By Norrian Rundle
MELBOURNE — The Victorian Directorate of School Education's new staffing formula, recently sent to all primary and secondary schools in the state, has provoked industrial action by teachers. The new formula will cut staff in schools by 6%, in addition to the 10% cut at the end of last year.
For secondary schools of around 800 students, the number of teachers will be reduced by five and in primary schools, for every 126 students the school will lose one teacher. This will result in the loss of 2500 to 3000 teaching jobs.
The DSE has stated that there is to be no change to class sizes or programs. Instead, the shortfall is to be made up by increasing the workload of teachers. Primary school teachers are to have their two hours of preparation time cut to one and a half hours and secondary teachers will have their teaching time increased by two hours.
This cut in staffing, along with school closures, accounts for $113 million of the $145 million cuts announced in the April state budget. The remainder will come from the closure of school support centres with 600 curriculum consultant jobs to go.
The DSE has chosen to increase teacher time because cuts to programs and increases in class sizes are far more likely to arouse parent anger than an increase in teaching time. The DSE has been emphasising that secondary teachers only work an average of 16.5 hours and primary teachers 23 hours, despite an Australian Teachers Union survey that found Victorian teachers worked the most hours in all states — 50 hours a week.
Many schools are also involved in Quality Provision Taskforces; a euphemism for school closure. The Taskforces are supposed to be going through community consultation but in reality the chairpeople of the each task force have been provided with the "correct" outcome and been told to achieve it.
Small primary schools are most at risk in this process. Country communities are organising to prevent their schools closing and are receiving a lot of favourable publicity. The Save Our Schools committee who are fighting the closure of Richmond, Northland and Fitzroy Secondary colleges, have produced a kit on how to occupy a school and are planning a tour of areas where schools are under threat.
In response to this latest round of cuts, the two teacher unions called a joint stopwork on August 26. The meeting endorsed a campaign of rolling regional stoppages and a publicity campaign focussing on cuts to school programs and teacher workload.
The two unions have not yet agreed on all aspects of the campaign. The Victorian Secondary Teachers Association has called for a 24-hour ass meeting on October 6. This is the Trades Hall Council's day of protest of one year of the Kennett government.
The Federated Teachers Union of Victoria has mapped a program of rolling stopworks culminating in a 24-hour joint stopwork on September 10 to join the Save Our Schools rally organised on that day.
At the VSTA's Special Council meeting on August 21, the leadership refused to allow discussion of other motions to be put to the mass stopwork meeting on August 26. It was argued that nothing that was divisive should be put to the meeting and the campaign be planned at the October 6 meeting after membership consultation in the branches. So in effect it will simply be a protest meeting rather than the start of a strong and genuine campaign to protect members' jobs and conditions.
However, many members are so angry by this latest attack on their conditions and the lack of leadership from the union officials in the face of sustained attacks on education by the Kennett government that a range of motions will be moved the floor to try and force the union leadership to wage a real campaign against these attacks. To date the teacher unions' leaderships have urged their members to trust in the delivery of a federal award to regain lost and threatened working conditions.