Thursday’s union roundtable with the Premier proved to be yet another meeting with nothing tabled to address excessive teacher workloads or improve conditions for Tasmania’s hardworking educators.
Teachers and support staff have been waiting more than a year for the Premier to support their Lifting Learning solutions to improve education for every Tasmanian child, and today’s meeting failed to address any of the real challenges our schools and colleges are facing.
The Government needs to come forward with real fixes to reduce the excessive workloads driving people out of teaching and schools.
For more than a year now Government negotiations to improve conditions in schools and colleges have delivered nothing while teacher shortages worsen, and student learning suffers.
This is unacceptable and shows Premier Rockliff is out of touch with what is happening in our schools and the challenges public sector teachers are facing daily.
To lift learning we need more in-class support, more school psychologists, social workers, teachers, time to teach and support for new teachers. Teacher Assistants need to be paid all year, not stood down without pay for 12 weeks.