educator_winter_2023

Australian

Promises on hold // Funding delayed is funding denied

Equitable education // Why public funding must be allocated fairly

Engaging practice

// Follow four dedicated new educators

WINTER 2023 // ISSUE 118 $9.95

LGBTQI+ rights

// The impact of new censorship laws

Culture & Country

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See how the Arthur Hamilton Award winners are driving change

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Contents ON THE COVER A student from Coldstream Primary School, where the winners of this year's Arthur Hamilton Award are building a strong connection to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and Country.

PHOTOGRAPHY Anthony McKee

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• Call to invest in ESPs • New report recommends changes to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their teachers • How to reduce early childhood teacher burnout

Accepting the gift of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s Voice.

Four educators around the country share their strategies for student engagement and professional development.

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Though the latest budget was largely anticlimatic, it does offer a sliver of hope for schools in Central Australia.

Discrimination against LGBTQI+ people is having a devastating impact on students, particularly in the US.

NEWS IN BRIEF

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A BETTER AUSTRALIA

FEDERAL BUDGET 2023-24

FUNDING PROMISES Fair funding for schools may have been delayed by a year but the federal government says it will be achieved.

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THE HEAVY HOURS Researchers find time poverty and not just workload needs to be addressed to avoid burnout.

CLARION CALL FOR EQUITY Inequities in Australia’s public education system reveal a critical need for funding to ensure parity for all children.

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AN EDUCATION SYSTEM AT WAR WITH ITSELF Jane Caro on why public funding should not be used to turbo charge the gap between privilege and underprivilege.

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ARTHUR HAMILTON AWARD Two educators from Melbourne's Coldstream Primary School have been recognised for their outstanding contributions to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education.

ENGAGING PRACTICE

RIGHTS UNDER ATTACK

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RE-ORGANISING TEACHERS Lessons learned by the UK’s National Education Union allowed quick action during COVID-19 as outlined in a new book.

REGULARS 04 From the president 05 Know your union 38 Recess

www.aeufederal.org.au

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From the president

A pathway to 100 per cent of SRS Governments must come together to properly fund public schools if they are to live up to their election promises and prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pledge to leave no Australian (and that includes children) behind.

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espite the pre-election commitment of the Albanese government to ensure that all schools are on a pathway to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS), public school funding was largely left out of the May federal Budget. But there were signs of hope.

Firstly, in recognition of the unmet need and deep inequality in the Northern Territory, there was an announcement of $40.4 million over two years ($30 million this year and $10 million in 2024-25) for schools in Central Australia. While this does not address the broader issue of funding for the NT, for the 36 public schools that will receive this funding boost, it means more teachers, more education support personnel and more one-on-one individual attention for students who need extra help. In terms of Labor’s election commitment, it demonstrates the political capacity to reach 100 per cent of the SRS, which must be extended to all schools. This is an important step forward in the long-running struggle to achieve full and fair funding for public schools across the nation.

Secondly, the budget included social justice considerations for the nation, which show what Labor can do when they understand the issues.

Both Victoria and NSW have committed to reaching 100 per cent of the SRS, but there is an absence of detail about the funding commitment and the timelines for achieving this. Much will depend on upcoming negotiations between the Commonwealth and state and territory governments for establishing that pathway and the commitment of all governments to work together to achieve 100 per cent.

Australian Educator

(ISSN: 0728-8387) is published for the Australian Education Union by Hardie Grant Media.

The magazine is circulated to members of the AEU nationally.

Heads & Tales

Ground Level, Building 1 658 Church St, Richmond 3121 Tel: (03) 8520 6444 Fax: (03) 8520 6422 Email: educator@hardiegrant.com

We know from bitter experience that governments often need a push in the right direction. Over the past decade we have seen the impact of the broken school funding promises at all levels of government. From the very beginning of needs-based funding in 2013, the Coalition government sought to undermine the SRS funding model by scrapping the formal school funding agreements signed between governments, capping Commonwealth funding at 20 per cent of the SRS for public schools and delivering billions of dollars to private schools. The direct impact of these repeated attacks on public school funding has played out in schools where the current workforce crisis – escalating workloads, high levels of student complexity and unmet need – has taken its toll. So once again, it is time for action to resolve these issues.

We have a deep commitment to our students and their communities, which motivates us to act for change.

There is no clearer demonstration of that motivation than the thousands of old school photos, blogs and comments that were posted online in recognition of National Public Education Day on 25 May 2023. There is strong community support for public education across Australia and we will be calling on the community to stand with us as we hit the campaign trail this year to fight for full and fair funding for all public schools.

To quote prime minister Anthony Albanese “If you invest in education and training of our young people, what you do is you increase the future economic capacity of the nation.”

AEU and subscription enquiries Australian Education Union Federal Office, PO Box 1158 South Melbourne Victoria 3205 Tel: (03) 9693 1800 Fax: (03) 9693 1805 Email: aeu@aeufederal.org.au facebook.com/AEUfederal @AEUfederal

Editor Kevin Bates Publisher Fiona Hardie Account manager Christine Dixon Managing editor Beth Wallace Commissioning editor Tracey Evans Subeditor Leanne Tolra Art direction & design Dallas Budde

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It is through your voice and your lived experience that the issues and the urgency for funding equity will become real for politicians. It is time to turn the hope offered by the Albanese government into action.

Powerful words, but meaningless if they are not backed with action. As we campaign across the country, we will ensure that the prime minister and his cabinet colleagues hear from the people of Australia about the importance of investing in public schools.

We will share the stories of hope and of unmet need, the stories of opportunity and of adversity, stories that are the lived experience of the students and young people who AEU members teach every day.

And we will connect communities with education allies and stakeholders to make sure that the Albanese government understands that meeting the promise of a pathway to 100 per cent of SRS is not only essential for our students, but critically important if we are to realise the promise that was made to the children of Australia, as set out in the original Gonski review more than 10 years ago.

As we launch the next phase of the School Funding campaign, we will ask you, our members and the communities in which you serve, to join us again in taking action to secure the funding that we know is so necessary for Australia’s public schools. It is through your voice and your lived experience that the issues and the urgency for funding equity will become real for politicians. It is time to turn the hope offered by the Albanese government into action. Our children and students cannot be expected to wait any longer for the promise that was made to them over a decade ago.

Correna Haythorpe AEU federal president

Advertising manager Kerri Spillane Tel: (03) 8520 6444 Email: kerrispillane@ hardiegrant.com

Audited circulation: 119,252 (1 October 2020 _ 30 September 2021)

Printer IVE Group Unit 1/83 Derby Street, Silverwater NSW 2128

Copyright rests with the writers, the AEU and Hardie Grant Media. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior permission of the copyright holders. The opinions expressed in the magazine are not necessarily the official policy of the AEU.

Know your union With a federal office and branches or associated bodies in every state and territory, the AEU represents more than 198,000 members industrially and professionally.

AEU FEDERAL 120 Clarendon St, Southbank, VIC, 3006 Phone: +61 3 9693 1800 Email: aeu@aeufederal.org.au Web: aeufederal.org.au

Federal president Correna Haythorpe Federal secretary Kevin Bates

AEU ACT BRANCH Branch president Angela Burroughs Branch secretary Patrick Judge 40 Brisbane Avenue Barton 2600 Phone: 02 6272 7900 Email: aeuact@aeuact.org.au Web: aeuact.org.au

AEU NT BRANCH Branch president Michelle Ayres Branch secretary Rachael Metcalfe 3/8 Totem Road Coconut Grove 0811 Phone: 08 8948 5399 Email: admin@aeunt.org.au Web: aeunt.org.au

AEU SA BRANCH Branch president Andrew Gohl Acting branch secretary Matthew Cherry 163 Greenhill Road Parkside 5063 Phone: 08 8172 6300 Email: aeusa@aeusa.asn.au Web: aeusa.asn.au

AEU TAS BRANCH Branch president David Genford Branch state manager Brian Wightman 1/32 Patrick Street Hobart 7000 Phone: 03 6234 9500 Email: support@aeutas.org.au Web: aeutas.org.au

AEU VIC BRANCH Branch president Meredith Peace Branch secretary Erin Aullich 126 Trenerry Crescent Abbotsford 3067 Phone: 03 9417 2822 Email: melbourne@aeuvic.asn.au Web: aeuvic.asn.au

QUEENSLAND TEACHERS’ UNION President Cresta Richardson General secretary Kate Ruttiman 21 Graham Street Milton 4064 Phone: 07 3512 9000 Email: qtu@qtu.asn.au Web: qtu.asn.au

NEW SOUTH WALES TEACHERS FEDERATION President Angelo Gavrielatos General secretary Maxine Sharkey 23-33 Mary Street Surry Hills 2010 Phone: 02 9217 2100 Email: mail@nswtf.org.au Web: nswtf.org.au

STATE SCHOOL TEACHERS UNION OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA President Matthew Jarman General secretary Mary Franklyn 1 West Street West Perth 6005 Phone: 08 9210 6000 Email: contact@sstuwa.org.au Web: sstuwa.org.au

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News

News in brief

Education International (EI) has demanded that the labour rights of education support personnel (ESPs) be guaranteed.

ESPs are “the beating heart” of education institutions and their working conditions must reflect the importance of their contribution to quality education, says EI president Susan Hopgood.

“We demand that governments take concrete policy steps to enhance their status,” she says.

On World Education Support Personnel Day, on 16 May, Hopgood called on all governments to invest in ESPs. “The day is an opportunity to show recognition and appreciation for the incredible contribution that education support personnel make to quality education. ESPs are essential for student wellbeing, for their health, and for their learning,” says Hopgood.

Hopgood says that shrinking budgets lead to retrenchments, increasing privatisation and deteriorating working conditions.

“It is not only the workers that are affected, but the students too,” she says.

“This is why Education International has launched its Go Public Fund Education Campaign, an urgent call for governments to fund public education and invest in the education workforce.”

How to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and their teachers A new report has found Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary school students are engaged in their schooling, but they and their families still experience “significant levels” of racism and they want more teaching of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.

The report also found that teachers do not have enough training to value and teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures.

The Longitudinal Study of Indigenous Children Primary School Report, by a Queensland University of Technology research team, is based on data from an ongoing federal government study, Footprints in Time. The study has followed about 1700 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, their parents and their teachers for 15 years.

