Budget cuts undermine teacher improvement
By Education Minister Peter Collier’s own admission, WA teachers and school leaders are facing a challenging year.
It will be a year of enormous change, including the Year 7 cohort moving into high schools, new WACE requirements, moving to the student centred funding model and a one-line budget in schools.
And all of this is being introduced on the back of almost $200 million in cuts to school budgets. So with all that school staff have on their plates this year, it is incomprehensible that director-general of education Sharyn O’Neill has chosen to start the year by announcing a crackdown on “lazy” and “incompetent” teachers, as reported in The Weekend West on January 31.
At a time when the director-general should be supporting school staff, she has chosen to berate them, showing total insensitivity to the added stresses being felt by principals and teachers. This is a director-general who, having overseen the biggest cuts experienced in WA education, is out of touch with the consequences of those cuts for principals and teachers in schools.
As a result of the budget cuts, almost 1000 teaching and non-teaching jobs have been lost in the past year. Significantly, this included the loss of specifically targeted level 3 classroom teacher time used for teacher mentoring and professional development — for both new teachers and those needing assistance with the delivery of curriculum programs.
The cuts included hundreds of education assistants and Aboriginal and Islander education workers who assisted teachers in the classroom. As a result, principals have indicated they have had to cut attraction and retention programs, literacy and numeracy support, professional development programs and many other initiatives.
All of this means larger class sizes and teachers having to deal with students at educational risk without the assistance of EAs and other support staff and programs.
In some high schools we are now seeing teachers having to teach different subjects to Years 11 and 12 students in the one classroom at the same time.
In addition, the system is moving towards the use of national professional standards for teachers and principals as a primary reference in ensuring teachers and principals continue to reflect on and improve their work. Teachers and school leaders are still grappling with the effect this will have on their professional practice.
Once, the significant system-wide professional development necessary for such a change would have been provided. Under this Government, while some principals have received some training, most people have to rely on online modules and are expected to add this to their already overwhelming workloads.
A feature of the professional standards is that they are designed to operate within a culture of support for staff development. The purpose of classroom observation in this context is to provide feedback to enable reflection and further development to happen. This requires time, before and after observations, for conversations between teachers and line managers, as well as the observation itself.
Again, this is an example of this Government’s lack of regard for the consequences of its policies. Having ripped almost $200 million from the education budget, with more to come via voluntary severance packages and cutting the salary budget every time someone retires or resigns, the Government is pushing teachers to continue to improve while at the same time slashing funding for the mechanisms that would help them.
Pat Byrne is president of the State School Teachers Union
