Education union calls for urgent public school funding injection

One Top End teacher who routinely works up to 60 hours per week says ‘the sustainability of the job is definitely being questioned for a lot of people’.

Education Minister Eva Lawler says the government is ’undertaking a national and international recruitment campaign focused on attracting and employing classroom teachers to schools’. Picture: (A)manda Parkinson

Territory school students are reportedly being short-changed by more than $6000 each in annual government funding, prompting a scathing assessment of the school system by the education union.

The NT branch of the Australian Education Union made the urgent call for more investment at its annual conference last weekend, describing public education as “funded for failure”.

Branch secretary Rachael Metcalfe said government schools had been “denied funding equity”, citing a report by education economist Adam Rorris that found almost 20 per cent of Territory schools did not meet the minimum threshold of public funding required to meet students’ educational needs.

The union also identified chronic teacher shortages, inequity for Indigenous students and remote schools, and deteriorating student engagement as problems plaguing the system.

Ms Metcalfe said the funding shortfall was exacerbating widespread teacher shortages while schools were stripped of necessary resources.

“Money provides specialist resources for teaching and learning, it provides extra help for students who need it, and it also provides much needed support to teachers and education support personnel, ensuring their workloads can be managed,” she said.

A survey conducted by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership in December 2021 found teachers were on average working 140 to 150 per cent of their contract hours.

One high school teacher based in the Top End, who wanted to remain anonymous, said she was working up to 50 or 60 hour weeks after taking on extra responsibilities due to staffing shortages.

“We’re seeing things like bigger classes or covering classes or splitting classes when there’s absences at school, kind of picking up the extra holes that we’re seeing due to that shortage,” she said.

“The sustainability of the job is definitely being questioned for a lot of people.”

AEU NT members at the conference last weekend.

The teacher added that the lack of support was lowering the quality of education being delivered in the classroom.

“When teachers have less time they can’t plan an amazing lesson for students,” she said.

“We create a lot of our own learning resources and activities. The kids miss out ultimately.”

Education Minister Eva Lawler said the Territory government was addressing workforce shortages through its $10m Education Engagement Strategy, which was launched in October 2021.

“The NT government is currently undertaking a national and international recruitment campaign focused on attracting and employing classroom teachers to schools,” she said.

Federal member for Solomon Luke Gosling said $32m in grants to upgrade school infrastructure in greater Darwin announced on Thursday was evidence the commonwealth was “investing in a better and fairer education system”.