The QUT researchers say that despite a prevailing assumption school engagement is a struggle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, more than half of the children in the study were highly and consistently engaged with school across their primary years. Parents’ trust and engagement with schools was also high.

But the report found a disconnect between teachers’ approaches to cultural identity, the training they received, and the racism experienced by parents and students. Almost a quarter of students

had experienced racist bullying at school and parents also reported experiencing racism at their child’s school. More than half of the teachers surveyed said they had insufficient cultural competency training.

Almost 90 per cent of parents surveyed said they wanted their child to learn an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander language at a school, but only 21 per cent of children had this opportunity.

The report has recommended a number of “positive and necessary” changes including: • A stronger emphasis on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures in the curriculum and a national plan for First Nations language programs.

• Improved cultural competency training for teachers.

• Professional learning that explicitly addresses race-based bullying and racism.

• Stronger relationships between teachers and parents.

The report has also called for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices to be central to discussions for the next federal school reform agreement. tinyurl.com/yc6y6jp8 and tinyurl.com/27wh78ts

IMAGE: ISTOCKPHOTO; ILLUSTRATION FIONA KATAUSKAS

Call to invest in ESPs

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If we want to keep educators in these vital roles, we need to actively support them to stay.

Marg Rogers University of New England

EVENTS 2–9 July NAIDOC Week

28 July Schools Tree Day

9 August

How to reduce early childhood educator burnout High rates of turnover and burnout in the early childhood sector are taking a toll, particularly since the pandemic.

A 2021 United Workers Union survey of 4000 educators found that 73 per cent planned to leave the sector within the next three years because of excessive workload, stress, low pay and status, and a lack of professional development and career progression. More than 80 per cent of those surveyed felt rushed when carrying out caring tasks.

In the 12 months to April 2022, jobs website SEEK reported a 40 per cent increase in positions advertised in the sector.

A team of academics from Australia and the UK has reviewed 39 studies to understand what causes educator burnout to help governments improve support for the sector.

Marg Rogers, senior lecturer in early childhood education at the University of New England, says burnout harms educators’ wellbeing, the quality of children’s education and leads to educators leaving. That then affects the ability of parents to work and business to thrive, as well as the learning outcomes of students throughout their lives.

Rogers says burnout is complex and can involve: •

Ongoing physical and mental fatigue

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A low sense of personal achievement

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Emotional exhaustion

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International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples

25 August Wear it Purple Day

Depersonalisation, where you feel separate from your body or feelings.

The review found effective ways to improve wellbeing, prevent burnout and keep teachers from leaving their jobs included coaching for career development, peer mentoring and counselling.

The research also showed that teachers experienced stress when they had few resources but high expectations to produce quality learning environments. Data collection added to the stress while inadequate income and a feeling of low status in society reduced educators’ motivation and caused them to leave their jobs.

“If we want to keep educators in these vital roles, we need to actively support them to stay,” says Rogers. tinyurl.com/mrxaztt5

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Minister restates funding promise Fair funding for schools has been delayed by a year while the federal government undertakes a review for the next National School Reform Agreement.

IN SHORT // The Albanese government's fair funding election promise has been delayed for a year. // A review into the National School Reform Agreement will advise the government on reform priorities. // The AEU is calling for a clear timeline for delivery of full funding.

The minister says the purpose of the review is to inform the development and negotiation of the next NSRA and the bilateral funding agreements with individual states and territories.

In particular, it will consider: 1 What targets and reforms should be included in the next agreement to drive real improvements in student outcomes, with a particular focus on students who are most at risk of falling behind and in need of more assistance – for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds, regional, rural and remote Australia, students with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students and students from a language background other than English 2 How the next agreement can contribute to improving student mental health and wellbeing, by addressing in-school factors while

acknowledging the impact of non-school factors on wellbeing 3 How the next agreement can support schools to attract and retain teachers 4 How data collection can best inform decision-making and boost student outcomes 5 How to ensure public funding is delivering on national agreements and that all school authorities are transparent and accountable to the community for how funding is invested and measuring the impacts of this investment.

Principal and AEU member Dyonne Anderson is a member of the six-person Expert Panel undertaking the review while the federal president, federal secretary and deputy federal president of the AEU are members of the Ministerial Reference Group that will advise education ministers on the specific reforms that should be tied to funding.

IMAGE NEWSPIX

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he Albanese government’s election promise to ensure every school is on the pathway towards 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS) was put on hold for 12 months when minister for education Jason Clare announced a review into the National School Reform Agreement (NSRA) – the joint deal between the Commonwealth, states and territories.

The NSRA is negotiated every four years and was due for renewal in late 2022.

The terms of reference for the NSRA review have made funding central to the review’s deliberations with the opening statement: “The Australian government is committed to working with state and territory governments to get every school to 100 per cent of its fair funding level."

AEU federal president Correna Haythorpe says that even though the review is focused on how money should be spent: “There is an irony with this review in that you can’t have the conversation about how money is spent without defining the size of the bucket of money to be delivered and that’s where Labor’s commitment is so important."

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Agenda

… you can’t have the conversation about how money is spent without defining the size of the bucket of money to be delivered and that’s where Labor’s commitment is so important.

(opposite) Jason Clare (pictured with the prime minister) has restated Labor’s commitment to funding.

Correna Haythorpe AEU federal president

Worldwide campaign Growing austerity measures in countries around the world is seeing budgets for education and schools plummet, according to Education International (EI), the global federation of education unions.

Austerity Watch has estimated that 85 per cent of the world population – or 6.7 billion people – will be living under austerity conditions by the end of this year.

Transforming Education Financing, a booklet released as part of EI’s Go Public! Fund Education campaign, says increasing the size, share, sensitivity and scrutiny of national budgets is essential to ensure public schools have adequate resources to deliver the right to education.

To achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG 4) by 2030, to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, countries must fulfil their obligations to provide free, quality public education.

“Yet, countries around the world are failing to allocate their maximum available resources. In fact, in the last few years, as many as 40 per cent of low- and middle-income countries have taken retrogressive steps, by lowering the education budget,” the booklet says.

“The COVID pandemic has made meeting the SDG 4 goal increasingly difficult. Education systems were severely affected by disruption and school closures. It is estimated that 147 million children missed more

than half of their in-class instruction through 2020 and 2021.

“It [the pandemic] has already led to a deepening of the pre-existing inequality crisis in education by gender, race, income, wealth, disability, ethnicity and location. Child labour numbers have risen for the first time in two decades. Girls face particular challenges, with increases in the number of early pregnancies and marriages recorded due to pregnancy during pandemic-related school closures. Furthermore, long hours of online teaching and learning have, in many cases, brought about negative impacts on students and teacher's mental health and other social problems, including online abuse mainly against girls and women.

“To deliver on the right to education, ultimately, domestic financing must be the focus. Over the past 40 years most international meetings and policy documents on education finance have focused on international aid or concessional loans. But these make up only 3 per cent of education financing globally. Over 97 per cent of the funding required to achieve SDG 4 must come from domestic budgets."

Countries should allocate a minimum 20 per cent share of their national budgets, or 6 per cent of their GDP to education, the booklet says.

Global leaders meeting in September 2022 at the UN Transforming Education Summit called for an increased and more equitable and efficient investment in education.

Haythorpe has welcomed the minister’s commitment to consult with the teaching profession at every step of the way but she’s concerned about the delay in providing fair funding to public schools.

“Funding delayed is funding denied.

We’ll have students finishing school this year who have never had the benefit of a fully funded public school,” she says.

Haythorpe has called for a clear timeline for delivery of full funding to public schools as quickly as possible.

Teaching summit Australia was represented for the first time at an annual International Summit on the Teaching Profession held in the US this year.

AEU federal president Correna Haythorpe, federal secretary Kevin Bates and the federal minister for education Jason Clare attended the summit, along with delegates from 22 countries to discuss how to strengthen the teaching profession and ensure all students have access to a quality education.

Delegates discussed ways of elevating and enhancing the teaching profession, educating for global and cultural competence and civic engagement, and leveraging the potential of digital technologies. At the conclusion of the summit, commitments were made about the practical actions that unions and governments could take to advance students’ education nationally and globally.

You can find a summary of the discussions at tinyurl.com/yc6sb784

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Clarion call for equity

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ree, inclusive, quality education for all is a noble aim and if evidence from the OECD is any indicator, countries whose education systems combine quality with equity are the highest performers.

In Australia, governments promise a fair go, meaning that everyone will have the opportunity to succeed in education and beyond. But that’s not necessarily the case, says author and Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg, professor of educational leadership at the University of Melbourne.

Indeed, the confusion between rhetoric and delivery could come down to semantics.

“We need to be clear about what we mean by equity in education, because my experience here is that people have very different views. Some think we can enhance equity by broadening educational opportunities, making more choice available,” says Sahlberg.

“But the basic principle for me is what we often call ‘social equity’, which means that educational outcomes, however they’re measured or defined, should be similar across different social or equity groups.”

IN SHORT // There exists significant disparity in educational outcomes throughout Australia. // Funding for education must be prioritised to deliver inclusive, quality public education for all. // The AEU and Youth Development Australia are working to bridge the divide.

In Australia, that simply isn’t the case.

There is great disparity in educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children from low socioeconomic groups, those for whom English is not their first language and children who live in regional, rural and remote areas.

If the goal for every child in this country is to accomplish an agreed level of education — to achieve social equity and equality of educational outcomes — that takes money.

POLITICAL WILL David Edwards, Education International (EI) general secretary, says there is plenty of money out there to address this inequity should governments choose to prioritise it.

“Funding is available when it comes to subsidising the fossil fuel industries polluting our planet. It’s available when it comes to war or giving tax breaks to the rich and corporations. What is lacking is the political will to truly make education a priority.”

EI’s Go Public! Fund Education campaign is a global initiative to unite 32 million educators from 383 member organisations in 178 countries to fight for publicly funded education systems able to deliver inclusive, quality, public education for all.

“Education status tells us so much about a country,” says Edwards. “The prospects for children, the health status of the population, the income and civil rights of women, the likelihood of innovation and entrepreneurship, and a country’s ability to respond and adapt to crises including conflict, climate change and natural disaster.”

