Striking to show our value
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 130 No 5, 1 August 2025, page no 5.
As this Journal goes to print, the QTU is in the middle of a ballot for protected industrial action. While negotiations continue, the commitment to the government wages policy of 8 per cent over three years remains a barrier to reaching an agreement.
The offers that have been received to date do little to set Queensland ahead of other states and territories. The first offer, which was only the government wages policy, would have relegated Queensland teachers and school leaders to the third lowest in the country. The second offer, which included an additional step in the classroom teacher stream, would’ve led to a teacher in their 14th year of teaching receiving a salary greater than the highest paid classroom teachers in the country, but it was not comparable with the rest of the country for the number of years of experience. On average, it takes a classroom teacher 10.2 years to reach the top of the salary scale in Australia. A teacher with 10 years of experience should not be worth less in Queensland than elsewhere.
While the offer focused on the remuneration at the top of the salary scale, which is a nod to retention, it did not provide an adequate adjustment to beginning teacher salaries. At a time of teacher shortage, attraction is just as important as retention. The failure to provide competitive salaries to attract teachers to the profession or experienced teachers to Queensland failed a key element of our claim – i.e. initiatives to attract and retain teachers.
Nor did the offer include adjustments to maintain the relativities in salaries between classroom teachers, heads of programs, deputy principals and teaching principals, which should at the very least be maintained.
Those calling for increased non-contact time should be cautious, as Queensland currently has the lowest rostered duty time in the country. The focus has instead been on a comparison of the hours of face-to-face instruction, which in Queensland are similar to those across the country. However, the time for intentional collaboration is less. Many school leaders are currently finding creative ways to accommodate release time for collaboration and planning; however, the Union has focused on the provision of additional days allowing opportunities for collaboration without disrupting student learning.
During negotiations, the QTU has resisted changes to rostered duty hours. While in the current industrial instruments members have 25 hours of rostered duty time per week, the experience of members is different, due to the existence of regulation 7 of the Education (General Provisions) Act. This requires duty outside of rostered duty hours for two purposes: to attend meetings and to supervise students. The industrial instruments provide for some management of this through the provisions relating to bus and playground duty and staff meetings; however, if we were to consider the impact in practice, on average a member attends an hour of staff meetings per week and between 50-60 minutes of bus/playground duty per week. Consequently, teachers and school leaders tend to be at school undertaking duty for between 26 hours and 40 minutes to 27 hours per week, which is comparable to other states.
Members undertake significant work outside of these hours planning, assessing, reporting, and undertaking professional development. It is therefore ironic that, while various offers refer to the red-tape reduction agenda of the government, during EB negotiations members were informed of the requirement to conduct the Year 1 phonics test. While the department suggests that the conduct of the test will take between 5-7 minutes per student (in a class of 25 students, this is 2.5 hours or half a day), the workload associated with the outcomes of the test has not been quantified. For any test to be of value to learning, the data should inform practice and intervention. The provision of time, such as intentional collaboration time, which does not focus on mandatory training but rather gives members the space and time to plan, prepare, report, moderate and collaborate can only improve learning experiences for students.
Elements of the second offer, such as remuneration for attendance at camps, provided some recognition of the work expected of members above and beyond the core responsibilities of their roles. However, it did not go far enough when it comes to remuneration, safe and healthy workplaces, attraction and retention, modernising school resourcing and treating members as professionals. To truly demonstrate the value of teachers and school leaders, the government and community need to understand what happens when we stop doing what we always do. This is why the proposed action extends to 24 hours – it includes not doing the work in your discretionary time; the work that the system relies on for schools to function.
If members vote for industrial action, the only way to prevent it is provision of an offer that addresses the core elements of the claim. The future of Queensland’s state schools depends on it. We cannot afford an agreement that does not go far enough to attract and retain teachers and school leaders in Queensland’s state schools.