Four of the seven small group/classes operated open enrolment procedures which essentially means that there is a ‘rolling’ student clientele; as learners withdraw, get jobs or move on to other educational programmes, they are replaced by new enrolments. Scogins and Knell (2001) reported that teachers in their US study identified open enrolment as one of their three main issues.
Overall, open enrolment did not seem to cause these teachers undue concern:
| T: | Our courses are 24 weeks long, so we have two a year and people can join at any stage during, during the year. | |
| I: | How do you find that? | |
| T: | With having a maximum of 10, I don’t mind. That is fine, because sometimes if there is a job that somebody’s going to, then they could be here for perhaps six or seven weeks and that is the right time for them to go, if a job comes up. This doesn’t happen quite so often in this area, because most of mine go on to further training. |
While the teachers coped with this issue, they would prefer not to have to deal with it; but the pragmatics of funding meant that they need to incorporate this factor into their initial recruitment.
| T: | [explaining how her programme works] … but where it’s not so good is that it’s hard for people to come in at different points of it. | |
| I: | Which is why you’re quite strict about accessing them and slipping them in if they came in? | |
| T: | Yeah, that’s right … Yeah, and so what I try and do too, is start with a bigger group at the beginning of the year, load the group up - and then as people do drop off. | |
| I: | Natural drop-offs. | |
| T: | Natural drop-offs, you’ve still got eight left at the end. |
Most of the classes had a diverse range of needs within their groups of learners. One class for example had students relying on finger-counting for their numeracy tasks through to students working on volcanic eruptions based on NCEA Science material. This class had two teachers who essentially managed their class as a series of individual learners, resulting in considerable ‘plate-spinning’ where they constantly moved from learner to learner, teaching and checking and then assigning further tasks to complete. This class spent minimal time as a whole group for teaching purposes.
The distribution of their average weekly teaching workloads is shown in the figure below. The most striking feature of the distribution is the diversity of workloads among the group.