PHOTO ISTOCKPHOTO

The pandemic exposed deep inequality in Australia’s education system, revealing a critical need for funding to ensure parity for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, regional, rural and remote students, those with disability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

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Agenda

… the basic principle for me is what we often call ‘social equity’, which means that educational outcomes, however they’re measured or defined, should be similar across different social or equity groups.

Pasi Sahlberg The University of Melbourne

Globally, the statistics are grim. Edwards says 220 million children are not in school, 450 million students in school are not learning at their expected grade level, and there’s a worldwide shortage of 69 million teachers.

“We need to turn this tide, to meet all students where they are, address their needs, and help them overcome the obstacles they face. For that to happen, we need well-funded public education systems and well-trained and well-paid educators that have the trust, tools, and time to deliver quality, inclusive and equitable education for all,” says Edwards.

COMMITMENT NEEDED According to Edwards, education financing has fallen in 65 per cent of low- and middle-income countries and in 33 per cent of upper-middle and highincome countries since the start of the pandemic, leaving educators everywhere without the resources they need to help students heal and make up for lost time.

In addition, widespread policies driving uncompetitive pay, unsustainable workloads, and growing precarity are driving teachers out of the profession they love and making it impossible to recruit and retain the teachers the world needs.

“We’re demanding that governments commit to education,” says Edwards.

“Large corporations and wealthy individuals can no longer be allowed to leverage the financial system for speculation and short-term profitmaking while raising prices, hiding assets, and undermining state revenue collection.

“Billions in uncollected taxes must be marshalled for the extensive investments in the public good like public education and to build economies that provide sustainable and broad-based growth.”

A RARE SIGHT After a 20-year teaching career in Queensland primary and secondary schools, many of them in rural and remote areas and on Country, Kamilaroi woman Melitta Hogarth has seen the difference that resources and proper funding can make. But, she says, it is a rare sight.

Hogarth, now an associate professor in Indigenous education at the University of Melbourne, says for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children to achieve the same educational outcomes as non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, schools need to receive funding that addresses the inequities that currently exist.

“That became evident during COVID when students who were already struggling were detrimentally affected because they didn’t have the financial resources for access to the internet.

Bridging the Divide The AEU and Youth Development Australia will hold a two-day Bridging the Divide Summit to examine equity in education.

Discussions will consider models for economic investment, political capital, initial teacher education, decolonisation in the classroom, wellness, student-led learning, teaching culture, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community connection, supportive practices and inclusion.

Tickets are available for in-person attendance on 30 and 31 October 2023 at Melbourne Park or for individual sessions online. bridgingthedivide.org.au

So issues that were already apparent to teachers before COVID became more pronounced,” she says.

“A lot of people talk about equity in terms of equality of opportunity rather than recognising that everyone does not have the same starting point,” Hogarth says.

SMOOTH TRANSITIONS Australia’s education system is, in many ways, grinding to a halt in terms of its relevance to and in support of students, says Keith Waters, executive officer at Youth Development Australia (YDA).

Waters has experience in helping young people – especially those out of the juvenile justice system or home care settings – make the transition from secondary school into work. He’s also a single father of nine, all of whom attended public schools.

He says Australia is not resourcing schools to enable teachers the tools to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of work and the skills required to participate in it.

“It is abundantly clear to me in all of my experience, which has spanned public and private schools, that public schools struggle under the weight of a pure lack of resources, whether that’s the overall funding levels or capital investment,” says Waters.

He’s staggered by the number of schools he sees that are in disrepair and not fully functional because governments don’t make the necessary investments: “The significantly growing numbers of disengaged young people comes down to a lack of resources in public schools to provide the teaching and support that those students need.”

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Agenda

The significantly growing numbers of disengaged young people comes down to a lack of resources in public schools to provide the teaching and support that those students need.

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Keith Waters Youth Development Australia

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Early school leavers are disadvantaged when it comes to participation in the workforce and are at higher risk of becoming homeless. With the cost-of-living crisis biting many families, those living hand-to-mouth can find it difficult to make education a priority, says Waters.

“There’s a whole range of other risk factors,” says Waters, “so it’s really important to invest in ensuring that all young people have a quality education.

But, in particular, to give young people who experience disadvantage, every opportunity to complete their education and to fully participate in the labour market.”

That places even more pressure on already under-funded schools and governments need to address that.

“The burden [that schools] have to carry to try and keep those kids engaged is really difficult. And with that often comes other issues of disadvantage, so it just compounds.

“There’s a geographical inequity: what you get depends on where you live. And that’s something that’s got to be addressed also.”

But it’s not just local geography.

Waters, whose youngest son is African, says schools can’t adequately assess children, especially new arrivals, from different diaspora.

“The resources just aren’t there for schools to be able to assess the educational level these kids are up to and how they’re best supported.

A student at 13, who should be in Year 7, might have the academic skills of someone in Year 3.

“That’s not the school’s fault, that’s not the teacher’s fault. The resources just aren’t available,” Waters says.

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Above and beyond For disability advocate and Inclusion International council representative for Asia Pacific, Stephanie Gotlib, equity is about inclusion and opportunity and the specific resourcing required to achieve that.

Gotlib’s son Adam, now 23, lives with intellectual disability and autism. He has high communication and behaviour support needs.

When Adam was starting school, Gotlib was asked why she wanted him to learn to read. “For me, it’s about every child getting a fair go and having access to an education that enriches and values them and gives them opportunities. If we deny that to kids, particularly kids with disability, the community misses out,” says Gotlib.

For me, it’s about every child getting a fair go and having access to an education that enriches and values them and gives them opportunities. If we deny that to kids, particularly kids with disability, the community misses out.

Stephanie Gotlib Inclusion International

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Adam began his schooling in disability-specific education, but Gotlib was frustrated at the lack of expectation. “I can remember looking at his learning plan and thinking, ‘This isn’t an education. This is stuff I can teach him in my kitchen at home: how to make pancakes, how to sit up at the table’.

“He was ready to learn, but he wasn’t given equity of opportunity and expectations,” she says.

Gotlib enrolled Adam at Clifton Hill Primary School in Melbourne and he completed his schooling at Fitzroy High School with a modified Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning (VCAL).

“I worked really hard with Fitzroy High to come up with a Year 11/12 curriculum for him with limited resources, skills and expertise. The principal went above and beyond to modify the curriculum and assessments to ensure he passed his VCAL and you couldn’t ask for a more committed team. But the harsh reality is that when you don’t have equity of resourcing, how do you do it? I don’t think teachers can work any harder than they do now," she says.

Gotlib says more work needs to be done to provide engaging education support for students with intellectual disabilities. “We have to work out how to make it possible. I think there are some real learnings that could happen from Adam attempting his VCAL to help others with high communication needs and significant intellectual disability.”

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espite the success of Universal espite the success of Universal Newborn Hearing Screening, more Newborn Hearing Screening, more children receive their first hearing aids children receive their first hearing aids during their first five years of school during their first five years of school than during their first three years of than during their first three years of life (Hearing Australia, 2020). In many life (Hearing Australia, 2020). In many cases, hearing loss only becomes cases, hearing loss only becomes apparent when the children apparent when the children experience poor academic progress. experience poor academic progress.

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10-13_Agenda_Equity2.indd 13

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16/6/2023 4:56 pm

An education system at war with itself Public funding should not be used to “turbo charge the gap between privilege and underprivilege”, writes author and social commentator Jane Caro AM.

wealthier Australian parents make to buy their child a place in a prestigious school?

Particularly as, unlike American universities, those schools are publicly subsidised.

EDUCATION AND DEMOCRACY A highly educated elite is a private good.

It benefits those lucky enough to belong.

A well-educated general population is a public good. It benefits everyone.

A functioning democracy must have a well-educated general population.

IN SHORT // Neoliberal governments have widened the gap between private and public education. // Educating all children, rather than an elite few, is essential to a functioning democracy. // To ensure equal access to education, public funding must be directed where it's needed most.

Rule by the people means we must equip all people with the tools they need to think critically, not just to help them get a job, but to make wise decisions.

It’s to that end that, like all democracies, we have a universal, compulsory, free, secular education system.

Perhaps being born is the riskiest thing we ever do. We have no control over the circumstances into which we will arrive.

Some of us arrive into wealth, safety and comfort; some into the opposite.

Every civilised government has an obligation to make sure that every child, regardless of the accident of birth, has as equal as possible a chance to

overcome disadvantage and realise his or her potential.

It is probably true that life is always more or less unequal, but that is no justification for using public funding to turbo charge the gap between privilege and underprivilege, to not just allow wealthy parents to corral most resources for their own children, but publicly fund them to do so. Some people argue that they “work hard” and “make sacrifices” so their choice of school should be supported by the taxpayer, but that fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of schooling and education funding. Schooling is for children, not for parents. Education funding should be used to help narrow the inevitable differences visited upon children at birth. It should never be used to punish or reward those parents, governments or neoliberals see as “bad” or “good”.

THE MYTH OF CHOICE In Australia, we have two publicly subsidised education systems, which work in direct conflict with one another.

One is driven by the neoliberal ideal of parental choice. The other by the classic liberal ideal of education for all children, regardless of parentage.

Worse, parental choice for everyone is not possible in a compulsory education system, because parents tend to choose and reject the same schools. Inevitably then, parental choice is a misnomer, a marketing term rather than a reality.

What we’ve created is a system where some schools – those considered more desirable, most of them private but some of them public – now have choice over which children they will and will not educate. And other schools do not.

Some parents can buy a place in a sought-after school. Some parents cannot.

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ne sure way to tell the difference between a first world and a third world country is by its public infrastructure.

Even the poorest nations have rich oligarchs and warlords living in luxurious and often highly fortified compounds. The higher the fences, the richer the occupants.

It is the state of a nation’s roads, drains, public buildings, public schools, hospitals, clinics and transport that reveal whether a place is defined by poverty or by prosperity.

If the public infrastructure is in good repair, it’s likely most citizens enjoy a reasonable standard of living.

Yet neoliberalism despises the very things that create this difference. Neoliberalism slashes the taxes that pay for public services. It reduces the budgets and the people who develop, fund and maintain public facilities. Neoliberalism prefers choice for the fortunate over services for all.

In Australia, we see the effects of almost 25 years of neoliberal governments starkly illustrated in our crumbling public schools and private schools resourced beyond dreams of wildest avarice. Our schooling system is now divided along class lines, between the parents who have choice (aka money), and the parents who don’t.

