Australian Greens: Teachers and students deserve better than technocratic tinkering

The Greens say a proposal by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership to parachute inexperienced staff into classrooms and give pay rises to a mere handful of teachers is an insult to hard-working educators across the country and will do very little to address teacher shortages.

Comments attributable to Greens spokesperson on schools, Senator Penny Allman-Payne:

“Targeted incentive schemes are just technocratic tinkering that does nothing to fix the underlying problem with our public schools.

“It’s also incredibly insulting to the thousands of hard-working teachers across the country who are forever being told to do more with less, while their real wages continue to shrink.

“Over the past ten years, government funding for private schools in Australia has increased at nearly five times the rate of public school funding. By the end of the decade, private schools will be overfunded relative to the Schooling Resources Standard benchmark, while public schools won’t even hit 91%. 

“It’s really quite simple: If we want to attract more teachers to public schools and provide a world-class education for our kids we need to properly fund all public schools and pay all public school teachers more.

“And we could pay for that simply by canning the stage 3 tax cuts that will rob the public coffers of $224 billion and deposit $9,000 a year into the pockets of the super rich.

“Ahead of next week’s Education Ministers Meeting I urge federal, state and territory education ministers to reject proposals that merely fiddle at the margins and commit to genuine investment in teachers and schools.”