Subject: Public Education

Mihajla Gavin et al. address the importance of teacher unions as the collective voice of teachers to counter policies that worsen teacher working conditions and student learning environments. . .

The neoliberal reform wave in education

Teachers are one of the most highly unionised professions in Australia and globally. This is despite a challenging industrial, political and legal environment marked by repeated attempts to weaken the power of trade unions.

Over recent decades, teachers and their unions have felt the impact of ‘neoliberal’ policies in education. David Harvey describes neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005). Essentially this means pursuing policies which privilege individualism, choice and competition, and see the state as a constraint on this freedom.

In the state of NSW, we have seen such policies manifest in school education over the last 30-odd years. Some key examples include the now-defunct Local Schools Local Decisions devolutionary reform, and school ‘dezoning’ policies from the 1980s which expanded parental choice.

Market-based and competition style policies have had clear impacts on teachers’ work. As we have described elsewhere in this suite of articles, and as expanded upon in a recent article (Gavin & Stacey, 2023), despite the promise of devolutionary reform in helping to ‘reduce red tape’, in fact, the level of bureaucracy and paperwork has worsened in schools. Teachers’ workload and work hours have exploded and are considered ‘very high’ by international standards. Evidence shows teachers have felt a loss of professional respect (Mockler, 2022). And this is while teachers have worked under a decade-long ‘cap’ on salaries and went to extraordinary lengths to continue students’ learning during the COVID-19 pandemic (Gavin & Stacey, 2022).

Teacher unions are setting the agenda

Asserting the voice of teachers against policies that worsen their conditions and affect public education is important. Unions use a range of tactics and strategies to protect and improve both teachers’ working conditions and students’ learning environments.

Looking beyond Australia, we’ve seen vivid examples of teachers being fed up with current policy environments and demanding better conditions and professional respect. In the USA, educators led an historic upsurge in work stoppages in the #RedforEd strikes in 2018-19 (Blanc, 2020). Teachers across mainly Republican-dominated states – some even with bans on public sector strikes – pushed back against austerity and privatisation agendas that were negatively impacting public schools. Educators were successful in winning many key improvements on pay, conditions, and school funding. This activism was mirrored in the NSW Teachers’ Federation ‘More Than Thanks’ campaign where NSW teachers took historic strike action to fight against workload burdens and declining professional salaries.

At other times, other strategies may be more necessary or effective to defend teachers’ work and public education. In a chapter looking at changes to professional accreditation in NSW, we examined how governments have used professional standards to hold teachers accountable for the quality of education systems (McGrath-Champ et al., 2020). We explored how the NSW Teachers’ Federation used a strategy of ‘professional unionism’ in working with government and Department to support a standards-based accreditation system at a time when we have seen credentialism and professionalism under threat. An interview with a senior officer for this research described how introducing a standards-based system in NSW would make it “more difficult for governments to come after qualified teachers” and help to prevent a “race to the bottom”. This is important given examples witnessed in other countries where lower paid ‘teaching assistants’ have increasingly replaced the work of teachers.

A great example of this ‘professionalisation’ strategy has also been building the work of the NSW Teachers’ Federation in other areas, such as the Centre for Professional Learning, which helps to provide high-quality training for teachers, as well as this very journal which shares key resources and articles for teachers to enhance their learning across topics. This kind of work by unions is critical and reflects an important way that teachers can build their knowledge and skills about unions and issues in their profession.

Elsewhere, we see examples of unions using evidence from academic research as a platform to campaign for better working conditions for teachers and improvements to public education. In an article on academics collaborating with teacher unions to drive policy impact, we showed how a collaborative research project on teacher workload with the NSW Teachers Federation established an evidence base to draw attention to the work demands on teachers and campaign for better conditions (McGrath-Champ et al., 2022). Unions have also supported influential independent public inquiries into public education, such as the Gallop Inquiry (Gallop et al., 2020).

Another key strategy of teacher unionism has been striving for social justice and equality – not only in public education but across society more broadly. In an article on women-activists’ participation in teacher unions, we wrote about the importance of unions advancing gender equality by elevating the voice of women in union decision-making and representation (Gavin et al., 2022). Unions, like the NSW Teachers’ Federation, have been forerunners in promoting women’s participation in the union through initiatives such as the annual Women’s Conference and the Anna Stewart Program. But activism is challenging, and our article highlights a number of strains that women continue to face not only in their union work, but in the labour market and broader society. One union officer for this research explained how ‘women still carry the bulk of caring responsibilities, teaching full-time…while balancing teaching and family.’ With women now more highly unionised than men in Australia than ever before, striving for the goal of gender equality remains ever important – not only for unions but across the fabric of society. 

Let’s continue to raise teachers’ voices

Teachers work in one of the world’s most important professions globally, helping to educate and prepare children for their future lives and to be good citizens for a democratic society. But they are working in challenging and increasingly demanding times, marked by a distinct lack of professional respect. Unions play a vital role in continuing to advance and advocate not only for teachers, but for students and public education more broadly.

