Victorian public school teachers are close to reaching a settlement with the state Labor government on a new pay and conditions agreement. Their previous enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA) expired in August, and they have not had a pay rise since October 2006.
The original claim lodged by the Australian Education Union (AEU) was for a 30% pay rise over three years, significant reductions in class sizes and teaching hours, and a real decrease in the numbers of teachers on short-term contracts. The government only offered a pay rise of 3.25% per year over four years, in line with its offers to all state public sector workers.
Victorian public school teachers are currently the lowest paid teachers in Australia and the Victorian public school system is also the lowest funded per student. With even the best paid public school teachers in Victoria being 15% behind their counterparts in NSW, many Victorian schools near the border cannot fill teaching positions. Wealthy private schools have also been poaching teachers from state schools by offering much higher pay rates.
On May 2, AEU negotiators reported to the union's branch council that there has been some movement by the government in the area of salaries for teachers at the top of the incremental scale and also for graduate teachers.
However, the sticking point for the negotiators is the four "pupil free days". Currently these are used by teachers for writing reports to parents and also for staff professional development. State education minister Bronwyn Pike wants to reduce the number of these days.
The branch council passed a motion that if this issue can be resolved, then the AEU branch executive is authorised to call off a proposed stopwork action to coincide with the national literacy and numeracy testing on May 13–15. Some teachers on the council had concerns about this, as they felt the proposed EBA did not bring any reduction in workload or class sizes.
At the council meeting, several councillors were censured for breaching the AEU's requirement that any progress in negotiations only be reported verbally, and not in writing. The Teachers Alliance (TA) website mistakenly posted an article that had previously been ruled in-breach of this requirement.
When asked why AEU branch officials did not approach TA members, asking them to remove the article, the officials claimed that they did not have time to do this as they were heavily involved in the EBA negotiations. However they did have the time to draft a half-page motion censuring councillors involved in TA.