Page 495 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 18 February 2015
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been fixed. They tried to highlight their concerns by collecting data on just how hot some classrooms were. They issued thermometers to their members to track their working conditions, with at least one south side school classroom reaching 34 degrees. As the AEU report on the 2014 ACT budget pointed out:
In response to member concerns about extreme temperatures, the AEU requested that the Education & Training Directorate conduct an audit of all ACT classrooms. “The Directorate’s own audit shows 73 of our schools lack comprehensive cooling systems. 11 of our schools do not have cooling in their libraries.”
As the ACT AEU branch secretary, Glenn Fowler, pointed out:
It’s 2014, we’ve got people now as a matter of course working in cool temperatures in other office and learning environments and this is a relic of the past.
It appears that there are no prescriptive guidelines for schools. In the absence of any ETD guidelines, the AEU guidelines say that classrooms should be between 17 and 30 degrees, a realistic range when the ACT’s own work health and safety code of practice suggests that “optimum comfort for sedentary work is between 20 and 26 degrees”. While there is a standard work health and safety code of practice, there is nothing specific for schools. Clearly, if we had public servants, and even those in private enterprise, working in buildings without air conditioning, there would be uproar. The AEU guidelines are hardly unreasonable on any account.
At the time this article went to press, the ETD director-general was quoted as saying:
There’s been a lot of work done over the last few years in upgrading our schools, so most of our transportable buildings have air-conditioning units.
She also mentioned such things as ceiling fans in many of the classrooms. And she said:
… where necessary, we work with schools to provide site-specific information on how to purge the heat from buildings during the night.
Seriously, in a city that is supposedly the world’s most livable, with one of the highest per capita investments in education and in a region that is known for its extreme hot and cold days, is it really good enough to expect our children and their teachers to work in buildings that rely on a ceiling fan or an open window to moderate the temperature?
Last year we had an unprecedented amount of equipment failures in schools. We had an electrical fault that put a teacher in hospital; we had schools that had to be evacuated while emergency services dealt with the problem.
When I raised this matter of lack of investment in infrastructure last year, I received, as is usual practice for this minister, no real explanation or information as to what was happening—just the standard line that I was not supportive of ACT public schools.
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