Carrying the load of new initiatives

During the recent dispute over the number and distribution of teachers for students with learning difficulties the Government’s media machine tried to depict Federation as opposed to any Government initiative on education. The cry was: “Who really runs education in NSW?”
Demonising the Teachers Federation makes it easier for government to abrogate responsibility for finding solutions. Such falsehoods make it easier to stifle debate about their own performance.

The commentators who fall for this line show their ignorance of history and distance from the realities of classrooms in NSW.

It’s a long time ago now but we all welcomed the first term Carr Government’s return of the 2500 teaching positions lost in the Metherell years and reviews into the primary school curriculum and the HSC.

Since then, every day in every classroom, teachers have been implementing Government initiatives — the new HSC, new literacy and numeracy strategies, new primary school curriculums, measures to deal with bullying, child protection and drug education to name just a few. Teachers are working more closely with parents and the community, including business. Teacher discontent is so strong precisely because of exhaustion from work on “new initiatives”.

Federation “leadership” is seen as the most recalcitrant and obstructive. Yet in the salaries dispute, progress was made when the Federation “leadership” proposed negotiations on the immediate implementation of key Government education policies on vocational education and multicampus colleges (The Collegiate Education Plan).

Federation has long been an admirer of Government initiatives on pay equity, which should improve the lot of our casual and part-time teachers. It’s just the Government hasn’t been too keen to pay for a better deal for these tens of thousands of teachers.

The Carr Government rightly expects the best of our schools and colleges, students and teachers. The expectations of all our students have increased enormously. Students with learning difficulties are no longer encouraged to leave school at the earliest opportunity. Students with disabilities now get an education and, more often than not, in the regular classroom where once they would have been institutionalised. And with a greater media obsession with test results as measures of performance, schools and teachers who are perceived as not performing get inspected and “reviewed”.
Manly High School is just the latest to be given the treatment.

Governments have not quite realised the implications of their espousal of high humanitarian principles and demands for excellence on the Budget. Enormous government resources are required. Yet every government in Australia is seeking to contain expenditure and substitute public provision with private provision. Those who make money in the private sector are the new heroes. Teachers do not make money for government; teachers seek to spend it for the benefit of their students.

An English commentator, Jeremy Paxton, observing the rise of the self-made entrepreneur and the decline in the status of the teaching profession in Thatcher’s Britain wrote: “Small wonder that the idea of public service has come to count for so little. Teachers, to whom we give the delicate and awesome responsibility of nurturing the minds of the next generation, are looked down upon by their charges because they earn so little. If wealth generators are to be the heroes of the hour, then public servants, by definition wealth consumers, are its villains.”

No wonder we get so much flak and will continue to do so. Teachers are the losers in the current political climate.

Teachers are seeing an increasing gap between the haves and have nots in our society. Aboriginal students are still not achieving equality of educational outcomes, HSC results still reflect postcodes. Teachers see kids who are hungry, craving for affection, even suicidal. Teachers are the natural advocates for these kids’ needs to be addressed. You can’t teach properly if you ignore the needs of your students. So the teaching profession and their union, the Teachers Federation, continually exposes the gap between our ideals and expectations and the reality of what is provided.

Teachers supported the ban on the ELLA test because teachers had to stand up for the needs of the students in the 179 high schools that lost teachers who work with students with learning difficulties. Kirrawee High School is a comprehensive high school with 1100 students. It used to have a full-time teacher for students with learning difficulties. After the reallocation the teacher is now only available one day a week for the 130 students who have learning difficulties.

Because the total pool of teachers for kids with learning disabilities stayed the same, schools who justifiably deserved more teachers gained them at the expense of schools that still had a need for a teacher. Having seen what an additional resource could do to help their students, teachers were angry when this resource was removed.

The Minister is now conducting a review into the allocation of Support Teacher Learning Difficulties (STLD) teachers. More STLD teachers are required to ensure the needs of learning difficulties students are met in all our schools.