Enterprise bargaining has begun for 14,000 Catholic School teachers in NSW and the ACT. Through this process, Catholic employers want to work with staff and the union to change industrial arrangements negotiated decades ago.
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Change can be challenging and maintaining the status quo would certainly be the easier approach.
But the educational landscape is changing forever and industrial arrangements created decades ago simply don’t reflect this. At the school level, change is already happening and frontline Teachers are its leaders.
What’s out of step are the systems and structures that are supposed to support them.
The Catholic employers’ enterprise bargaining proposal is one way of bridging this gap. It is not the final word by any means – it is the start of a conversation.
The days of one teacher being isolated in the private space of a classroom are over. The complexity of modern education and the differing needs of every child require a collaborative approach from staff that have diverse skills, capacities and interests.
The pressures of changing student, parent, school, system and Government expectations are too great to abandon individual teachers to work it out in isolation.
Ours and other systems can show us the way. The journalist Amanda Ripley describes the Finnish system of education where 'as soon as young kids showed signs of slipping, teachers descended upon them like a pit crew before they fell behind'. A lone teacher in a classroom has no chance of matching the power and efficacy of this sort of collaboration.
In contrast, I recently talked to friends whose son has struggled to keep up through his first six years of school. They described the frustration of trying to engage with teachers who were overworked and sometimes just not qualified to help their son. Special needs support was limited and so their son drifted along with steadily declining performance, esteem and capacity to learn.
Their situation is not the fault of their son, his teachers or school, but reflects a bigger challenge that can only be addressed through structural and behavioural shifts from within the system as a whole.
Opening up the conversation about collaboration is the beginning of that process.
The draft enterprise agreement presents a range of ideas which Catholic School employers want to openly consult on. To support this process, we gave school staff a 2.27% pay increase in January without asking for any changes to the current agreements and have said that if constructive discussions continue we would not delay further increases that would otherwise have applied.
Importantly, it is our staff who are ultimately in control, as changes to their current enterprise agreements will only occur if they vote to change them. We will only ask staff to vote for a new enterprise agreement when we think we have a document that they will support. That time is clearly not now.
The only expectation we have at this stage is the willingness of everyone to express their ideas and be genuinely listened to.
It is out of this sort of process that the best ideas and enterprise agreements can emerge. The reality is that in 2014, a 1970's industrial campaign cannot stop the professional conversation that we must have to support our schools now and in the future.
Tony Farley is Executive Director of the Catholic Commission for Employment Relations
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