From The Point: Victorian Catholic Schools: Implementing the right conditions

Your newspaper The Point is hitting letterboxes as we speak. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing cherry-picked highlights from the publication online. You can also view the full publication at: https://www.ieuvictas.org.au/member-publications

Implement the right conditions and the staff will follow

More than one IEU Organiser, when meeting with school leaders, is being asked, “Do you still have your VIT registration? Are you good to take a class?”

The teacher workforce crisis, long mooted, is here, and it is having a big impact.

It underscores how important it is to make jobs in education more attractive and working conditions more reasonable.

It backs up members’ resolve through campaigning in the Victorian Catholic sector for better measures to tackle workload.

And it means it is vital to implement the spirit of the new Workload Agreement in MACS schools, instead of trying to work around it.

An example is the use of staff members’ class focus time for duties such as swim meets. This is occasionally unavoidable, but if educators are consistently missing class preparation time, it is unacceptable. The 30 + 8 model is a big step forward, but it cannot fix every situation; it takes a genuine desire to keep teachers’ class focus time sacrosanct to make the Agreement work.

That’s where planning comes in. All a year’s major events are booked in long ahead of time. Consultative Committees should consult the calendar and ensure that duties at extracurricular events are shared as evenly as possible.

Those committees are so important – make sure your Consultative Committee Reps make the most of their entitlement to paid leave to attend training sessions which offer insights into how to ensure genuine consultation in your workplace.

In case you are in any doubt about the right to your class focus time, here it is in lawfully binding black and white from the CEMEA Agreement: “Class focus time includes work directly related to the learning and teaching program of a Teacher’s class(es) (such as planning, preparation, collaboration, assessment). The Teacher has professional autonomy to determine the duties undertaken in class focus time”.

That’s your time, it’s in the allocated 30 hours for scheduled class time and class focus time laid out in the Agreement. You have autonomy over it.

For schools routinely denying IEU members class focus time, those attempting to acquit TIL during an employee’s five hours of employer directed time during the school day, and those school leaders trying to pay part-time workers less because scheduled class time is down, there will be a reckoning. If breaches of the Agreement continue, the union will enforce the rights of members, in disputes if necessary.

Schools treating staff well, genuinely consulting with staff and applying the spirit of the Agreement will find it easier to attract and retain staff in a highly competitive market.