NSW Teachers Win New Award

 Written by: Seb A. on 6 October 2024

 

Above:  NSW teachers vote for new Award October28.  Photo: NSWTF Facebook

New South Wales public school teachers have held mass meetings across the state to vote for acceptance of an offer for a new award. 97% of NSW Teachers Federation members attending the meetings voted in favour of the new award on 28 October. 

The pay rise is 9% over the three years of the Award, and 0.5% superannuation increases each year, which is the baseline offer the NSW government announced for public sector workers in NSW after the 2023 election of the Minns ALP state government. 

While this pay rise keeps NSW teachers up with official inflation figures, the real significant gains of the new award are to workload and conditions. With teachers leaving in droves because of the piling up of unsustainable workload since 2012 under the regime of the neoliberal Department of Education Local Schools, Local Decisions agenda and the worst teacher shortage in decades, these improvements are vital in ensuring teachers’ work health and safety and a healthy work-life balance. 

Around twenty improvements have been achieved, with some of the more significant including a one hour weekly limit to before and after school meetings enshrined in the Award. Over recent years, schools have seen dramatic increases in after and before school meetings with hours often spent weekly in meetings before and after school with no real benefit to teachers or students. This win will significantly decrease the unsustainable workload burden that is seeing so many teachers leave schools. 

Classroom teachers themselves will now determine 50% of what they do on the eight student-free School Development Days each year. These days are when teachers engage in professional learning and development and prepare for the school year; however, all too often they become opportunities for irrelevant top-down determined professional learning, no consultation, and teachers doing all their real preparation outside of school hours. This means that now classroom teachers will have much more opportunity to use these days for what they are most useful for: actually preparing quality lessons for our students. 

These wins would never have been made without the committed and unified strike action members took during the More Than Thanks campaign that won NSW teacher unionists the previous award last year, and which made them the highest paid teachers in the country. 

From the perspective of building teacher union strength, the improvements won in the new award will be an opportunity to empower union activists to push back locally and put power in teachers’ hands to have a say in determining what their work day looks like. 

The new award will also see the development of a new consultation framework that will mandate that teachers have a say when there are proposals to change or add to their workload at the school level. 

While a major objective of the union was not achieved in the new award, the granting of an additional two weekly hours of release from face-to-face teaching to deal with the increased administrative workload that teachers have been burdened with, the wins discussed above place teacher unionists in a strong position to further build union strength and be ready to campaign for those goals as yet unachieved.