Editorial: Delivering on your priorities
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 130 No 1, 14 February 2025, page no 5.
The QTU priorities are developed each year with the input of QTU Executive. It is my view that it is important that your Union is campaigning and delivering on priorities that are established with the input of members in schools and TAFE.
The overarching goal of this year’s priorities is for the Union to be an assertive, professional, campaigning Union that educates, engages, activates, and grows our membership. Consequently, the core focus of this year’s priorities is to defend and improve industrial conditions in schools and workplaces. To do this, the QTU will work with members to hold the employers to account.
The QTU will require the department to meet its obligations to fully staff schools, provide safe and healthy workplaces, put systems in place to eliminate the risk of occupational violence and aggression and, most importantly, to remunerate members to ensure that we can not only grow our profession but encourage teachers and school leaders to remain in our profession.
These campaigns are familiar to members because they have underpinned what the Union has done for over a century.
We know that when we are united, we achieve outcomes. Last year, we saw the effect of this when our members joined in with Queensland Unions’ campaign for reproductive health leave, which resulted in our members and others in the public service receiving 10 days of reproductive health leave per year. Locally, we have seen members win when they have remained united, with members in Yarrabah achieving safe drinking water and members in North Rockhampton, Sarina and Mackay raising their voices to achieve incentives that have resulted in their schools being fully staffed at the start of the 2025 school year.
When schools are recognised as workplaces, (and are appropriately resourced) we can achieve improved conditions. Together, members achieved air conditioning in all workplaces in Queensland, improved security in teacher accommodation and schools, and leant their voices to the QTU’s “My Workplace is not like yours” campaign. It is imperative that we continue to send the message that schools need to be properly resourced to address the complexities of student and community member behaviours and address the multiple learning needs in classrooms and schools. As we head into the federal election, our campaign for fully funded state schools will be vital in achieving this.
We also know that we are one profession and that our members from bush to beach, city, and country, remote and regional are the keys to solving the education crisis. When learning was disrupted during COVID, our members leaned in and changed their practice to support online learning. They continue to adapt and adopt the curriculum to meet student learning needs and are the most advanced in the country in implementation of the Australian Curriculum. The time and commitment of our members must be recognised, and they must be remunerated to ensure that every school in Queensland has, and continues to keep, great teachers and school leaders. When members, regardless of where they work how remote they are, stand in solidarity, the voice of our profession, is heard by the government.
As we commence the 2025 school year, we call on the government to respect our profession; and show that it does so by: providing safe, healthy and properly resourced schools and workplaces; ensuring our teachers and school leaders are remunerated as the highest paid in the country; working with the Union to address the education crisis; and building on the working conditions and incentives that ensure that state schools across the state continue to have great teachers and school leaders.
The government must recognise the Union as the most democratic and representative voice of the teaching profession in Queensland, and that it has been so for more than 135 years.
North Queensland emergency
As our members in North Queensland faced floods, six years to the day after the devastation of 2019, the QTU activated its natural disaster relief fund and worked with the department to ensure that members safety was paramount when determining whether schools opened or closed.
Click here to access the QTU Priorities 2025