Education Minister hits back at unions for mass teacher strikes

The teachers’ unions have declared mass post-budget strike action in public and Catholic schools, which the Education Minister has slammed as “incredibly disruptive”.

Teachers at both public and Catholic schools will take joint strike action next Thursday June 30 in a bid to get a pay rise.

The 24 hour strike action was agreed to by the NSW Teachers Federation and the Independent Education Union on Tuesday as an agreement to raise the public sector cap to three per cent was formalised in the NSW state budget.

Teachers Federation president Angelo Gavrielatos said the state budget “did nothing to address crippling workloads” for teachers, ahead of announcing the joint action which will result in teachers walking off the job later this month.

“Acting on uncompetitive salaries and unsustainable workloads is the only way to stop more teachers leaving and attract the people into the profession we need to fix the shortages,” Mr Gavrielatos said.

“We asked the Premier to reconsider his decision to cap the pay of teachers at three per cent when inflation is more than five per cent and rising. Yet, he did nothing.”

Teachers on strike meet at Hyde Park then March onto Parliament House for speeches. Picture: John Grainger

Education Minister Sarah Mitchell on Tuesday afternoon said the protests would be “incredibly disruptive” for families and students.

“I think it’s really disappointing that the education unions have made the decision to once again take industrial action on the 30th of June. It’s incredibly disruptive for families (and for) students,” she said.

Facing more industrial action later this year, Ms Mitchell said the government was still attempting to negotiate with union heads.

“We’ve said many times as a government that we want to work constructively with the union to sit down and negotiate your award. That absolutely still remains our prerogative … I met with the union as recently as last week to talk about some of the pressures, particularly around workload and what we can do in that space.”

It’s the latest industrial action to hit the government, which has been buffeted by thousands of union members striking across different industries this year.

The action later this month will be the third time NSW school teachers have taken action so far in 2022.