Specialist teachers: Conditions that count
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 130 No 7, 3 October 2025, page no 15.
Earlier this year, I attended a conference for Japanese language teachers and had the opportunity to spend time answering some of the more complex questions specialist teachers face about their working conditions.
These conversations reinforced what many of us already know: specialist teachers are essential to the life of our schools, but their working conditions are often misunderstood, misapplied, or overlooked entirely.
Specialist teachers are curriculum experts, charged with delivering high-quality learning while managing additional duties related to their specialist area. Their professionalism depends on having distinct entitlements respected: preparation and coordination time provided in usable blocks, travel time properly recognised, and timetables developed through genuine consultation. This is not about reducing teaching time. It is about protecting the profession and safeguarding the capacity of specialists to deliver for students.
Music, health and physical education, and languages teachers regularly travel between schools or across sprawling circuits. Yet, despite clear industrial protections, the time specialists spend travelling, preparing and coordinating programs, and advocating for their learning areas is too often treated as invisible, squeezed out of timetables, or ignored altogether.
Preparation and coordination time
Specialist teachers carry additional responsibilities: coordinating, developing and evaluating programs, assessing and reporting on student achievement, and providing expert advice in their area.
To undertake these duties, preparation and coordination time must be delivered in usable blocks. Breaking this entitlement into five or ten-minute fragments undermines its purpose. It is as impractical as suggesting that English or mathematics lessons could be meaningfully delivered in five minutes. This time enables deep, sustained professional work, not snatched moments between classes.
Travel between schools
Travel time is duty time and must be built into timetables. It cannot be absorbed into non-contact time or breaks. Importantly, this travel time is deducted from the total available teaching (contact) time, which is why careful timetabling is so important.
Travel between schools on the same day is counted as rostered duty time. Schools must also allow for the organisation, transport, and set-up of lesson resources. Back-to-back lessons in different schools without travel time factored in are not acceptable.
When travelling directly to a school other than the base school that is further from home than the base school, the extra travel time must also be recognised as duty time.
Because travel time reduces available teaching time, judicious timetabling of circuits is essential. Schools must consider travel distances, road conditions and the number of schools serviced when planning specialist programs. Poor timetabling increases workload, heightens fatigue, and reduces the quality of specialist programs.
Consultation in timetable development
Timetabling is intended to be a cooperative process between the principal and the specialist teacher. Effective consultation ensures workload factors such as the number of schools serviced; travel, co-curricular responsibilities, and occupational health and safety considerations (like voice strain and sun exposure) are properly taken into account.
When consultation works well, timetables balance school needs and industrial requirements. When it does not, the result is often unrealistic workloads, unusable preparation time, and unnecessary conflict.
Schools that create their own “specialist” roles
Clause 10.4.3 of the State School Teachers’ Certified Agreement 2022 provides an important protection. It states that where principals create additional teaching roles that mirror the duties of specialist teachers, the specialist teacher conditions of the award apply.
This means staff in these roles are entitled to the same conditions as other specialists. Schools cannot sidestep entitlements by simply labelling the position differently.
Importantly, these roles must be resourced from the school’s total staffing allocation, not from the “specialist teacher allocation bucket”. This ensures schools do not diminish existing specialist allocations to create new roles but instead make transparent staffing decisions.
What should I do?
If your timetable does not reflect these entitlements:
- raise the matter locally through consultation with your principal
- check that travel time and preparation/coordination time are fully included
- contact the QTU if the issue cannot be resolved.
For a more detailed breakdown of specialist teacher working conditions, click here.