Any tinpot dictatorship can produce a highly educated elite. So-called ‘elite’ parents have always practiced wealth capture. In other words, they try to concentrate all the resources they can on their own already privileged children.

We recently witnessed a scandal in the US where wealthy and celebrity parents bought places for their not-particularlytalented children at prestigious colleges, often parting with millions of dollars to do so. This may have shocked the Americans, but is it really very different from the efforts

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Choice

What we’ve created is a system where some schools … now have choice over which children they will and will not educate … Some parents can buy a place in a sought-after school. Some parents cannot.

Jane Caro

If Australia continues down this neoliberal education path, the only thing it can do is entrench generational privilege and underprivilege. We will get a highly educated elite.

We won’t get a well-educated general population.

We can stop this happening and we must.

We must change direction, put our public funding behind the children with the greatest need and our best resources into the schools that teach them.

Jane Caro is a columnist, author, broadcaster and social commentator.

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A better Australia Accepting the gift of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s Voice.

B Y T R A C E Y EVANS

The Uluru Statement – the invitation to accept our Voice – is written to the Australian people … it is a gift from Indigenous peoples.

Thomas Mayo Maritime Union of Australia

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hen author Thomas Mayo visits schools around Australia to tell students about the Uluru Statement from the Heart, he’s often asked why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people don’t already have a Voice to parliament.

IN SHORT // The Voice to Parliament Handbook offers a basic explanation of the Voice. // Co-authors Thomas Mayo and Kerry O'Brien say it is a question of fairness and acceptance. // While the Voice is an important step, there's still a lot of hard work ahead.

Mayo, a Kaurareg Aboriginal and Kalkalgal, Erubamle Torres Strait Islander man, is a Maritime Union of Australia official and an advocate for a constitutionally enshrined Voice.

He has published four books and numerous articles and essays.

His latest book, The Voice to Parliament Handbook, which was co-authored by former ABC journalist Kerry O’Brien, is a backto-basics explanation of the Voice.

Mayo writes that it’s now up to all of us to answer the children’s question.

“The Uluru Statement – the invitation to accept our Voice – is written to the Australian people,” he says.

Mayo points out that it’s not a government idea. “Rather, it is a gift from Indigenous peoples.”

Thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were involved in the creation of the Uluru Statement,

which was released in May 2017.

The Voice was one of its three key proposals. The deliberations were conducted over many days through a series of regional discussions and culminated in the Uluru National Constitutional Convention in 2017.

O’Brien says the Voice “reflects a conscious choice by the largest representative body of First Nations leadership in our history to go beyond the politicians of this country and appeal directly to the people”.

While some have sought to complicate the referendum, it is a simple matter, say Mayo and O’Brien: “It comes down to a question about fairness and acceptance.”

The referendum’s only role is to decide whether to acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s 60,000year occupation of the continent and the deep injustice of their colonial

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Agenda

The community campaign A community campaign to support a yes vote in the referendum is underway, fuelled by public donations.

Resources Federal government information voice.gov.au Community campaign yes23.com.au Unions for Yes campaign tinyurl.com/y8nn3d3y

dispossession by giving them a right to be heard and to have a say in government policy, write Mayo and O’Brien.

Russell Honnery, chair of Yalukit Yalendj, the AEU’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Committee, says that this acknowledgement through a ‘yes’ vote will be something that cannot be removed or changed by successive governments without another referendum.

“It’s a recognition that we’re actually here,” says Honnery, a Gomeroi man.

Honnery says the referendum is a first step. “There’s a lot of hard work ahead,” he says. That’s particularly the case in schools where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander student numbers are growing – but Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers and principals remain in small numbers.

In 2021, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Years 7 to 12 represented 5.7 per cent of the total student population. In the 20 years to 2021, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school student numbers grew from 34,124 to 100,609, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

But Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teacher numbers have failed to keep pace.

The latest available numbers, from the 2016 census, showed that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers made up a little over 2 per cent of all teachers.

It is crucial to lift the numbers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers and principals to help connect schools to communities, says Honnery.

The More Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Teachers Initiative (MATSITI), a four-year national program to increase numbers, which ended in 2015, saw an increase of 16.5 per cent. The program was discontinued by the previous government.

The campaign, which provides a comprehensive explanation of the referendum and a host of resources, offers ways to become involved through volunteering or donating.

Source: yes23.com.au

Principal of Cabbage Tree Island Public School and president of NATSIPA Dyonne Anderson, a proud Githabal woman, is disappointed that there is not a greater effort to train and recruit Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers and to support career progression to principal positions.

What is the Voice to parliament?

The Voice will be an advisory body, which would make representations to the federal parliament and executive government on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander matters.

It will: • be chosen by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people based on the wishes of local communities • be representative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, gender balanced and include youth • be empowering, communityled, inclusive, respectful and culturally informed • be accountable and transparent • work alongside existing organisations and traditional structures • not have a program delivery function • not have veto power.

Source: voice.gov.au

“We need to make sure we are visible in schools, particularly those with high Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations, so that our communities and the wider community can experience our passion, commitment and perspective. That’s how we are going to end up having a better Australia,” says Anderson.

“There are great benefits for our education system investing in us.

There’s always been a great need to make sure that we are represented and have a voice because we have the solutions and alternative viewpoints to be able to deal with some of the challenges we face with our children.”

Anderson says research data highlights that educational leaders are increasingly feeling “culturally unsafe” and are subject to racist abuse – behaviour is also of concern.

“We have to acknowledge it and have a way to address it,” she says.

“It can’t be the dominant culture that continues to come up with determining whether an incident is racist, and then come up with a solution. It just doesn’t make sense.

We’re never going to have any success for First Nations people when the dominant culture determines the whole process and the outcome."

If you’ve never experienced racism, how can you assess someone’s experience and deliver a fair and unbiased outcome?

“We’ve got to get our foundations right and then we can actually benefit from the additional strengths, insight, knowledge, 60,000-plus years of connection to Country to culture that that can bring to our schools,” Anderson says.

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Slowly goes in school funding

IN SHORT // The 2023-24 federal Budget did little to alleviate many years of underfunding in public schools.

The federal Budget barely meandered into addressing urgent and essential needs for schools, however a small-but-significant announcement in the Northern Territory gives hope.

// Nonetheless, funds allocated to public schools in Central Australia represent a significant shift to address past governments’ neglect.

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he 2023-24 federal Budget was a distinct anti-climax for public school teachers, students and communities. It offered little new funding to fix the more than a decade long crisis of underfunding in public schools, which has now reached more than $6 billion annually.

Most measures of significance in the Budget had already been announced in the October 2022 Budget, including the provision of 5000 bursaries of $10,000 per year for high-achieving school graduates to study teaching and the Schools Upgrade Fund. The schools fund will deliver a one-

year $215 million boost to capital works projects in public schools — just a fraction of the $1.9 billion, 10-year capital grant fund the Commonwealth provides for private schools.

The Budget also put dollar amounts to those commitments made in late 2022 as part of the National Teacher Workforce Action Plan. Some of these were encouraging, such as the announcement of a $25 million Teacher Workload Reduction Fund to pilot new ways to reduce teacher workloads — something the AEU pushed hard for during the development of the Action

Plan. There was also a further $9.3 million to ensure the national guidelines that come out of the Action Plan better support early career teachers and new school leaders and generate improvements to teacher workforce data that will help to better understand future demand for teachers.

Other measures, such as the $10 million national advertising campaign “to raise the status of the teaching profession” may be well meaning, but they are a drop in the ocean for solving the workforce and workload crisis that schools continue to face.

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Federal Budget

… it represents full funding to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard in the region. That funding will help deliver more teachers, more education support staff, and more one-on-one individual attention for students.

Correna Haythorpe AEU federal president

SLIVER OF HOPE However, signs of hope in one small-but-verysignificant commitment largely went under the radar: the promise of $40.4 million over two years to improve school attendance and education outcomes and ensure that every school in Central Australia is fully funded to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard (SRS). Although this is a tiny amount in terms of the total Commonwealth budget of more than $10.6 billion a year for public schools, and will benefit just 36 public schools in total, it potentially represents one of the most important steps forward for the future of Australian public schools on the long-promised, and long-delayed path to full funding for all public schools.

Australian Education Union federal president Correna Haythorpe welcomed the announcement but confirmed the AEU’s commitment to ensuring that every child in every public school in Australia is provided with the funding they need.

“While $40 million may not be much compared to other federal Budget commitments, it’s important that we’re clear about what it represents,” she says.

“For public school students in Central Australia, it represents full funding to 100 per cent of the Schooling Resource Standard in the region. That funding will help deliver more teachers, more education support staff, and more one-onone individual attention for students.”

At the 2022 Federal Election the ALP promised to set all schools on a path to 100 per cent of SRS, and education minister Jason Clare has repeated this promise.

The Commonwealth’s decision to increase funding of these 36 schools to 100 per cent of SRS is the first step on that path towards realising the promise of full and fair funding for all public school students in Australia.

This hope is tangible as the announcement for the Northern Territory to reach 100 per cent of SRS provides precedent and indicates that the government is well aware of the need for every public school in the country to reach 100 per cent of SRS.

NORTHERN TERRITORY TURNAROUND The entrenched underfunding of public schools in the Northern Territory is more severe than the underfunding in all other jurisdictions. The 2018 bi-lateral funding agreements, signed between the previous coalition government and all states and territories, locked in an arbitrary Commonwealth funding cap of 20 per cent of the SRS and offered 75 per cent of SRS as an aspirational target for states and territories to move towards over five years. This meant that in every jurisdiction except the ACT, public schools were underfunded by at least 5 per cent and, in most cases, closer to 10 per cent.

In the Northern Territory the deal was even worse and required the Territory government to fund a maximum of only 59 per cent of the SRS by 2023. This, alongside the Commonwealth reducing their funding from 23.5 per cent in 2018 down to the self-imposed cap of 20 per cent by 2027, means that in 2023 public schools in the Territory will receive only 80.5 per cent of the minimum combined funding they require. Every student will be underfunded by more than $6000, and one in five students will miss out on the vital resources they need to overcome significant geographical and compound disadvantage barriers.

This was despite the bi-lateral agreement recognising the “delivery of school education in the Northern Territory

as unique because of the challenges associated with providing services to a disproportionately high number of disadvantaged schools and students”.

