Page 4017 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 16 Sept 2009
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classroom is the optimum situation and what parents, schools and students want. That is a given. So Ms Burch’s usual dorothy dixer has certainly pulled out all of the motherhood statements for this motion today. However, on the issue of this government’s initiative to develop a merit-based promotion system in order to attract and retain the best teachers to the ACT, there are some issues yet to be fully addressed.
Whilst I certainly accept the motion’s intent, I have a great deal of difficulty with the actual reality of the implementation of this proposed initiative. ACT Labor in general has a history of opposing merit-based pay for teachers. It has always been a Liberal Party policy to support this concept. This is another mighty backflip from our minister for education from 2006, when he was opposed to a merit-based pay system, to 2009, where he has reinvented himself as the champion of the so-called merit-based pay system.
This government is making a half-hearted attempt at introducing this initiative. As is usual with Mr Barr, there is a lot of spin on this topic but precious little substance. This government has a history of bringing its teachers to the absolute brink of despair. In 2006, most ACT teachers were at their wit’s end, in the face of having to deal with a backlash to school closures. Their morale declined dramatically, numbers dwindled and, as I understand it, ACT education took a massive blow as a result of the Costello functional review, as around 60 teachers left the system. We have seen again only this year the Stanhope-Gallagher government renege on a pay deal with teachers that had already been agreed to in the previous budget. Teachers in the ACT have every right to be sceptical of this government’s commitment.
Today we have Ms Burch bringing us this grandstanding motion, which is short of substance yet full of motherhood statements that state the obvious, with that final kicker about merit-based pay for teachers. What the government have really said about merit-based pay is that it must have a limit; there must be a quota for it to be affordable. The minister himself has said that it will prove difficult to increase the salaries of teachers in the current climate. We saw only this year the inability of this government to even make good on their initial agreement with teachers, let alone make any increases on this. The minister has said that, while he wants to introduce a merit-based pay system, it would be necessary to cap the number of public school teachers eligible for this new pay packet. The minister, on 23 May in the Canberra Times, said:
Putting 200 teachers onto the higher wage in the program’s first year would be difficult.
According to the government’s own figures, about 1,500 teachers have reached the top pay rate. In order to move 100 of these teachers to a merit-based higher wage, it would cost the department an additional $2.6 million in salary costs. Another 50 would cost $1.3 million. Even 25 higher salaried teachers would cost the ACT government an additional $600,000. If this was the case, less than one per cent of the entire teaching population would be eligible for this performance pay. We must also remember the difficulty facing initial teacher recruits from other regions, who are being put off due to the long and arduous selection process.
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