Today’s strike action in more than 300 schools across metropolitan Adelaide, as well as regional and rural South Australia, follows a vote by 80 per cent of the Australian Education Union’s (AEU) members to take action – affecting an estimated 62,500 students and their families.
The South Australian government’s response focused largely on the pay demands made by the union, with claims that meeting the pay demands is currently beyond the government’s capacity.
From the union’s perspective, the strike is about much more than a 20 per cent pay rise across three years, or the government’s counter offer of three per cent over three years. Instead, they claim the major issue faced by SA teachers in the current climate is about the systemic crisis in the state’s education system. The crisis means that, each school day, around 35,000 students are left without regular classroom teachers.
The importance of creating positive workplace culture
Associate Professor Rebecca Collie is Scientia Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) School of Education.
“The success of our schools relies on creating a workplace that supports teachers to be effective in their jobs,” she told EducationDaily.
“Research shows that teachers’ workloads and the complexity of the job have greatly increased in recent years. This has played a part in the record levels of teacher attrition and shortages we now experience in Australia.
“Ensuring teachers have positive working conditions is essential for addressing these issues.”
Efforts to improve teachers’ working conditions, Professor Collie told EducationDaily, should include “appropriate levels of pay, provide teachers adequate time to complete administrative tasks, and provide teachers with appropriate support to best meet the needs of all students”.
“Positive working conditions such as these mean that teachers are more likely to stay in their job, to fare better in terms of their own wellbeing, and that their students’ learning and wellbeing outcomes are also improved,” she says.
Research shows that poor working conditions – including high workloads and disruptive student behaviour – are linked with teachers’ decisions to quit the profession. But because, Professor Collie says, these issues can be improved by reducing and streamlining teachers administrative work, and also ensuring teachers have access to effective professional learning and mentoring, she believes the issues that led to today’s strike can be resolved in a sustainable way.
“Motivation and wellbeing at work are critical for teachers and their work,” Professor Collie told EducationDaily. “Teachers who are highly motivated and who experience wellbeing at work are able to build positive interpersonal relationships with students and are better able to engage students in learning. In turn, this is linked with beneficial wellbeing and learning outcomes for students. On the flipside, however, when teachers are stressed or burnt out, it is harder for them to form strong bonds with students and to be able to adapt and respond to students’ learning needs.”
With teacher shortages worsening in schools across the nation, Professor Collie told EducationDaily “ongoing attempts to attract new teachers to the profession may be hampered by a ‘revolving door’ of staff turnover if current conditions are not improved”.
“Our research consistently shows that feeling valued professionally is critical for teachers. It is linked with greater teacher wellbeing and commitment to the profession, as well as teachers’ ability to adapt instruction to meet the needs of students and students’ own motivation for their learning.”
Quality teachers are needed more than ever
Dr Meghan Stacey, Senior Lecturer in the UNSW Sydney School of Education, has a particular interest in teachers’ work.
“The teacher strike in South Australia today is emblematic of the critical moment our country faces, as schools grapple with a national teacher shortage on the one hand, and battle with governments to effectively support their work and working conditions, on the other,” she told EducationDaily.
These are, she says, “two sides of the same coin: we need teachers, maybe now more than ever, and this means we need to support them appropriately”.
Exactly what that support looks like, Dr Stacey told EducationDaily, includes “attending to the growing intensity of their work, seen, for instance, in the heightened administrative demands made of teachers across the country”.
“It also means remunerating teachers in a way that recognises their complex expertise and keeps pace with inflation,” she says.
In this age of social media sharing, Dr Stacey believes the public have a key role to play in motivating government action.
“Research has found that the public highly value teachers,” she told EducationDaily. “And for their part, teachers sometimes feel more valued by the public than they do by their employer. Teachers need the broader public to do what they can to show their support.”
Given that teachers have reported growing workload pressures, especially in relation to student needs and administrative work, for many years now, their claim that adequate resourcing has not kept pace with these growing demands seems, to many, both reasonable and valid.
“We’ve been talking about fixing teachers’ pay for a long time. These talks are long overdue, especially given the challenges teachers face today,” Dr Stacey says. “Teachers’ working conditions are a vital element of students’ learning conditions. Generally speaking, when governments aren’t supporting teachers, they aren’t supporting students.”