In the Territory, 44 per cent of public school students are from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds, 40 per cent live in remote or very remote areas and 38 per cent have a language background other than English. Half of all students are in the lowest quartile of the Index of Community SocioEducational Advantage and more than one quarter of students in the Northern Territory have a disability and should receive educational adjustments. That makes the Territory’s student cohort unique and highlights the need for additional resources.

Despite this, in 2018 both the Commonwealth and Territory governments absolved themselves of responsibility by declaring that full funding for these students would be too expensive, that the “Northern Territory’s funding commitments under this agreement should be considered in the context of the current subdued economic and fiscal conditions” and that the SRS goal for the Territory should be reduced to only 80 per cent of SRS. This abdication of responsibility has left 20 per cent of public school students in the Territory without any allocated funding, and left schools to face unacceptable shortfalls in resources, teachers and services.

FUNDING FOR SUCCESS The impact of this funding crisis has been laid out in a new report from the Northern Territory Branch of the AEU titled Funding for Success.

“Our students are disengaging from school at unprecedented rates. Their learning outcomes have deteriorated

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Federal Budget

Our students are disengaging from school at unprecedented rates. Their learning outcomes have deteriorated since the turn of the century, and they are highly stratified by socioeconomic and cultural background.

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Funding for Success Report from the Northern Territory Branch of the AEU

since the turn of the century, and they are highly stratified by socioeconomic and cultural background,” the report says.

“Our teachers are stressed and burned out, resulting in a labour shortage that has forced us to fill gaps in our schools with corporate department staff. All of this is ultimately driven by an attendancebased funding model that forces our most disadvantaged schools into downward spirals of hyper-residualisation.”

The first recommendation of that report is “to fund all NT public schools at 100 per cent

of the Schooling Resource Standard by no later than the start of 2026”. This echoes the main recommendation the Gonski review made more than 10 years ago, which devised the SRS as the minimum funding required to allow most students to reach achievement benchmarks. Because the minimum fair funding level has not been delivered over the last decade, cycles of disadvantage have been further entrenched and equity gaps widened.

This is why the new $40.4 million included in the Budget for 36 public

schools in the Territory is a small but very significant shift to address past governments’ neglect. It is the beginning of righting a decade of wrongs. It also sets a new benchmark for federal funding of public schools above the arbitrary and restrictive 20 per cent SRS cap imposed by the previous coalition government and demonstrates that the Commonwealth can act to ensure that schools are fully and fairly funded to 100 per cent of SRS. Jonathon Guy is the AEU federal research officer.

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Policy

The heavy hours Work intensification is key to understanding why teachers’ work has become so demanding.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have found time poverty and addressing the “heavy hours” are as important as overall workload.

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he enduring workload pressures teachers and principals face remains a policy problem not adequately addressed. The 2022 Department of Education Issues Paper: Teacher Workforce Shortages, for example surmised that teacher “workloads and their complexity have increased over time”, contributing both to attrition and a decline in people choosing teaching as a career. A research project

in partnership with the Queensland Teachers’ Union (QTU) has found the issue is more complex than workload alone, and suggests systemic responses solely targeting workload, such as reducing the number of teaching hours or providing suites of lesson plans, will have little traction in turning the tide. The pressure points within teachers’ work requires demarcating between workload and work intensification to address time poverty.

IN SHORT // Workload and work intensity together contribute to time poverty among teachers. // Policies must address both areas to combat attrition and poor job satisfaction. // A new app provides the means to better understand the work teachers are doing.

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Workloads and their complexity have increased over time.

Issues Paper: Teacher Workforce Shortages Department of Education, 2022

WORKLOAD VS WORK INTENSIFICATION Workload is usually defined as the amount of work done over a given period. This is commonly elicited through self-report surveys. For example, the OECD’s Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), last conducted in 2018, asked teachers and school leaders, “During your most recent complete calendar week, approximately how many 60-minute hours did you spend in total on tasks related to your job at this school?”. This question generates a number of hours worked each week, which is averaged out across respondents. These surveys usually find that Australian teachers are working significantly more hours than is reasonable. A workload survey of AEU South Australian members published in 2022, specifically found that “South Australian teachers work on average over 50 hours per week, including 30 hours of tasks beyond face-toface teaching”.

Work intensification, on the other hand, is best understood as the experience of difficult or stressful moments of a job associated with complexity and cognitive/psychological demands of a particular task or set of tasks. In our study we draw on Jaime L. Beck’s concept of “heavy hours”, which refers to the feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once due to competing and contradictory demands at a given point in time. Sociologist Judy Wajcman in Pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism describes this feeling of multiple pressures as evidence of a “more complex temporal patterning of experience” as if time is becoming compressed.

When numbers don’t add up

South Australian teachers work on average over 50 hours per week, including 30 hours of tasks beyond face-to-face teaching

Source: A workload survey of AEU South Australian members published in 2022

TIME POVERTY We argue that there is a relationship between workload and work intensity that needs to be better understood in the work of teachers and principals. This relationship, we argue, explains a common feeling of always being time-poor. Time poverty is the relationship between a) the amount of work a teacher does, or perceives that they have to do, and b) the intensity of that work, which may be expressed as the number, complexity or stakes associated with decisions that need to be made over a given time period. The fact that an increase in one (load or intensity) can lead to an increase in feeling “out of time” suggests that they are independent concerns. Our argument is that time poverty is becoming a common experience in teaching, and this has to be a focus for systems.

Insisting on this distinction is a reminder that systems must intervene

in both workload and the “heavy hours” experienced in order to combat attrition and reduced job satisfaction. It is not just how much teachers are working, it is the subjective pressure of that work which feeds into job dissatisfaction and attrition. Too often, proposed recommendations to solve the problems of teachers’ work focus solely on workload (such as saving teacher’s time through automating or outsourcing some tasks), rather than addressing what it is that teachers find stressful in their classrooms and in their roles.

A further issue is that teachers may expect, and indeed find value in, the complex demands they see as being core or central to teaching itself. David C. Berliner’s work on expert teachers, for example, posits that it is their ability to recognise and respond to patterns in the classroom in relation to learners that defines their craft. Responding to time poverty is not simply about making teaching less complex, it may be better described as understanding the impact of non-core work that teachers feel gets in the way of their ability to be successful in the classroom. Things such as mandated data-entry, increased administrative work, excessive (and performative) assessment work and feeling in perpetual communication via email, apps, learning stories, photos and videos appear to take energy away from teaching itself.

RESEARCHING WORK INTENSIFICATION “Heavy hours” are difficult to measure.

While survey approaches have yielded much valuable information regarding workload, there are concerns that they aren’t as useful for understanding work intensification, or the subjective

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Policy

Resources The app, developed in partnership with the QTU, can be applied in contexts such as schools, TAFEs and universities. If you would like to find out more about the project, you can visit the project website tinyurl.com/yckvba2c or read the most recent paper at tinyurl.com/3zaem8ce

experience of teachers’ work. Partly this is a problem of recall: in more complex or high-paced moments it can be difficult to remember exactly what was occurring and how time was spent or allocated.

Which is where technology and app development comes in. The collection and analysis of real-time data is easier and more common through wearable or easily carried devices such as smartphones.

WHAT WE FOUND We piloted an app on 109 QTU members in Queensland in 2022.

Findings suggest that the app provides new ways to understand the work that teachers are doing and their subjective experience of time.

First, the results suggest that understanding teachers’ work requires grappling with inherent and imposed multi-tasking. When teachers recorded their 30-minutes of time use, it was evident that many were constantly switching their focus across multiple domains. Across the 280 30-minute timeslots recorded, on average teachers spent time on at least nine different activities. When they estimated how much time they spent on these activities, they totalled an average of 63.28 minutes of time use. This did not mean that teachers had warped the space-time continuum, rather it meant that many activities that teachers were managing, and switching between, occurred simultaneously. Teachers were having to layer multiple activities, each with their own cognitive and psychological demands, at the same time. This helps understand why a 30-minute period of work can feel intense for many teachers.

Jaime L. Beck’s concept of “heavy hours” ... refers to the feeling of being pulled in multiple directions at once due to competing and contradictory demands at a given point in time.

More than half of the participants, when asked at the end of the day how manageable their workload was and how rushed they felt during the day, reported low levels of manageability and high levels of feeling rushed. Those who recorded higher levels of dissatisfaction with their workload and who felt rushed were asked to qualify factors that impacted this experience. Participants identified three common factors, these were managing student needs/behaviour, communicating with parents/carers and the amount of work to be covered in lessons. It is easy to see how these factors add layers of complexity to teaching. Managing student needs/behaviour can take time away from teaching and learning activities, which is at a premium when the teacher feels pressure to keep up with syllabus and curricular content. Communication with parents, whether via email or through a student management system, similarly becomes an administrative task that

must be done on top of an already intense schedule.

These “heavy hours” during the school day are exacerbated by the amount of work teachers felt that they still had to do.

The app recorded 255 responses asking teachers a) how typical their working day was and b) to estimate how many hours of work they still needed to complete.

The teachers participating reported that while their days were relatively typical, on average they still had three hours of work left to do that night or over the weekend.

BETTER CONVERSATIONS The problem of teachers’ and principals’ experiences of work is particularly urgent because of concerns about the effects of work on teachers’ health, wellbeing and the ability and will of systems to respond. The teachers using the app are reporting both the heavy hours of their work (intensity) and the amount of work they have to do (workload). This is shedding light on time poverty: the relationship between the amount of work to be done and the intensity of that work.

Seeing the problem of time poverty as solvable through policies that aim to reduce workload hours alone does not adequately respond to this problem.

Greg Thompson is Professor of Education Research at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and former secondary school teacher.

Anna Hogan is an ARC DECRA research fellow in the QUT School of Teacher Education and Leadership and former secondary school teacher.

Dr Meghan Stacey is a Senior Lecturer in the UNSW School of Education and former secondary school teacher.

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From little things, a bigger message grows Building a stronger connection to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and Country.

B Y L E A N N E T OL RA P H O T O S A N T HONY Mc KE E 24 // WI NT E R 20 2 3

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Arthur Hamilton Award

W

IN SHORT // Phillippa Adgemis and Yvonne Thurgood of Coldstream Primary School in Melbourne's northeast are the 2023 winners of the Arthur Hamilton Award.

