IEU members at Strathcona staff act on workloads
Teachers and teaching assistants at Strathcona Girls Grammar School have commenced taking protected industrial action to achieve more sustainable workloads in a new enterprise agreement.
It is uncommon for staff at such a prestigious and well-funded school to take this step, but our members have reached a breaking point due to the continued inaction on workload intensification.
On Thursday, 24 April, staff will undertake: “An unlimited number of stoppages or interruptions of work for 30 minutes to display enterprise agreement campaign material in cars parked on school property and/or on workstations”.
In early April, over 84% of staff voted NO to an employer deal they felt didn’t address their needs and concerns.
Over 100 teachers and teaching assistants implemented work bans, including refusing to attend assemblies. They also wore union T-shirts at work, added industrial campaign messages to their email signatures and handed out flyers to parents during a 20-minute stopwork meeting at a school cross-country event.
After successfully applying for a Protected Action Ballot Order (PABO), IEU members at Strathcona voted 98 per cent in favour of taking industrial action. The union now then had the option to take strike action, and members voted to escalate industrial action in Term 2 if needed.
Negotiations have been underway at the school for 8 months, with the major sticking points include enforceable limits to scheduling teaching time, ensuring time for preparation and marking, the right to access arbitration in the case of a workplace dispute and wages.
IEU General Secretary David Brear said: “Workload limits are critical to the sustainability of the work educators do — so, of course, they need to be expressed in an enforceable Agreement rather than being relegated to policies that can be changed by the employer on a whim.”
Salaries are also an issue.
“Strathcona is a high fee school, but the wage offer on the table just doesn’t cut it for staff living through a cost of living crisis. The IEU has already won significant wage increases for staff in several independent schools and we will be campaigning hard for significant uplift to salaries across non-government education in 2026 and beyond,” Brear said.
Unlike similar agreements at other private schools, Strathcona has no limits on scheduled teaching and preparation time.
Herald Sun coverage of the Strathcona dispute tacitly acknowledged the IEU’s ground breaking workload measures negotiated in the Catholic sector.
“The dispute comes as some of Victoria’s most prestigious private schools are facing increased pressure to give teachers workload relief after Catholic sector educators received a reduction in teaching time of one hour a week in 2023 and half an hour in 2024.”
Parents are now sending messages of support for staff to school leadership.
As IEU Rep Brendan Nicholls commented on Facebook, “This is the kind of action members are keen to take as, sadly, it’s often the only thing that brings about timely and fair outcomes”.
