Opinion & Commentary
Teachers need help with job appointments
Last month, all NSW public schools were effectively closed because the NSW Teachers Federation called on its members to take part in a 24 hour strike. Traditionally, parents of children in public schools have been pretty tolerant, if not supportive, of strike action imposed by the union. Most parents think their kids’ teachers are good people who sometimes do a tough job.
On this occasion, however, parents have a right to be miffed because the union’s reaction to changes in the staffing of public schools is completely overblown. From the amount of noise being made by the teachers’ federation, you might think that the state education department was threatening to make all teachers reapply for their jobs at a lower rate of pay.
The real story is that the state government is trying to drag the teaching profession into the 21st century. Up until a couple of weeks ago, teachers were allocated to NSW public schools by a staffing system that rarely involved schools themselves in the selection of teachers. If a school had a vacancy for a teacher, the education department’s staffing unit sent them a teacher. The appointment would not be based on how good the teacher was, but where the teacher fitted into the pecking order.
According to departmental policy, this is how teachers were selected: “Classroom teacher positions not filled through priority transfer, service transfer, the Permanent Employment Program, special fitness appointment or through a mix of resumption of duty from leave, the Graduate Recruitment Program, scholarship holders, teachers completing targeted training programs, or from the employment list, will be externally advertised and filled by merit”.
The glaring feature is that merit is at the bottom of the list. A less obvious feature is that schools were largely locked out of the process. In 2006, schools were directly involved in the appointment of only 7 per cent of classroom teachers. Half of these were advertised and selected on merit. The other half came from the ‘employment list’ – teachers who don’t fit into the appointment hierarchy. Even then, schools were given only five candidates from the list to choose from. This would not be so bad if it was the best five, but instead it was the five that had been on the list for longest.
The message this staffing process sends is clear and the effect is stultifying. Patience is rewarded over excellence. There is no incentive or recognition for hard work. Teachers have little control over their career paths, and they are treated as interchangeable workers rather than professionals with identifiable specialist skills.
Change has been needed for a long time. Principals support the changes, with few exceptions, because they know that the key to the success of a school lies in getting the right combination of teachers. The teachers’ federation claims that the staffing system is being ‘dismantled’, while the NSW Director-General of Education and Training, Michael Coutts-Trotter, who has been up-front in the battle, describes the reforms as ‘modest’. The latter is closer to the truth.
The new staffing agreement increases the ability of schools to advertise for classroom teachers and make their own appointments. It is by no means an open employment market, though. Schools will only be able to appoint their own teachers if there are no suitable candidates among those the department gives preference to. Based on staffing statistics over the last several years, these candidates would cover almost three quarters of teacher appointments. When the service transfer system is phased out in 2010, it will be closer to two thirds.
So it all boils down to giving schools direct involvement in about 25-30 per cent of teacher appointments. Not exactly cut throat, is it? Especially considering that this is completely optional for schools. They can still absolve themselves from responsibility and let the department choose a teacher for them.
Most of the fuss has been about the difficulties hard to staff schools potentially face when the service transfer system expires. Contrary to the teachers’ federation’s rhetoric that it is the only proven way to ensure equity, it is well known that the service transfer system results in a high turnover of inexperienced teachers in the most difficult and least popular schools.
There is still an issue about how to attract good teachers to these schools, which the education department is yet to address properly, and it would have avoided some problems by doing so from the outset. Nonetheless, the staffing challenge facing a minority of schools is not sufficient reason to subject the whole public school system to antiquated employment practices.
Jennifer Buckingham is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies
