What the government school Agreement means for IEU members
On 4 February, the AEU and the Victorian Government reached an in-principle deal on a new Agreement for government schools through to 2025. This is the result of many months of bargaining as well as a series of industrial actions and bans by AEU members.
This Agreement does not cover our workplaces but sets a new benchmark in our bargaining with Victorian Catholic and independent school employers, so it’s important to understand what’s in it! It’s quite a complicated set of documents, but we’ve done our best to quickly unpack it for you.
Headline wins for staff in government schools include:
- A reduction in maximum face-to-face teaching time of one hour per week in 2023 and a further half-hour in 2024 (pro-rata for part time teachers).
- ‘Quarantining’ of non-teaching time so that a maximum of 8 hours per week (or pro-rata) can be timetabled as lunch breaks, directed duties and meetings, leaving the remaining time to be used at the professional discretion of the teacher.
- Time-off-in-lieu for all staff for all out-of-hours school activities, including school camps.
- Revised classification structures and descriptors for Education Support Staff and better recognition of qualifications, granting automatic access to higher pay rate and more opportunities for reclassification.
- Improvements to parental leave: There is now 16 weeks paid primary carer leave (up from 14 weeks, or 8 for adoption leave), and paid partner leave has increased from 1 week to 4 weeks.
- Provision of laptops for Education Support Staff.
In terms of salaries, the Agreement contains:
- A restructuring of the salary tables backdated to 24 December 2021, delivering a 0.95% increase for teachers (2% at the graduate entry level), and increases ranging from between 0.3% and 9.6% for Education Support Staff, Principals and Assistant Principals. For the largest cohorts of Education Support Staff (Ranges 1 and 2) the increase from the restructure will be at least 1.27%, with 9.6% for the entry level rate.
- A 1% increase for all staff backdated to 1 January 2022, with a subsequent 1% every six months until July 2025.
- An annual additional payment equivalent to 1% of salary to be paid each December to teachers, Assistant Principals, and some Education Support Staff.
For teachers in government schools, this means a base salary increase of 3% by July (4% for the first-year graduate rate), plus a further December allowance payment equivalent to 1%, treated as income. Beyond this, the salary increases by 2% annually (split into January and July increases), plus the 1% allowance payment each December.
Teacher salaries and allowance in the proposed Victorian Government Schools Agreement 2022
What it all means
Overall, these are some really significant wins.
For teachers, the reduction in class time and the protection of professional autonomy of much of the rest of the week are really significant victories that will help address the workload crisis in our schools.
The improvements at the bottom of the Education Support Staff scale are a big boost to the lowest paid workers in schools and are an important recognition of the increasingly professionalised work of this category of staff.
Even given the restrictive current government wages policy of 2% per year, AEU negotiators have succeeded in effectively winning substantially more than this in the first year, with teachers receiving a 3.5% overall increase in income this year compared with 2021, before considering any incremental progression.
Here’s the most important bit though: none of this will be simply handed down to IEU members!
Over decades of negotiations and members campaigning, we’ve been able to successfully maintain teacher pay parity and directly comparable conditions and salaries for Education Support Staff, Principals and Assistant Principals in Victorian Catholic schools. We’ve also achieved salaries and conditions in many independent schools that are competitive with or better than the benchmark set in government schools. We cannot take this for granted – our ability to win comes directly from our collective strength. We must continue to grow, stand together and campaign together.
Our negotiations for new Victorian Catholic Agreements have been ongoing for some time, but now is the time for staff in the sector to get behind our campaign to ensure that we aren’t left behind.