The Guardian 28 May, 2008
NSW teachers stand strong on staffing
In a highly successful action on May 22, around 35,000 NSW public school teachers went on a 24-hour strike against the Iemma government’s drive to change school staffing procedures. The government wants to give principals the right to employ teachers of their choice and dump the current transfer system which requires teachers to teach for a period at school in remote and hard to staff schools. Teachers warn that this would hurt more than 600 schools.
The NSW Teachers’ Federation says the government’s unilateral staffing procedures are organisationally unsound procedures with grave equity implications imposed by an arrogant and duplicitous government.
Despite the Minister’s media spin, the government’s procedures will:
phase out teacher transfers in practice;
offload the government’s responsibility for finding teachers onto schools;
lead to large class sizes or unqualified teachers in some schools because they find it harder to attract and retain teachers;
establish the pre-conditions for the full deregulation agenda as in Victoria.
The Education Department has written to the Federation "offering" to put all the new procedures into an agreement for five years. But the union points out that an industrial agreement is a legal document which contains mutually acceptable conditions.
Both parties may compromise, but one does not impose the conditions of an "agreement" on the other. The critical issue is that after five years of the procedures a future government would be in the position to implement the full deregulation agenda. That would include devolving notional salaries budgets to schools and loss of tenure for Federation members.
Federation President Maree O’Halloran said the Department is prepared to put at risk a curriculum guarantee for all children in the state and that it is also prepared to render null and void service transfer points accumulated in good faith by teachers while they contribute to their local communities.
"I have no doubt that the government’s staffing changes will make it more difficult to staff some schools," she said. "In the face of 16,000 teachers becoming eligible to retire by 2012 and 25,000 by 2016, the real issue for government policy is how to attract teachers, not the method of appointment."
For the purpose of media control, the Department recently pumped out the numbers of teachers apparently waiting for appointments in various parts of the state. It was claimed that 100 teachers were waiting in the wings at Moree. Yet, Moree Secondary College commenced this term with three staff positions unfilled — one science teacher and two special education teachers needed. No permanent, temporary or casual teacher could be found. And this is just one example.
Further, there is no government policy in place about the impending teacher shortage identified by the Auditor-General in February 2008. Instead there are procedures for staffing schools which reward teachers with permanent appointments for going to the locality of their choice, becoming known to the interviewers and waiting for a job advertisement.
The Federation says the inevitable consequence of government policy is that some schools will have to increase class sizes and have teachers teaching outside their subject areas.