” said Morgan, the former principal of Tereora College.