Page 4111 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 23 October 2018
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MS LEE (Kurrajong) (3.52): I thank Ms Cody for bringing on this matter of public importance about supporting and valuing ACT teachers. Teachers do a tremendously important job. Educating children is as hard as it is valuable. It is incumbent on a government to do what it can to ensure that teachers are able to undertake this important job in a safe and supported environment. We have nearly 4,000 teachers employed in ACT schools. Anyone who has visited our schools will know that for the most part teachers work in a warm, pleasant and inspiring working environment.
Our 87 government schools educate nearly 48,000 students. Those schools are clustered into four geographic networks. Principals are supported by school improvement directors who work closely with schools in their region. They in turn are supported and led by an executive director of school improvement, who has responsibility for implementing school improvement and planning cycles and day-to-day executive leadership of school operations, including management of critical issues and complex complaint management.
I note from recent responses to questions on notice that the number of executive officers and senior officials within the education directorate has increased, in some cases quite significantly, particularly at the executive level. That is all very well but that increase appears to have come at a time when teachers are under increasing pressures and under increasing threat of injury.
The much-lauded managing occupational violence policy that came into effect, or perhaps more correctly was included in the directorate’s list of policies, in July 2017 is intended as a blueprint and protocol, as its title suggests, to manage violence in the education work space. We have more executive staff and we have more policies that someone can point to to show how proactive we are. But I note that, as at September this year, only 48 schools had participated in occupational violence training. Despite the policies, despite the additional layers of oversight, we have almost half of our schools not yet equipped to manage their workplace safety.
During the 2017-18 annual reporting period there were 3,139 work health and safety incident reports, up from 2,242 the previous year. The directorate likes to think that this increase in reporting is a positive step. Yes, the fact that staff are more willing to report incidents would be encouraging if it were only a failure to report that was the problem. But why so many in the first place, and what evidence is there that each of them had a satisfactory outcome?
There are about 6,800 staff employed in the education directorate; so that is almost half the number of incidents compared to the number of staff looking after the entire education system in the ACT. This is a staggeringly high ratio. When you put those employment numbers, reporting structures, incident report processes and the introduction of a new violence management policy into the mix, you wonder how and why circumstances could get so bad that WorkSafe is forced to intervene.
Madam Deputy Speaker, last week ACT families would have been as horrified as those of us on this side of the chamber to learn that we have teachers being seriously injured at work on a daily basis and that these attacks have gone on relentlessly, in
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