Agreement is a line in the sand: IEU Committee of Management on the vote

IEU Committee of Management members have reported a positive response in schools to the proposed Agreement for MACS+ Victorian Catholic Schools.

Next week’s vote was understandably the focus of discussions at the COM meeting on Friday 16 June.

Many of the Reps present had just presided over meetings devoted to the Agreement in the one-week access period prior to next Tuesday and Wednesday’s vote.

IEUVT President Mark Williams said the most important thing about the Agreement is that “it’s a line in the sand about what we can ask teachers to do in the future”.

He’s hopeful it will make the profession it attractive to graduates again.

Mark believes if staff read and discuss the “detailed, simple instructions and guidelines” the union has provided the new provisions are “not as complex as some people think”.

Mark said principals and leadership teams need to be patient and the new arrangements are “not something that should be onerous on anyone”.

“The Agreement is actually going to do something for teachers to get them back into the profession and get them to stay in the profession.”

Marcus Corlett from the Victorian Catholic Secondary Council said his meeting had been “pretty positive” and anyone worried about the proposed Agreement were “looking at an individual item, not the whole picture”. A good measure of the success of his presentation was that two new members signed up afterwards!

Marcus Corlett, Parade College.

“The Agreement represents big steps forward in reducing workload and balancing our workload and making sure that we have some autonomy over our own work and we can start to stop all of the administration stuff that’s creeping into teaching and has been for 15-20 years now,” Marcus said.

“I think that’s the major issue people are having with teaching – their focus is not just what’s in the classroom anymore and that’s what we need to get back to.”

Rep and ES COM member Andrea Hines kept her meeting “short and simple”, concentrating on the list of wins for members in the Agreement. Her message to members? “Hell, yes, you should be voting yes!”

COM member Jason Blackburn from Sacred Heart College, Newtown, pointed his members towards the smooth implementation of the Sale DOSCEL Agreement which features many similar provisions and said the Agreement represented “the first true accounting of every day of the school year”.

“Because of this Agreement, the next time we go to the bargaining table, all the superfluous arguments will be off the agenda…”

Frances Matisi from the Principal’s Council had a very straightforward message: “If you want better conditions, vote Yes!”

IEUVT General Secretary David Brear said the Agreement puts a cap on what teachers can be asked to do in addition to their classroom duties and it would “quarantine” the most important aspects of a teacher’s job.

“Employers will have to be judicious in what they direct you to do.”

Deputy General Secretary Kylie Busk pointed out that there had been 30 years of claims on workload reduction, but “nothing had changed” until this Agreement.

Adam Bremner, from the Victorian Catholic Primary Council and St Brigid's School, Gisborne said staff at his school are “really excited to have something real to challenge workload”.

“People are really looking forward to having the same thing as the teachers across the road who work at the state school. Teachers are excited that they won’t be unsure about how their implementation going to look like. And they’re really happy that the extra work that we do outside of hours will be accounted for”.

Adam Bremner.

Adam believes that measuring the work of educators and all the different activities and programs they deal with into quantifiable amounts will be a big change.

“We must put a limit on it and a border on our day and say how much we can actually achieve in one day and what things are valuable. And the valuable things are the ones that actually benefit the students, they’re the things were really going to enhance and keep. And the things that aren’t as valuable we can leave behind.”

He says the Agreement will “prioritise what we do well - which is education”.

“At my school the state school is literally across the road, and we have friends who work there. And when we see the state school’s teachers working the same as us but having conditions that are appealing to them it makes staying at our school a challenge.

“So to keep our teachers retained in our good schools we want them to have the same conditions and the same quality of workload expectations that the state school has.”