Eidsvold P-12 State School in east-central // The educators have Queensland has been successfully incorporated running its Wakka Aboriginal and Torres Strait Wakka Yumbin language Islander perspectives, cultural reclamation program for learnings and celebrations into almost six years. their school's curriculum.

hen Phillippa Adgemis became principal at Coldstream Primary School in Melbourne’s northeast in 2016, the school community did not acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Adgemis and placement teacher Yvonne Thurgood, a Noongar woman, began to acknowledge Country at briefings each morning and included it in weekly assemblies. They found prominent places to display the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags and adopted a wholeof-school approach to inclusion.

Together, they audited the school’s teaching to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives. In addition, the school observes significant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dates in activities and staff have participated in Community Understanding and Safety Training (CUST). In recognition of their ongoing work and school programs, Adgemis and Thurgood are the 2023 winners of the Arthur Hamilton Award for Outstanding Contribution to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education.

Today the Coldstream Primary School community recognises the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the

Traditional Custodians of the land on which the school stands, and its students have developed their own daily class and weekly assembly acknowledgements.

There are four Aboriginal children at the primary school and four children at the school’s kindergarten. Other families are beginning to discover their own Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ancestry as they learn more, too.

IMMERSION IN CULTURE The school has celebrated Harmony Day since 2017 and each year teachers and students adapt Dreamtime stories into plays to perform for the local community.

“Hundreds of community members joined us that first day. Local Traditional Custodians performed a Welcome to Country and smoking ceremony and children participated in activities including boomerang making and Aboriginalthemed colouring,” says Adgemis.

“Playgroup, kinder and long day care children from neighbouring areas and other primary schools attended and were gifted with showbags including Aboriginalthemed colouring books and pencils. (from left to right) Phillippa Adgemis, principal at Coldstream Primary; Yvonne Thurgood (left) celebrates the Arthur Hamilton Award with a student.

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Arthur Hamilton Award

(from top) Phillippa Adgemis with a student from Coldstream Primary; (below) Adgemis (centre) and Yvonne Thurgood (far right) with students and the Arthur Hamilton Award – funding from which will go towards training that supports staff to develop and embrace Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.

the Traditional Custodians of where our school is built,” she says.

Thurgood, who is the school’s Marrung leader, says she was not encouraged to recognise her own Aboriginality when she was growing up.

She has learned much about the culture of her mob and teaches and shares it with her students. Together they use Noongar words wherever they can, and Thurgood teaches Wurundjeri Woi wurrung words where she can.

“It has become a regular March event at our school and First Nations plays and themes are at the centre of our study leading up to the day,” says Adgemis.

“This immersion of culture has been systematic and as we have progressed, we have included all significant events including NAIDOC Week, Sorry Day, Indigenous Literacy Day, Reconciliation Week.

“Where possible we reference First Nations culture as an underpinning of our lessons and always link back to

Where possible we reference First Nations culture as an underpinning of our lessons and always link back to the Traditional Custodians of where our school is built.

Phillippa Adgemis Coldstream Primary School

STRONG CONNECTIONS The school has also engaged Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educators to deliver sessions on traditional craft, bush tucker, medicines and connections to the land.

In 2019, the school applied for a grant to develop a Koorie hub supported by Wurundjeri Elder Brooke Wandin, who helped to develop modules of leaning to consolidate cultural understandings.

Wandin visited classrooms to support learning and help embed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into the curriculum.

Adgemis says the school has also included Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-themed furnishings and toys in its early years rooms and has engaged mentors to run specialised programs for its Wurundjeri children.

“We have also commissioned a series of murals depicting the totems of the children as known to us – and involved First Nations children – and all the children in the school have participated in their creation and installation,” says Adgemis.

Adgemis says the school plans to use the grant money provided by the Arthur Hamilton Award for staff to undertake

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training through the Strengthening Professional Capabilities of Principals in Koorie Education (SPPIKE) program.

The program supports Victorian principals and education leaders to develop and embrace Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture.

Leanne Tolra is a freelance writer and Australian Educator’s sub-editor.

Arthur Hamilton Arthur Hamilton was a Palawa man, educator and union activist who advocated for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to be given access to high-quality public education. The annual award recognises his contribution by celebrating the successes of educators who have followed in his footsteps.

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New starts

Engaging practice In this instalment of our new educators series, the four teachers we're following throughout the year explore student engagement strategies and professional development.

B Y M A R G A R E T PATON

Jake Freeman-Duffy

TAKING THE REINS Leadership has been the dominant theme for Jake Freeman-Duffy so far this year.

For three weeks in Term 1, he was the relieving deputy principal.

Freeman-Duffy would arrive at school at 7am and leave around 6pm. It allowed him to get his work done because during the school day he was “pulled left, right and centre” dealing with daily issues that arise.

“I had to hit the ground running, managing the whole school as well as managing a stage team. One day, I had six teachers away. With the teacher shortage and being in Western Sydney where there are hardly any casuals available, I had to jump into a class, so I had to change my whole day around,” he says.

He appreciates and understands the domino effects of disruption.

“There might be an issue with one class, so I’ve had to change one teacher’s relief from a face-to-face teaching day, but then, I have to make fixes here, here and here, changing people’s days around, rotating roles,” he says. “As a relieving deputy, you look at what benefits the whole school.”

MANAGING BEHAVIOURS But quick fixes aren’t his style. As a leader, when dealing with students’ behavioural issues, he takes time to interview each one to get everyone’s side of the story.

“For one incident, I had to step away for a moment and then came back.

It helped me get a clearer picture of what happened. I take my time, within reason,” he says.

Freeman-Duffy follows his school’s Positive Behaviour for Learning approach, which also has a “sprinkle of restorative practices”.

“I’ll blend the approaches, and, for Indigenous students, I will use the same strategies as with any other student, so, it’s a low-key chat, ‘why did you do this? Tell me your side of the story, let’s work it out’. If I came on hard ball, they’d just shut down,” he says.

It’s part of a philosophical shift he has made since his early career years teaching in regional NSW. There he used to keep pushing and pushing students

PHOTOGRAPHY MICHAEL AMENDOLIA; ROHAN THOMSON

Assistant principal St Mary’s North Public School, NSW

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In each issue of Australian Educator, we follow the challenges and achievements of four new educators throughout the year.

Resources Stronger Smarter Leadership Program strongersmarter.com.au 8 Aboriginal Ways of Learning 8ways.online

academically. He’s since realised the need to enable them to get there themselves, as independent learners.

Also on the improvement drive are his school’s assistant principals (APs). They’ve been supervising and observing their stage teachers’ classes to work out why intervention methods aren’t working as well as they want. So, the school’s APs lead the classes while the classroom teacher does one-on-one work in class.

STRONGER AND SMARTER As for his downtime, Freeman-Duffy has been keeping up his morning gym sessions and he spent two weeks hiking New Zealand’s South Island during the school holidays.

At work, he plans to continue his professional development with two courses: the Stronger Smarter Leadership Program, developed by Dr Chris Sarra, and the Art of Leadership.

“I’ve done leadership courses before, but only broken the surface. I want to cut it open that bit more to find out what I can about myself and what I can do better,” he says.

HITS has helped me in terms of how I walk into class and set my lessons, and manage student behaviours.

Alex Leon Mount Stromlo High School

Alex Leon Teacher Mount Stromlo High School, ACT

ENERGISED TEACHING New educator Alex Leon has found some “magic” in teaching – it’s the Buunji Birrang (shared horizons) program her school runs for Year 7-10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

For three classes a week, the program covers the same content all students learn, but it uses an approach based on the Aboriginal eight ways of learning.

Leon team-teaches with a peer who has written the lesson plans. They collaborate and tweak delivery based on the “mood of the learners”, which can often be highly energetic, says Leon, a proud Worimi (Forster-Toncurry) and Lardil (Mornington Island) woman.

“These are kids who can be disengaged in other classes and not making the best choices, but in these classes, in Buunji, they’re so connected. They want to participate.

“It’s a really cool space for students to be part of a community, to learn about our culture, and shine,” she says.

PRINCIPLED TEACHING In her other classes (mostly humanities and social sciences – HASS), Leon has been implementing High Impact Teaching Strategies (HITS), which draws on the work of Professor John Hattie and is part of Mount Stromlo High School’s professional development. HITS highlights high expectations, success criteria, learning intentions and feedback to support reading, according to the ACT education directorate. Leon recognises the principles from her university studies.

“It’s very similar to the skills that I’d already learned. HITS has helped me in terms of how I walk into class and set my lessons, and manage student behaviours,” she says.

For example, Leon will highlight socialemotional capabilities in her wellbeing, health awareness and management classes.

“We have check-ins, talk about respecting our bodies, our choices, and it’s been fun to see how the funny little handshake warm-up builds classroom culture,” she says. “I’ve integrated those into all of my classes.”

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However, when one of her students said, “I like you as a teacher, but I hate HASS. It’s boring”, she saw the opportunity to take her students out of the classroom. “I’ve taken the class out for basketball drills, broken them into teams and I do a reflection to quiz the class on what we’ve covered and make them take turns.

“I will use this lesson as a recap of our previous learning. So, if we covered the Industrial Revolution, for instance, I will ask questions about the Industrial Revolution. They could be proper questions like: ‘In what decade did the Industrial Revolution begin?’ Or true or false questions like: ‘True or false – the Agrarian Revolution was BEFORE the Industrial Revolution?’,” she says.

A HEALTHY BALANCE Leon is an AEU rep at her school and has been catching up with union committee members who have attended events. The union is acting on behalf of ACT public school teachers on a new enterprise bargaining agreement.

“I’ve been really feeling it around the school that teachers are struggling, but they’re so resilient, showing up every day, no matter what,” she says.

“I’m lucky to be where I am with support from such strong teachers.

“Teaching can be emotionally draining. It’s been really helpful sometimes not taking my school laptop home, not opening emails after school, just disengaging from work, and doing physical exercise,” she says.

In her downtime, Leon regularly goes on five-kilometre jogs, despite a recent injury, which has delayed her marathon goal until year’s end.

Elora Ghea Teacher Ulverstone Secondary College, TAS

LITTLE TWEAKS FOR BIG IMPACT Elora Ghea has beaten the “bad decision fatigue” that hits at the end of each school day, particularly if she’s been staring at screens for too long.

