Know Your Agreement: Victorian Catholic Education Agreement Highlights - Part 1
Disclaimer : the information in this news article may not be current. For up-to-date advice on the CEMEA please refer to the fact sheets on this page.
Congratulationsl! You now have a brand spanking new Agreement.
Now it's time to get to know it!
Over the next few weeks, we’ll highlight important provisions in the new Catholic Education Multi-Enterprise Agreement, including some important details you might have missed which could significantly enhance your working life.
The 30 + 8 teacher workload model (Clause 59.2)
For teachers, this is one of the biggies! To defeat the endless escalation of workload intensification, teacher working hours needed better regulation.
From now on, 30 hours of a full-time teacher's 38-hour week are allocated for scheduled teaching and 'class focus time' for teacher-led work including planning and assessment. Teachers cannot be 'directed' in this time - in the words of the Agreement: 'the Teacher has professional autonomy to determine the duties undertaken in class focus time.'
The other 8 hours are 'employer-directed' - these include 2.5 hours of paid lunch breaks, 2.5 other hours during the normal 7-hour ‘attendance time’ for duties, student supervision, directed collaboration etc, and 3 hours adjacent to attendance time (which can include two one-hour meetings). Importantly, in this Agreement teachers retain the right to leave the workplace when they do not have scheduled duties.
This is a big change and will take getting used to, but there many schools in which this has been properly implemented is working smoothly, offering a way to “fence off” teachers’ valuable time to allow them to focus more on their teaching and their students, less on administrivia.
Read more.
Parental leave: superannuation and recognition of service
(Appendix 1, Clauses 8 & 9)
There are major improvements to parental leave entitlements in the CEMEA, notably increases to paid parental leave from 14 to 16 weeks and to paid partner leave from 1 to 4 weeks, as well as earlier access to parental leave.
Two less-heralded but really important improvements, however, are new entitlements to superannuation payments and recognition of service for the first 12 months of parental leave for the primary carer - combined, these make real inroads into dealing with the gender pay and retirement wealth gaps.
Australian women are retiring on average with 47% less super than men - in significant part because for many their accumulation of superannuation savings is interrupted by significant periods out of the workforce with young families. In an industry like education where employment is based on incremental payscales, longer breaks in service also result in lost earnings over a number of years as a result of being 'held back' from progression up the payscale.
This Agreement doesn't solve this problem overnight - but it takes an enormous step in the right direction by for the first time ensuring that in their first year of leave a primary caregiver is not disadvantaged in terms of superannuation or career progression.
Find out more here.
Minimised spread of hours and better pay calculations for part-time teachers (Clause 59.4(b))
“The Employer will endeavour to minimise the numbers of days over which a part-time Teacher must work their Full Time Equivalent (hours).” It’s a simple sentence, but it represents an important reform – clearly there’s little benefit from working fewer hours if the hours you do work are scattered across a full-time working week.
For the first time under this Agreement, Victorian Catholic employers have a positive obligation to minimise the number of days part-time staff are required to work.
There are further advantages for part-time teachers as a result of the divisors used to calculate time fractions, resulting in increases to their salary per hour in the classroom of 8.1% for secondary teachers and 16.7% for primary teachers, over and above the across-the-board salary increases in this Agreement.
Part-time teachers should make it clear to their principal what their preferred spread of hours is when they submit their 2024 intentions.
Read more here.
Stay tuned for the next suite of highlights – coming next week!
You can find all you need to know about the CEMEA (including guides, FAQs, video explainers and the full text of the Agreement) on the IEU website.
Got a question or comment? Anything you'd like to tell us about how implementation is going in your workplace? Click here to let us know!