Deputy General Secretary: Achieving workload improvements and wage rises

In Australia, the education system is built on the back of asking overworked people to do more and asking good people to do more than they should, writes IEU Victoria Tasmania Deputy General Secretary Kylie Busk.

I started working for the IEU over 15 years ago largely because I wanted to address workload intensification. By then, it had already been a big issue for too long.

What gets called “workload intensification” is really chronic under-resourcing, a failure to understand the work that is required to meet the complex needs in schools. Under-resourcing has, inevitably, led to the teacher shortage crisis.

Thankfully, that crisis is finally being recognised, and state and federal governments are leaning in, listening and working to find solutions, concentrating on three words: attraction, retention, recognition.

Does that come 10 or 20 years later than it should have? Absolutely! However, we must take this opportunity to improve working conditions in all schools. That’s why we’re pointing out to government, education authorities and employers that of the three important words being highlighted, recognition is the most underrated.

That is especially important for education support staff, who are so often misclassified and restricted to fixed-term contracts. There is simply not enough awareness of the time involved in their tasks and what their remuneration should be for their skills.

The work of leading teachers is also underappreciated. Too many of our most gifted and dedicated staff do elite work for little extra reward because of the flawed HALT model.

In the independent sector, bit by bit we have collectively chipped away at making improvements to workload. School by school members working in union do the grunt work of bargaining to whittle away onerous working conditions and claw back work-life balance.

In the Catholic system, up until the latest Agreement, members overwhelmingly said, “we don’t care about the money, just do something about the workloads”. That’s why the wins on workload in the recent Victorian Catholic Agreement were so important. They represent a seismic shift on measures to confront what staff actually have to do in schools. The reforms are not perfect – first drafts rarely are – but we now have a fence to put around an educator’s workload.

Unfortunately, some employers, instead of embracing the universal benefits of respected, rewarded and contented staff, are actively pursuing a consistent, concerted strategy to disrupt and frustrate genuine implementation of workload improvements, deliberately undermining the principles they signed up to in the Agreement and continuing to undervalue the work of their employees.

In 2025 our planning and focus is on winning essential wage rises. But if employers think we will trade off hard fought workload wins to achieve them, they are deluded.

We need both improved working conditions and better pay – that is not negotiable.

We will push for improvements to the operation of workload improvement measures and we will protect what we’ve won.

Improving the working lives of members is at the heart of unionism and working to achieve it is what people like me signed up for when we became IEU officers. With the door ajar for genuine generational change, we won’t be backing down now.