NSW is currently leading the nation in reforming school curricula. Unfortunately, perhaps to mollify militant teacher’s unions, they’re also about to lead the nation in rewarding failing education standards.
Having worked in the education sector for a short while, while I suspect that there are professions with more inflated egos than teachers, I’d be hard put to name it. Actors, perhaps. But teachers are not only far more numerous, I also have to pay for them. I can choose to avoid a movie; I can’t choose how my taxes are spent.
Now, before some indignant chalkie starts sputtering, this isn’t to say all teachers have an inflated sense of their own importance. We’ve all had a good teacher. There are even humble actors. But, pound for pound, the profession seems over-weighted with self-righteous incompetents. There’s a reason Those who can, do… is a saying.
Those who can’t, teach has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few decades, as educational standards have steadily plunged in Australia and New Zealand. All while education is showered with more and more taxpayers’ money.
In NSW, they’re about to be showered with a whole lot more.
In a stop-work agreement that will pile pressure on public-service wages nationally, the NSW government has handed 95,000 state school teachers a 10 per cent pay rise over the next three years – plus $1000-a-year “cost of living’’ bonuses if inflation exceeds 4.5 per cent.
The new pay deal caps teachers’ working hours in the classroom – they can no longer be required to work at school more than an hour a week, outside official school hours of 9am to 3pm.
Teachers have also won the right to switch off work phones and laptops before 9am and after 3pm, in a “right to disconnect’’ that is far more generous than that granted to other workers with a 38-hour week from 9am to 5pm.
Declaring that “pay is a function of respect’’, NSW Deputy Premier and Education Minister Prue Car said the female-dominated teaching workforce needs better work-life balance.
For the rest of us plebs, pay is a function of performance. If teachers were paid based on the results, they’d be owing we taxpayers a fortune. Instead, they’re being showered with undeserved largesse. Worse, the teachers’ vainglorious greed is guaranteed to spread to the rest of the similarly entitled public service.
Well, it’s a Labor government, after all. The recently-defeated Queensland Labor government also oversaw a staggering explosion in public service wages.
Golly, I wonder who the public servants and mostly female teachers vote for?
As for their ‘right to disconnect’, are they going to trade that off against their nearly 19 weeks of holidays?
Oops, no: they’re getting more non-teaching days.
Parents will be forced to find alternative care for their children for an extra three days a year; the new agreement imposes eight student-free days to give teachers more time during the school term to catch up on changes to the curriculum.
And, despite years of steadily falling performance, a massive pay rise.
The deal includes an immediate annual wage rise of 3 per cent for each of the next three years, plus a 0.5 per cent boost to superannuation payments this year and next.
Teachers fresh from university will earn $102,335 next year – making NSW the first state to reach a six-figure starting salary in a profession where graduates already earn more than their counterparts in engineering, law or psychology.
Wages for senior teachers will rise to $150,364 this month, $154,875 next year and $159,522 by 2026.
How do they justify this outrageous, non-performance bonus?
“Offering better conditions and work-life balance will help us to attract new teachers and ensure those already teaching will stay on board,’’ Ms Car said.
New, maybe, but better? So long as it’s a profession which admits the lowest-ATAR students, the old adage that Those who can’t, teach will remain true.
Or, perhaps better phrased as, Those who can’t, get paid more than anyone else not to do.