The fourth-year teacher, based in northwest Tasmania, wakes up earlier to build in more time for herself.

“I’m up at 5am, getting my exercise and reading done first. It’s about checking in with my values, such as for health. That strategy gives me signposts of how I want to behave, make better decisions and not procrastinate.”

CONSOLIDATING PRACTICE Ghea has also been experimenting with running a Socratic seminar in her science class’s biology/evolution unit.

Students tackled the big question: “Are we responsible for the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs?” – taking different stakeholders’ perspectives to explore the issue.

“I had felt nervous asking kids to do something that can be stressful, but public speaking is such an important skill,” she says.

She can relate to challenges, having felt “thrown in the deep end” and battling information silos in her first teaching

year. So, now as a mentor to new teachers, Ghea draws on the work of instructional coach Jim Knight to be more collaborative, data-driven and efficient.

“There are so many facets to teaching.

Trying to change too much at once won’t work,” she says.

“I ask my mentees to rate their lesson on a scale of 1 to 10, with one being the worst lesson they’ve ever taught, and 10 being the best. From there, we are able to debrief about what pleased them about the lesson, and what would have to change to move the lesson closer to a 10.

I can then ask how we would measure that change and make that the one concrete goal for moving forward.”

She uses that approach and data collection to make the “biggest tweaks” to her own teaching.

“For example, if I want to nail my type of questions to students, I’ll mentally note how many open, closed or right-andwrong questions I ask,” she says.

“I could draw a map of the classroom and tally how often I need to correct particular student behaviours, the number of times students interrupt learning, different students responding, time on task, etc. Other data could be experiencesampling and percentage of teacher versus student talk.”

As a science-trained former journalist, she’s in her element there and enjoying her Year 11-12 media production class of just four students. In Term 1, they tackled a unit of journalism.

“It’s been really cool to see what stories they’re writing, often about what’s happening locally, in the region or globally.

One student is focusing on ChatGPT and, I have to admit, I’ve been using it as a tool for writing assignments and giving them feedback on assessments.”

PHOTOGRAPHY KIMBERLY CHADBURN

New starts

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Resources Patricia Hipwell’s website logonliteracy.au/pages/about-us Instructional coach, Jim Knight instructionalcoaching.com Berry Street Education Model berrystreet.org.au Tournament of Minds tom.edu.au

Ghea has been upskilling in prompt engineering to get better answers out of the AI-powered app. She’ll also complete the school’s professional development in the Berry Street model to trauma-informed practice this term.

TIMELY MOVES As an AEU representative at her school, Ghea often chats to peers about the union’s role in teaching.

“There are misconceptions, so I talk about strength and bargaining power coming from teachers having a say in their work conditions. Historically, unions have achieved a lot of things people take for granted, like minimum wages, regular pay rises, equal wages for women and maternity leave.”

Meanwhile, Ghea has been making some big life decisions. Next year she’ll move to the Blue Mountains, buy a house and marry.

This year, though, she’s looking forward to facilitating a small student group contending for the Tournament of Minds competition.

It’s been really cool to see what stories they’re writing, often about what’s happening locally, in the region or globally.

Elora Ghea Ulverstone Secondary College

Kelsey Hawthorn Teacher Marsden State High School, QLD

CRACKING DISENGAGEMENT Queensland high-school teacher Kelsey Hawthorn estimates she will save up to two hours planning for each unit, thanks to education consultant Patricia Hipwell’s strategies on literacy and numeracy.

“This professional development made me realise I’ve been overloading my units with skills and content,” Hawthorn says.

“Pat’s strategy is to backward-map, then forward plan. For example, in the past, I’d set my students an assessment to plan their cake design around their client’s needs. I didn’t teach them what a client is, or their needs.”

Her future lesson plans will summarise the content to be taught to allow her to adjust, while keeping focus through the constant interruptions on a typical school day, she says.

CLEANING UP THEIR ACT The food and design technologies and humanities teacher will also adopt Hipwell’s maxim for reading and writing activities to make up three-quarters of the lesson to build students’ understanding. The revamp might help Hawthorn better engage with her Year 10 students.

“They’re epic kids, but this is the first term without COVID lockdowns or teachers and students off sick in droves.

My Year 10s don’t think attendance is compulsory and constantly ask, ‘why do I have to do this?’ It made me question how I get through to them,” she says.

NEURODIVERSITY A FOCUS Meanwhile, Hawthorn has been forced to reflect on her own behaviour, following a recent attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnosis.

“My grandpa called me a walkie talkie because I’m always interrupting people, impulsively jumping into any conversation. That can be rude in a work environment, but we don’t have the control to wait,” she says.

Then, when a peer was diagnosed with ADHD and autism, Hawthorn could relate.

“I started researching ADHD, which is something I’d put off for years. I was always the annoying friend in my group,” Hawthorn says. “Now that I have a diagnosis, I recognise my privilege in being able to afford a psychiatrist.

“I’m looking forward to not using deadlines and my passion for a topic as the core of my work ethic, and hopefully being able to sit and listen.”

Hawthorn is also mentoring a beginning teacher, explaining: “The school had overloaded his timetable, so he taught theory and I did the prac. He got to see different ways of managing that class."

She’s learning professionally through an informal community of practice for fellow Queensland nutrition and hospitality secondary school teachers.

They’re pooling experience to support one another in the lead-up to a new syllabus rolling out next year.

“We’re not given time to plan and write it, so it will be a heavy workload increase,” she says. “I’m working with the union to recognise that.”

Margaret Paton is a casual high-school teacher, freelance writer and part-time PhD student researching out-of-field teaching.

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World view

Rights under attack A frightening escalation in legislative moves against the rights of LGBTQI+ people and especially children in the United States is also impacting curriculum.

B Y C H R I S T I N E L ONG Demonstrators supporting LGBTQI+ rights rally outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC.

IN SHORT // Around the world, LGBTQI+ communities are being unfairly targeted, with a growing number of laws being introduced – particularly in the US – to strip them of fundamental human rights. // Education International says schools need adequate government resources to help them fulfil their responsibility to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ students.

PHOTOGRAPHY GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCKPHOTO

T

he rise of nationalism, authoritarian governments, and wars are contributing to an alarming loss of human rights across the globe.

Growing economic inequality and globalisation are also playing a part in eroding the rights of women, workers, indigenous and queer populations.

In the US, attacks on LGBTQI+ people are gathering pace.

More than 300 discriminatory antiLGBTQI+ bills were introduced in 2022 to legislatures across the US; 149 specifically targeted the transgender and non-binary communities.

Eighty bills were designed to prevent transgender youth from playing school sports consistent with their gender identity and 42 aimed to prevent transgender and non-binary youth from receiving medically necessary gender-affirming healthcare.

By the end of the 2022 legislative session a record number of 17 bills attacking transgender and non-binary children passed into law.

Attendees at the Miami Beach Pride Parade denounce local representative Fabián Basabe for supporting Florida's expansion of the 'Don't Say Gay' law.

Hilario Benzon, associate director of the Human and Civil Rights Department in the National Education Association’s (NEA) Centre for Racial and Social Justice, detailed some of the latest anti-LGBTQI+ developments at the AEU federal conference earlier this year. The NEA is the largest labour union in the US, with 3.1 million members.

“One of the most notable trends in antiLGBTQIA+ state legislation is curriculum censorship bills, which may include book bans, bans on discussing race in the classroom and ‘Don’t Say LGBTQIA+’

bills that restrict leaders and teachers from acknowledging the existence of LGBTQIA+ identities or discussing LGBTQIA+ issues in the classroom,” he told the conference.

In 2022, seven curriculum censorship bills were passed into law including Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay or Trans’ law.

BOOK BANS INCREASE The first half of the 2022-2023 school year saw 1477 instances of individual books being banned across the country, an increase of 28 per cent on the previous year, according to free speech group PEN America.

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World view

They are really weaponising these bills in such a way to create unnecessary fear and uncertainty – particularly for parents who are voters – about issues that they don’t understand.

Hilario Benzon National Education Association (NEA)

They are really weaponising these bills in such a way to create unnecessary fear and uncertainty — particularly for parents who are voters — about issues that they don’t understand. It makes our work even more critical to build awareness around a person’s gender identity and who they are, and to counteract or to reframe the narrative on all these things.”

Book bans continued to target those featuring LGBTQI+ themes or characters as well as characters of colour, especially Black queer characters, and books that merely mention race or racism, not just books on critical race theory.

PEN America reports that the true magnitude in 2022-23 is likely to be higher than its data indicates. It says books are often removed silently and not reported publicly or validated through Public Records Requests.

Ahead of the 2023 legislative season, the NEA was tracking more than 327 antiLGBTQI+ bills, a record pace of introduction compared to recent years. Most were targeting transgender and LGBTQI+ youth.

Benzon says one of the latest trends is “forced outing” bills. These require schools to notify a student’s parents if the student uses a different name or pronoun or changes their gender expression. Forced outing means schools are no longer safe spaces for LGBTQI+ students and puts students at risk at home.

Language that links transgender people with negative behaviour is also on the rise.

There’s no attempt to understand gender identities, says Benzon.“

RESOURCES NEEDED Education International president Susan Hopgood says the discrimination against LGBTQI+ adults and children in the US is mirrored by many other countries.

Hopgood says that teachers and education workers need adequate government resources to help them fulfil their responsibility to protect the rights of LGBTQI+ students.

Decreased government investment in education often affects the most marginalised and vulnerable, which includes LGBTQI+ kids, she says.

School counsellors or social workers are among the first to go when resources are reduced, for instance.

“If we want to provide a culture of support and inclusivity, governments and their education departments have got to take the lead and set standards to build inclusive assistance,” says Hopgood.

That means ensuring there is comprehensive gender and sexuality education based on scientific evidence and human rights standards. There should also be pre-service and continuous professional development standards for teachers.

“It’s really, really important so that teachers themselves understand the issues and understand how to relate to students and how to ensure their safety in their own classrooms,” says Hopgood.

Resources should also be directed towards LGBTQI+ student organisations in schools, she says, and cites examples of students in Victoria who have formed such organisations with the support of their schools.

The final piece is to ensure curriculum resources and materials support an inclusive education environment.

Meanwhile, LGBTQI+ teachers must be supported, through professional and industrial mechanisms, to ensure they are not subject to discrimination, says Hopgood.