Blanc, E. (2020). The Teachers’ “Red for Ed” Movement Is Far From Dead. https://jacobin.com/2020/10/red-for-ed-movement-teachers-unions-covid-19

Gavin, M., McGrath-Champ, S., Stacey, M., & Wilson, R. (2022). The ‘triple burden’ in teaching: implications for women’s work as teachers and unionists. Economic and Industrial Democracy 43(2), 830-852.https://doi.org/10.1177/0143831X20958481   

Gavin, M., & Stacey, M. (2023). Enacting autonomy reform in schools: the re-shaping of roles and relationships under Local Schools, Local Decisions. Journal of Educational Change 24 (501-523). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-022-09455-5 

Gavin, M., & Stacey, M. (2022). Why we never want to be in Kansas. https://www.aare.edu.au/blog/?p=11725

Gallop,G., Kavanagh, T., Lee, P. (2020) Valuing the teaching profession ( an independent Inquiry) NSW Teachers Federation. https://www.nswtf.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Valuing-the-teaching-profession-Gallop-Inquiry.pdf

Harvey, D. A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) Oxford: Oxford University Pres

McGrath-Champ, S., Gavin, M., & Stacey, M. (2020). Strategy and policy: the case of an Australian teachers’ union. In R. Lansbury, A. Johnson, & D. Van den Broek (Eds.), Contemporary issues in work and organisations: An integrated approach (pp. 110-126). Routledge.

McGrath-Champ, S., Gavin, M., Stacey, M., & Wilson, R. (2022). Collaborating for policy impact: Academic-practitioner collaboration in industrial relations research. Journal of Industrial Relations 64(5), 759-784. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00221856221094887 

Mockler, N. (2022). No wonder no one wants to be a teacher: world-first study looks at 65,000 news articles about Australian teachers. https://theconversation.com/no-wonder-no-one-wants-to-be-a-teacher-world-first-study-looks-at-65-000-news-articles-about-australian-teachers-186210

Mihajla Gavin is a Senior Lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work.

Dr Scott Fitzgerald is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at Curtin Business School, Curtin University. His research interests are in the broad areas of industrial relations, human resource management, organisational behaviour and organisation studies. His research expertise also spans various disciplines: sociology, political economy and media and communication studies. A key focus of Scott’s recent research has been the changing nature of governance, professionalism and work in the education sector. 

Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. She has a PhD from Macquarie University, Sydney and a Masters degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of schoolteachers’ work and working conditions.

Meghan Stacey is a former secondary school teacher and current Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s research interests are in the sociology of education and education policy, with a particular focus on the critical policy sociology of teachers’ work. Her first book, The business of teaching: Becoming a teacher in a market of schools, was published in 2020 with Palgrave Macmillan.

Rachel Wilson is Professor, Social Impact at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research takes a system perspective on design and management of education systems and their workforce. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms.

Meghan Stacey et al. provide a historical context to the introduction of the temporary teacher category and its implications of precariousness of work and the impact on workload and career expectations. . .

Recently, around 5500 temporary teachers and support staff in NSW accepted a conversion to permanent status (NSW Government, 2023). This announcement represents new gains in the effort to address what we refer to below as the ‘recommodification’ of the teaching profession over the past twenty years, through growing work insecurity. In this article, we explore the origins and effects of the ‘temporary’ category of teaching work in NSW public schools.

The rise of temporary teaching work in NSW

In a recent journal article (McGrath-Champ et al., 2022), we used historical case and contemporary survey data to explore how the category of temporary teaching work has grown since its creation.

Established in 2001, the temporary teaching category was initially introduced in response to the ‘commodification’ of teaching labour that was taking place through a growth in casual work throughout the 1980s and 1990s, when the proportion of casual employment grew to 20%. This had considerable implications for teachers, and especially women teachers, with women engaged in childbearing effectively forced to resign from their permanent roles and return as casual teachers when their caring responsibilities allowed. There were, additionally, concerns that long-term casuals were completing very similar work to that of permanent teachers, but without appropriate recompense. The temporary teaching category presented a clear improvement on this situation.

Fast-forward to 2017, however, and while the casual proportion of the workforce had remained relatively stable since the introduction of the temporary category, at around 10%, analysis of union membership figures indicated that temporary teachers had grown to account for around 20% of the workforce, while permanent positions had declined from around 85% to about 70%. According to the NSW Government, the proportion of permanency has since been even lower, sitting at around 63% (NSW Government, 2023). The introduction of the temporary category, initially established in an effort to ‘decommodify’ the teaching profession, had instead led to an overall increase in precarity across the workforce, through what we describe as a process of ‘recommodification’.

