“Today we’re saying to the Premier – look, if you don’t care about teacher shortages you don’t care about our kids.”
These are the words of NSW Teachers Federation regional organiser Jack Galvin Waight who departed Newcastle’s McDonald Jones Stadium on one of two coaches bound for Sydney this morning.
The vehicles, filled with teachers donned in red T-shirts, are headed for Macquarie Street to protest on the steps of Parliament House.
“We’ve got five buses from different parts of the Hunter converging on Sydney, that doesn’t include people who are car-pooling and getting on the train in a sea of red,” Mr Galvin Waight said.
“Teachers are striking today because we have to. We’ve exhausted every available option and the state government’s just not listening.
“The teacher shortages are crippling our schools and really affecting student learning outcomes.
“There’s been irrefutable evidence from an independent enquiry and the government’s own documents – so in their own words they say we’re running out of teachers and the reason is un-competitive salaries and excessive workloads.
“That’s why teachers are striking today – for the future of their profession and their students.”
Mr Gavin Waight, who has worked in the education sector for more than 20 years, says the number of current teaching vacancies indicate a dire need for change.
“For the first time in my 10 years in Newcastle I’m seeing massive casual teacher shortages.
“When a teacher is away they’re not being replaced, so the poor kids are sitting in the quad or in split classes – it’s not fair on their learning outcomes.”
The shortages, he says, are worse in rural areas.
“The further you go up the Hunter, the worse the shortages are getting.”
The T-shirts worn to today’s protest adorn the words ‘More Than Thanks’.
“Coming out of the pandemic lockdown, the state government has said ‘we respect teachers and all their amazing work during the pandemic’ but at the same time they’ve stabbed us in the back and given us poor conditions, they’re not listening to us,” Mr Gavin Waight told Newcastle Weekly.
“We’re saying ‘thank you is fine’, but we need more than thanks.”
For Kotara High School teacher and president of the Newcastle Teacher’s Association Sean Brown, today’s strike is two-fold.
“What the government is not doing is addressing the issue and the issue is that teacher shortages are very real,” he said.
“Secondly, when you have a shortage you need to attract numbers that are going into teaching, and that number is actually falling at the moment.
“In the government’s own documents they’re saying they’re just not training enough teachers, which means once again we’re going to have a shortage of teachers.”
Mr Brown, who has been educating students for more than 28 years, says there are currently 3,000 vacant permanent teaching positions in NSW.
“Teachers are used to working hard but it’s the workload that they can’t see value in for the students, that’s just paperwork, it’s bureaucracy, it’s just data collection.
“Data in itself is not a bad thing as long as there is gain in it and an end result, and that it has some benefit to the kids, such as modifying programs, addressing student needs, that sort of data can be useful.
“When it’s data to be passed on to the department that we never see any outcome from, which takes a lot of time and effort, consumption of teachers’ time can be better used elsewhere.”
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