The overwhelming plea from today’s ACT and NSW teachers’ strike was for both governments to save Australia’s future – students.
A rare merging of Catholic and public school teachers across the ACT and NSW at Thoroughbred Park in Lyneham today, Thursday 30 June, saw a strike in solidarity, urging for better working conditions.
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Teacher at St John Paul College in Nicholls, Daniel Burns, says the profession he and his colleagues love is in “crisis”.
“Consecutive years of overwork and poor conditions caused the profession to become uncompetitive with other professions, which means there’s staff shortages,” says Mr Burns.
“Teaching is so important because it’s our future. The building blocks of society is education, and without a strongly educated society, we’re not going to be competitive as a country.
“This is really fundamental to our society. To be able to do our jobs properly and effectively and create those learning opportunities benefits all of society – not just parents, not just teachers. It benefits everyone.”
Another Catholic school colleague, St Mary Mackillop College teacher Nicholas Greeney, echoed Mr Burns’ call saying the profession has been notoriously overworked and they are under resourced to be “the effective teachers that we want to be”.
“We’re not looking for more holidays or anything like that. Give teachers the time to teach, give support staff the support they deserve,” says Mr Greeney.
“Provide us with more time to plan our resources because we just don’t have that right now, and if we are going to bring people into teaching, we have to make it a more competitive profession.
“One of the ways to do that is to provide a fundamental increase in salaries to actually make the profession competitive and bring people in.”
Another Canberra teacher, part of the Independent Education Union NSW/ACT, says teachers are striking because they’re “exhausted” and just “want what is fair”.
“We want to do the right thing for our students and that means that we need to have the amount of time that’s necessary to create learning opportunities that will actually give them opportunities to excel themselves,” she said.
“At the moment, we’re not being fairly compensated for our time in terms of our hours and our pay.”
For the two education systems to combine their fight for fairness is “huge” says Mr Greeney.
“This hasn’t happened for almost 30 years and, historically, both sectors have had their differences, especially when it comes to funding,” he says.
“I think this is a massive symbolic gesture of putting aside those differences to say it actually doesn’t matter what education system you’re in. Every single teacher and every part of the education system is under strain right now, and it needs to improve.”
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