Victorian teachers are in crisis. Now’s our chance to fight back

Victorian teachers and school staff face a crisis of unsustainable workloads and inadequate pay. We can address it this year as we negotiate for a new Victorian Government Schools Agreement (VGSA).

Our real wages have fallen by 11 percent under the current agreement. By the end of this year, graduate teacher pay will be $8,489 per year ($162 per week) less than it would have been if our pay had kept up with inflation.

Starting teacher salaries in Victoria are now the lowest in Australia and almost $10,000 behind those in New South Wales. We need a crisis catch-up pay rise that makes up for the value we’ve lost—17 percent would mean we’re back in front of inflation—and then future rises to keep us ahead of rising prices.

It’s not as though the money isn’t there. The wealth of Australia’s billionaires surged by $28 billion last year, according to Oxfam. And some state government workers have managed to win significant wage increases recently. Nurses in Victoria voted to reject the government’s inadequate pay offer and won 28.4 percent over four years. Victorian ambulance workers won increases of 24-33 percent for MICA paramedics in their new agreement last year. After a long campaign of strikes and rallies, teachers in NSW accepted a deal in late 2023 that immediately boosted graduate salaries by 12 percent.

Teachers are also overworked, causing burnout at record rates. The result, according to research by the education union, is that 83 percent of Australian schools have experienced staffing shortages. The 2022 VGSA included a 90-minute reduction in weekly face-to-face teaching hours. Unfortunately, that reduction came at the cost of three of our four professional practice days included in the 2017 agreement, limiting its effect.

This modest reduction in face-to-face teaching hours has not solved the workload problem. According to a Monash University report, Victorian school staff continue to work a staggering unpaid 12.5 hours each week. One way to address staff burnout would be to reduce face-to-face teaching hours from 18.5 to 16 hours for both primary and secondary teachers. That would align us with secondary school teachers in Norway and Italy, who, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey, average 15.8 and 16.8 hours, respectively, in the classroom each week.

Reducing class sizes is also essential for reducing workload. According to 2022 research by the Grattan Institute, 92 percent of teachers report not having enough time to prepare effectively for classroom teaching, many blaming their heavy administrative workload. Capping class sizes at twenty would significantly reduce this burden.

We should also fight for a fully funded agreement. The education union’s 2021 demands included that the state government fully fund all its provisions. That would make it harder for school principals to avoid implementing the VGSA by pointing to their limited budgets.

Winning a fully funded VGSA would be a step towards winning the minimum funding levels recommended by the Gonski review more than a decade ago. The recent announcement by Victorian and federal governments of extra money to meet the Gonski minimums takes full effect only “by 2034”. Meanwhile, education researcher Trevor Cobbold calculates that government schools in Victoria are short of the Gonski minimums by $1.8 billion annually—an average of $2,750 per student, or a $1 million deficit at a school of 400 students.

Just as important as our claims is our strategy for winning them. In 2021, union members put forward an ambitious list of claims, but much of it was dropped in the deal eventually agreed to by the union leaders. It’s little wonder that nearly 40 percent of members voted no.

This shows the need to apply serious pressure to win our claims. When teachers go on strike, schools close and politicians are forced to take notice. Teachers in NSW went on a series of strikes in 2021-22, eventually winning an immediate pay rise of almost $10,000.

The last strike of Victorian public-school staff, in 2012, brought 40,000 teachers onto the streets and closed around 400 schools in a show of collective power. If we want to win our claims, we’ll need an even more sustained campaign of strike action. It’s not as if there’s no appetite for this. In 2021, 97 percent of AEU members voted in favour of industrial action.

We need to begin preparing for this fight now. The state of our profession, and our schools, depends on it.