Vikki Campion: Teaching support staff are crucial to schools and student development

Cutting support staff from classrooms is going to cause more problems for a very minimal saving, writes Vikki Campion.

Toast is up for the gap-toothed little girl in a ponytail and public school uniform, and pregnant Ms K pumps up her confidence as she butters her bread.

“I heard you did really well yesterday,” the dedicated support worker says.

The girl beams a gummy smile: “I beat all the boys!”

Ms K taught her how to read and hold a pencil correctly and, most mornings, makes her toast – and thanks to the NSW education budget cuts, Ms K will be among hundreds of learning support staff to lose their jobs.

What NSW Education Minister Prue Car and gallery journalists dismiss as “desk jobs” to be cut, are actually the staff, mostly women, whom many teachers in the tougher areas fear going a day without.

Ms K cooks breakfast for all kids so as not to identify those who have nothing to eat at home. Another teacher remembers when learning support staff last went on strike: “It was the worst day of my life.”

This is NSW Labor’s betrayal to teachers. The party is happy to use them as fundraisers, as slaves to hand out election material, but will leave them unsupported as school budgets are cut by 1.25 per cent to save a measly $148m, as spending across the education support teams has been slashed by $1.4bn over the next four years, and school discretionary accounts are frozen.

The “$600,000 club” bureaucrat NSW Department of Education Secretary Murat Dizdar justifies the cuts by saying enrolments are down.

Support staff help with school breakfasts. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Kelly Barnes

In late March, shortly before NSW Education revealed budget cuts, Minister Car told parliament it would be her priority to “tackle the issue of workload burden on our teachers in all of our schools”.

Who supports our teachers amid a 3000-vacancy shortage when learning support staff are sacked?

It’s always been a complex mathematical equation to keep them on, but now it’s impossible, returning public classrooms to an archaic time.

Support staff are not desk jockeys divorced from education; they drive it in the classroom.

To Minister Car’s credit, she has been vocal in fighting for fair public school funding from the Albanese government – who believes subsidising the wealthy into luxury Teslas, and billionaires into wind factories is a national priority – but as Deputy Premier, Car shares an important table with the state treasurer.

Let’s help Minister Car with the obvious areas to find savings – the plaything of the inner suburban clique, renewable policy and the billion-dollar frolics of this arena, apparently more important than the child who doesn’t get breakfast before getting on the bus.

Let’s take a more rational view of that child’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Food is the most important and renewables are the least.

And for those saying “the parents should have given them breakfast”: Thanks genius.

Try teaching a hungry child anything at all.

Prue Car needs to find savings elsewhere, not just support staff. Picture: Tim Hunter.

At some schools, this has always been the case; for others, it’s only beginning as rent, mortgages, groceries, petrol, and power bills soar.

Without empathy for these children, their formation will be hardened by their circumstances at a critical time of development.

While the Albanese government is funnelling hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country, NSW Labor is cutting the very women who help both the refugee children who cannot speak English well and the kids with behaviour, hearing or speech problems in the classroom.

While the NSW Teachers Federation was part of the frenzied fight for the Voice and recently engaged in activism for Palestine, it has been noticeably absent from fighting for those on the home front. Support staff are not their members, but their entire role is about ensuring that their members are supported in their jobs. Start doubting their raging crusade when they fall into stony silence regarding a complete cut to their army when the party they support is comfortably in office.

It’s easy to find, all grown up, the kid who never had a Ms K in their life to focus on their phonics, confidence and full tummy.

Ask anyone working in prisons or at-risk pathways about their clientele’s childhood. Having therapy about your injuries at the bottom of the cliff is one thing – preventing the fall is another.

Witnessing the party of free education slashing public school budgets may be a political prize to the cynic, but those who will lose most are the gummy-smiled ones, still collecting their baby teeth for the tooth fairy, who cannot fathom a school morning without Ms K’s toast.