Hi comrades, Bianca here, your AEU ACT Research and Policy Officer. It’s my job to support the Branch’s advocacy on issues that affect your working life, and public education in the ACT. We’ve had some recent wins in this space that I’d love to share with you.
We’ve invested a couple of years of work now into ensuring that the Branch is respected as the professional voice of school and CIT teachers. A lot of this happens behind the scenes, but it’s deeply connected to the experiences of members.
Our submission to the ACT Budget for 2024-25 set out some ambitious and smart improvements to public education. You can read it here. It got the attention of our MLAs, with every party in the Assembly keen to discuss our asks with us. We were subsequently the only union to appear at the Budget Estimates Committee hearing.
One of my core beliefs as a unionist is that every worker is an expert on their own work. You know what works for your students and you know what effective system improvements look like. My job is to take that expertise, synthesise it, and communicate it effectively.
(Obviously, I’m just a cog in a well-oiled machine. Angela is an absolute gun at media and she can give any executive or politician an incredibly incisive assessment of the issues facing public education at a moment’s notice. And we have decades of experience in teaching, policy, and law in the AEU office. Heaven to me is a heavily track-changed document, with everyone pitching in with their wisdom.)
Back to the Budget. This is our annual chance to scrutinise the direction that the ACT Government is taking, and have our say on what could be made better. We have to achieve a coherent and consistent message that cuts through – after all, education is just one of the functions of the Territory government. Our challenge is to get it front and centre in the minds of MLAs, voters, and parents.
The Budget Estimates Committee has handed down their final report, and it makes a series of recommendations that back up our positions. It recommends that the Government:
- Consider funding at least one FTE school psychologist for every public school as part of its allied heath workforce review,
- Formalise a follow-up protocol for staff reporting sexual assaults and/or harassment in ACT schools, including timeframes for responses and actions taken,
- Provide full funding over the forward estimates for the implementation of all recommendations from the Literacy and Numeracy Education Expert Panel’s Final Report,
- Put in place a system within the Education Directorate which has information on all classrooms or learning spaces that are currently not in use due to maintenance or occupational health issues, and
- Ensure all ACT Government schools have adequate heating and cooling systems.
(Keen readers will see that there are recommendations we made in our Budget sub that weren’t taken up by the Committee. This is not necessarily a bad thing – if you achieve everything you ask for, then maybe you aren’t being sufficiently ambitious!)
The Government will need to make a formal response to these recommendations. We’ll be watching and following up.
Speaking of responses, I wrote earlier this year that we’d achieved some helpful inquiry recommendations out of a Legislative Assembly Committee tasked with examining school infrastructure. Our submission was exhaustively researched and very detailed. The Committee agreed with almost everything we said, and repeated our recommendations almost verbatim as their own.
I’m excited to say that this work has provoked some movement on long-awaited Property Quality Standards for school infrastructure. This is a fancy name for a simple idea: that even though we have a diverse system, there are some basic standards that every facility and every classroom should meet. Every public education facility should be functional, safe, hygienic, and comfortable. We’re asking for a system where these standards are articulated to everyone, audited transparently, and funding for maintenance and upgrades subsequently and centrally deployed.
It’s this sort of policy advocacy that the union is well-placed to prosecute. We’re the people who work in the public education system, so we know how to improve it.
None of this happens without the might of members united together. When we speak as one, Canberra listens.