Latest battle for teachers’ pay has roots in decades-old conflict | JordsBaker
NSW Teachers Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos has been involved in teachers’ strikes since Premier Dominic Perrottet was in primary school. As a beginner Indonesian teacher, Gavrielatos was among the 80,000 people who crowded into the Domain in the late 1980s during long, bitter disputes over the Greiner government’s education reforms.
Back in 2004, the teachers ended up getting a significant pay rise through a mechanism that no longer exists. The full bench of the Industrial Relations Commission looked at the changes to their work over the previous 12 years and awarded them a 12 per cent rise. But in 2011, the Coalition government scrapped that IRC process and introduced the wage cap, which can only be exceeded if the industry can prove productivity increases.
“It’s very hard to get through your day the way you used to [without working hard],” says one insider with knowledge of the workforce. “Those who are coming in, who are bright and hardworking, resent [that stereotype] bitterly.” Ben Jensen, who runs education consultancy Learning First, says policy reform at state and federal level doesn’t help either. “Very little policy development actually starts with, ‘what is the job of a teacher, what are the actions and decisions they have to make, and therefore how do we make that better?” he says. “Policy just goes on top.”
The number of people signing up for a teaching degree fell by 30 per cent in the five years to 2019. Their calibre dropped too – the proportion of students accepted into education courses with ATARs lower than 50 has grown fivefold over the past decade, which may explain why one in two are failing to finish their degrees.
The department is also trying to cut back administration to save teachers about an hour a week, and has offered the workforce the maximum 2.5 per cent a year pay rise.
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