Often teachers won’t come out or talk about who they are because they know it will cause them difficulties with school leadership and students.

“When you hear those stories, you know that we don’t have inclusive schools,” she says.

Benzon says building awareness of what it takes to create a space where students, educators and the community feel safe to be their authentic selves is part of the NEA race and social justice framework.

So, too, is building the capacity of members to be able to advocate for others at school board meetings, city council meetings, or by writing letters to their elected officials.

“I think part of the work that we are doing hopefully will inspire action for our members, our allies and our students to embrace their voices, to speak up and speak out, to be proud and to confront these attacks, which are meant to deprive them of their freedoms,” Benzon says.

Christine Long is a freelance writer.

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Got a question? Raise your hand.

Australia’s mental health and wellbeing initiative for schools equips teachers to support children and young people. It’s free, flexible and accredited.

See how we can help you, help them at beyou.edu.au With delivery partners

Funded by

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Lessons in re-organising teachers The UK’s National Education Union put 10 years of strategic planning and organising to the test when COVID-19 hit. And it was a major victory for safe schools and communities, writes Howard Stevenson, co-author of Lessons in Organising: What trade unionists can learn from the war on teachers.

A

s 2020 turned into 2021 the world remained in the grip of the global COVID-19 pandemic. These were difficult and dangerous times for those working in schools.

The UK government had to decide whether schools in England should be fully open, or work in “lockdown”, with only vulnerable students and the children of key workers physically in school while other students were taught online.

It is now clear that the government was deeply divided on the issue. Its own expert advice, supported by the health minister, recommended schools should work in lockdown mode but the education minister was determined that schools should remain fully open. The then prime minister Boris Johnson sided with his education minister and the decision was taken to press ahead with full school openings at the start of the new school term.

On Sunday 3 January Boris Johnson told weekend politics TV programs he had “no doubt” schools were safe, and that parents should “absolutely” send their children to school the next day.

On the same day, the National Education Union (NEU) held an online meeting attended by 40,000 members.

A further 400,000 people watched live on social media channels.

The result was that members invoked their right to demand safe workplaces.

This required immediate and wellorganised action on a huge scale – across 24,000 schools – to demand that schools only fully re-open when it was clearly safe.

The next evening, and the first day of the new school term, Boris Johnson used a specially organised live TV broadcast to say that schools were “vectors of

The result was that members invoked their right to demand safe workplaces.

This required immediate and well-organised action on a huge scale – across 24,000 schools.

transmission” and that they should work in remote mode until at least the middle of February.

This was a hugely significant moment because it was the instant when a very strong government (with a large majority in parliament) was forced to u-turn on a key area of policy in the pandemic, and put the safety of communities before its own political priorities.

The union’s achievement was not the serendipitous outcome of a particular set of unusual circumstances and the quick judgement calls of the union’s leadership, but rather the outcome of at least 10 years of strategic (re-) organising in which union members had been engaged in an active process of union renewal.

Renewal was necessary because it had long been apparent that successive governments in England were determined to confront, defeat and destroy the teacher unions to press ahead with their radical plans to restructure schools along neoliberal lines (making schools perform as individual business units competing in a market).

One of the features of this “war on teachers” has been the deliberate creation of a hostile environment for traditional trade union activity.

What also became clear, was that in this much transformed environment, the union could not continue as though nothing had changed.

The book analyses the renewal process in the NEU as it not only sought to challenge the neoliberal restructuring of the school system,

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Toolkit

Leadership is not about a position, or a role. It is defined by the function performed. Presented in this way, leadership in the union can (and must) be performed at every level of the organisation.

Howard Stevenson University of Nottingham

but as it transformed to build union power in a much-changed environment.

Our conclusions are presented as three “lessons in organising”.

LESSON 1: THE UNION IS IN THE WORKPLACE The first lesson is a relentless focus on building union presence, visibility and influence in the workplace.

“The union” can often seem remote and detached to union members in their daily working life. They see the union when an email appears in their inbox or when the general secretary appears on the TV news.

But it is important that union members see and feel the union in their workplace, where they experience the issues that shape their ability to do their job. Members develop a collective identity in the workplace – where belonging to the union is tangible and meaningful.

It requires someone to act as the focal point for the union and to draw others into the collective. For the NEU, this was a relentless focus on recruiting, supporting and developing union members to act as the “school representative”. Someone performing this key role in the workplace makes a real difference in making the union real in members’ lives.

LESSON 2: ORGANISING MUST BE POLITICAL The struggle over the purposes, value and values of public education is a political one. It is a struggle over what the future looks like, and it will always be contested.

This is not about party politics but about the politics of education.

Organising in the workplace around important pay and conditions issues is obviously essential. But, while these struggles challenge key injustices, they rarely question the more fundamental causes of the problem.

There is a need to connect immediate concerns with a wider set of questions, and to use these issues to turn the union outwards. It means organising around ideas and an alternative vision of what public education must mean.

For example, during the pandemic the NEU campaigned around health and safety issues in schools, but it connected those issues to the need for health and safety in the community.

It also linked problems of remote learning to wider questions of child poverty, with many children unable to access resources to participate in home learning.

A campaign on free school meals emphasised the links between children’s success in school and the need to address poverty and structural inequality beyond schools.

LESSON 3: LEADERSHIP MATTERS Leadership matters because it is people who make change happen.

However, our concern is not with leaders narrowly defined (for example, those who hold high office in the union), but all those in the union who engage in the process of helping others to understand their context, imagine alternative possibilities and to act collectively to bring about change.

Leadership is not about a position, or a role. It is defined by the function performed.

Presented in this way, leadership in the union can (and must) be performed at every level of the organisation. It is necessary to focus on building this type of leadership throughout the organisation.

Viewed in these terms, we argue that the key quality in any leader is the ability to develop leadership in others.

NOT A MANUAL FOR ACTIVISTS, BUT AN INSPIRATION TO ACTION In setting out these three lessons, we know we are distilling nuanced, and contested, developments into a format that does not easily capture complexity. We are also presenting a case study of a single education union in a very specific national context.

It will be up to others to decide how, and to what extent, these lessons may apply in very different circumstances.

In the book we are clear – the three lessons are not the only lessons, and they are certainly not a set of lessons to be followed and implemented in any simplistic way.

They are presented to encourage reflection, provoke discussion and encourage collective learning. The book does not claim to be a manual for activists, but we hope it will act as an inspiration to action for educators everywhere who are engaged in fighting for quality public education.

This is an edited extract of an article first published on ei-ie.org

Howard Stevenson is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies in the School of Education at the University of Nottingham.

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Boundary exploration Three simple rules help these preschoolers navigate risk safely.

B Y M A R G A R E T PATON

Why do you teach?

We want to hear your tips for engaging young minds. Email educator@hardiegrant.com if you have something to share. You can provide a written piece or we’d love to interview you.

S

pecial Education teacher Bec Fergie wears “at least five or six different hats” as an early childhood teacher.

“We are teachers of communication and organisers of sensory systems to support our learners. We work with families who may be at the ‘pointy end’ of understanding their child’s diagnosis,” she says.

“We support families to understand and navigate the schooling pathways for their child, and we guide them towards support services when the team around the child isn’t in place.

“My role is not just as a special education teacher. We definitely also have an allied health role, despite not being trained allied health professionals.”

Fergie has run the Inclusive Preschool Program at Adelaide’s Bains Road Preschool for 12 years and she came to the job with years of valuable experience.

As a Girl Guide in her teens, she spent five years as a volunteer at a week-long summer camp for young people with disabilities.

Later, Fergie moved to an after-schoolhours-care service, at first part-time while studying at university, then continuing on during her summer holidays after graduating.

“I had an amazing director who is still a dear friend. She ran a tight ship, but in a positive sense, so the children knew the boundaries and expectations. She taught me so much about building relationships and trust with children and their families,” says Fergie, who has two bachelor degrees, one in early childhood education and the other in special education. She also worked at The Briars Preschool for six years after graduating.

SHARING SPACES At Bains Road Preschool, a mainstream group of 33 preschoolers and six children

Even a non-speaking child can still be involved in exploring risk safely.

Bec Fergie Bains Road Preschool, SA

with complex learning needs and disabilities are enrolled in the Inclusive Preschool Program.

“We work super closely with the entire preschool, sharing learning spaces and educators. We have a dedicated space for children who may be needing a quieter learning space targeted to meet their sensory learning needs,” she says.

“But it’s a two-way street, so our space is inclusive of children in the mainstream program. Everyone is welcome.”

Due to the complex needs of some of the Bains Road learners, “incursions” work

better than excursions, meaning guests are regularly brought to the school rather than the students venturing out.

Fergie says the music therapist is a great leveller for the children, and when chicken hatchlings visit, the connection to animals helps to show a different side to her preschoolers.

“Glenn, the junkman, is our number one incursion. He sets up barrels, logs, tarps, milk crates – all these big loose parts.

The children do whatever they like, either watching, building, climbing on what someone else has built, or they can go into a cubby that Glenn’s built,” she says.

“Even a non-speaking child can still be involved in exploring risk safely, as long as they follow his three rules: look after yourself, look after everybody, and play.”

Those maxims make sense for the adults, too. Fergie says that as a union member she’s vocal when she attends roundtable meetings about early childhood education and disability.

She doesn’t have an official role but appreciates having a voice about workplace issues.

“The union is available to us all the time, not just in the lead-up to a fresh round of enterprise bargaining negotiations. I use them all the time for advice, professional learning support and around mental health and wellbeing space.”

Margaret Paton is a casual high-school teacher, freelance writer and part-time PhD student researching out-of-field teaching..

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We proudly support an important change to make Australia fairer and better.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart is a profound call from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples for constitutional change and structural reform in their relationship with Australia.

will give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People a direct line to Parliament to provide advice on any laws and policies that directly affect them.

The AEU urges all Australians to hear the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People who call for support for the Voice to Parliament.

The AEU is proud to support the Yes campaign for a Voice to Parliament and we stand with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in this struggle.

A Voice enshrined in the Australian Constitution

AEU Federal Conference Statement 2023.

Join the Unions For Yes campaign ausunions.io/unionsforyes © AEU 2023 Authorised by Kevin Bates, Federal Secretary, Australian Education Union 120 Clarendon Street, Southbank, Victoria, Australia 3006.

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