Health-Promoting UWEL Intervention: Giving Voice to New Zealand Teacher Aide Workplace Wellbeing and Practice Challenges

Abstract

The compulsory education sector in New Zealand faced post-COVID challenges in 2023, including teacher shortages, poor student behaviour and attendance, declining achievement, and record levels of inequitable outcomes for Māori, Pacific peoples, and students with disabilities, learning differences, or neurodivergent conditions. In response, the Ministry of Education implemented unprecedented strategies, including, funding Teacher Aide (TA) Professional Learning and Development (PLD). This study originated in dialogues with TAs about their workplace wellbeing and its impact on their practice. Examined is TA Universal Wellbeing across the New Zealand compulsory education sector and the influences on practice. Framed by health promotion, the researchers used a mixed-methods design and implemented a Universal Wellbeing Evaluation and Literacy (UWEL) intervention to investigate TA wellbeing. Underpinned by the Universal Wellbeing Model (UWM), the intervention combined the quantitative Universal Wellbeing Evaluation Tool (UWET) with structured and Socratic qualitative questions. Findings illuminate the state of TA workplace wellbeing and their professional practice realities. Both supports and impediments are revealed alongside inconsistencies in professional standards, culture, staff safety, and support provisions. The results identify a quarter of TAs require further workplace wellbeing supports to promote student achievement. While literature portrays accurately TAs as resilient, they are also often unsupported, insecure financially, and treated inequitably; this investigation finds they are an underestimated workforce that makes a significant contribution to student outcomes in New Zealand’s compulsory education sector.