The union has taken a range of actions over the past twenty years to manage this recommodification of work. This has included negotiations with the Department to achieve or maintain provisions under the three-yearly Staffing Agreement; monitoring of, and court action to ensure, the appointment of teachers to permanent instead of temporary positions; and efforts to secure professional development provisions for early career teachers in temporary roles. The announcement of the conversion of a further 5500 teachers and support staff to permanent status so far this year, and with more slated to come, represents but the latest response to a series of efforts made in this area by the union.

Impacts of temporary work on job quality and career progression

In a second recent article on this topic (Stacey et al., 2022), we conducted a deep-dive analysis of our survey data to explore the impacts of fixed-term contract work for temporary teachers.

Workload data indicates that teachers employed in a fixed-term capacity (i.e. in a ‘temporary engagement’) undertake a similar nature and amount of work to those in permanent roles, especially when compared with teachers working in a casual capacity. For example, while 72% of permanent teachers and 70% of temporary teachers felt their work ‘always’ requires them to ‘work very hard’, only 58% of casual teachers felt this way. Similarly, while 36% of permanent and 37% of temporary staff felt their work required ‘too great an effort’, this was true for only 27% of casual staff.

Yet interestingly, although temporary teachers were undertaking similar amounts of work to permanent teachers, they sometimes felt as though they were actually working harder. We understand this reflects a perception that they needed to ‘do more’ than permanent employees to keep their jobs. As one respondent explained, “there is a huge expectation that teachers put their hand up for extra roles … which adds to the pressure [teachers] (particularly temp teachers as we do more) feel”. Teachers’ careers were felt to be “at the whim of principals who pick and choose according to who toes the line … jumping through hoops to retain their position and add to their CV in order to gain permanency”. This loss of control over work negatively impacts job quality, as teachers described having to “take whatever is handed to you” as “workload rules go out the window”.

Overall, respondents expressed a frustration that they were not “deemed worthy of permanent employment”. Indeed, only 27% of respondents in fixed-term contract positions indicated that they were in these roles by choice. There are also gendered implications here, with women respondents much more likely to be temporary than men, suggesting potential, gendered ‘scarring’ effects on women teachers’ career progression. 

The future of employment security in teaching

It has been heartening, in recent months, to see that the NSW Government is working with the Federation to continue to address the concerns raised by fixed-term contract work in teaching. Promoting the attractiveness of teaching as a career is a particularly important priority today, and employment security is a key part of what has, historically, made school teaching a high-quality job. Protecting this feature of the profession is essential if the workforce is to be effectively supported moving forward. 

McGrath-Champ S, Fitzgerald S, Gavin M, Stacey M and Wilson R. (2023) Labour commodification in the employment heartland: Union responses to teachers’ temporary work. Work, Employment and Society, 37(5): 1165-1185. Published online 8 March 2022.DOI: 10.1177/09500170211069854

NSW Government. (2023). Almost 5500 teachers and support staff accept permanent roles as government acts to address workforce crisis in schools. https://www.nsw.gov.au/media-releases/5500-school-staff-made-permanent#:~:text=Almost%205500%20teachers%20and%20support%20staff%20have%20accepted%20offers%20to,tackle%20the%20teacher%20workforce%20shortage

Stacey, M., Fitzgerald, S., Wilson, R., McGrath-Champ, S., & Gavin, M. (2022). Teachers, fixed-term contracts and school leadership: toeing the line and jumping through hoops. Journal of Educational Administration and History 54(1), 54-68. doi.org/10.1080/00220620.2021.1906633

Meghan Stacey is a former secondary school teacher and current Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at UNSW Sydney. Meghan’s research interests are in the sociology of education and education policy, with a particular focus on the critical policy sociology of teachers’ work. Her first book, The business of teaching: Becoming a teacher in a market of schools, was published in 2020 with Palgrave Macmillan.

Rachel Wilson is Professor, Social Impact at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research takes a system perspective on design and management of education systems and their workforce. She has expertise in educational assessment, research methods and programme evaluation, with broad interests across educational evidence, policy and practice. She is interested in system-level reform and has been involved in designing, implementing and researching many university and school education reforms.

Dr Scott Fitzgerald is an Associate Professor in the School of Management at Curtin Business School, Curtin University. His research interests are in the broad areas of industrial relations, human resource management, organisational behaviour and organisation studies. His research expertise also spans various disciplines: sociology, political economy and media and communication studies. A key focus of Scott’s recent research has been the changing nature of governance, professionalism and work in the education sector. 

Mihajla Gavin is a Senior Lecturer in the Business School at the University of Technology Sydney, and has worked as a senior officer in the public sector in Australia across various workplace relations advisory, policy and project roles. Mihajla’s research is concerned with analysing the response of teacher unions to neoliberal education reform that has affected teachers’ conditions of work.

Susan McGrath-Champ is Professor in Work and Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney Business School, Australia. She has a PhD from Macquarie University, Sydney and a Masters degree from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Her research includes the geographical aspects of the world of work, employment relations and international human resource management. Recent studies include those of schoolteachers’ work and working conditions.