Page 3127 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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for accelerated progression through the classroom teaching structure so that it is not a long march from a graduate teacher salary to the top of the scale. It should not take nine years to reach that level of salary, and the government’s offer and the changes we are proposing mean that that process can be halved—you can go from a graduate teacher salary to the top of the classroom teacher band within four years. That is an important reform.
The second important reform is to provide for career advancement and promotional positions but allow teachers to stay in the classroom.
Mr Doszpot: Not much use getting promoted when even deputies get paid less.
MR SPEAKER: Order! One minute, Mr Barr. Mr Doszpot, you were heard in silence, and I expect Mr Barr to have the same courtesy.
MR BARR: Thank you, Mr Speaker. The current career structure for our best and brightest teachers is that if they seek promotion, it takes them further and further away from the classroom into administrative roles rather than teaching roles. That is why the creation of a lead teacher category and a lead teacher promotional position within this current government offer to the AEU is such a critical reform. It meets our election commitment, but it also provides the breakthrough moment for the teaching profession in this 21st century. It is aligned with work that has occurred with all states and territories and the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership around national professional standards of the teaching profession. It is work that Dr Jim Watterston, our Director-General of the Education and Training Directorate, has taken a national role on. The ACT has been integrally involved in delivering this national reform.
We have committed ourselves to addressing and taking on some of these national challenges that have dismally failed, I am afraid, over the last 30 or 40 years in our federation. It was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to achieve a national curriculum and to achieve the sorts of national education reforms that have been achieved in the last few years. The ACT has been at the forefront of that, and the education leadership of Dr Watterston has been an important part of that process. I also pay tribute to his predecessor, Dr Michele Bruniges, who now has a very senior role within the commonwealth education department. Her leadership of the ACT system, and that of Janet Davey, over that period has ensured that these reforms have occurred.
It is testimony of the strength of the ACT education department, the now directorate, that those staff who led our system only two or three years ago are now taking leading roles in the commonwealth department and in delivering this education reform at a national level. We should be very proud as a jurisdiction that we are innovative and we have the capacity to lead national education reform. I would like to see that continue. Certainly, we will approach and have approached the Gonski review of school funding on that basis.
I note that the Leader of the Opposition has left his call for the ACT to support a position of all schools receiving more funding from the commonwealth. He must have seen the 20 or so interviews and media monitoring of what I have been saying in this
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