Page 448 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 21 March 2023
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Schools—staff workload
MR HANSON: My question is to the Minister for Education and Youth Affairs, through the Chief Minister.
Chief Minister, in addition to the ACU report on principals which was the subject of my last question, the Australian Education Union recently published a report which showed that more than one third of principals work 10-15 additional hours per week, and that a further third work an 20 additional hours per week. Almost all principals, that is 94 per cent, say that the directorate lacks the resources to meet the necessary demands.
The Australian Education Union issued a statement that said: “ACT public school principals carry a crushing workload at the expense of their health.” Chief Minister, I presume that is not a societal problem. Can you explain why ACT principals are working under what the union describes as crushing workloads? What is being done by your government to assist them?
MR BARR: I think at the heart of the issue tends to be the question of what level of autonomy is provided to individual schools and school leaders versus the level of system support. That has changed over time. There are different models within education systems—highly centralised department-run services with very little autonomy at the school level, through to school based management systems that provide a huge amount of autonomy at a school based level. I think there are clear opportunities—out of the references that Mr Hanson has made—for more activity to be centralised within the department to achieve certain efficiencies and economies of scale and to reduce workload pressures on principals.
A perceived downside of that greater centralisation approach can be that it reduces autonomy at an individual school level, but clearly it would reduce workload for principals. So I take out of the quotes from Mr Hanson that a preferred direction at this point in the ACT education system’s journey is for the directorate to take on more administrative responsibility for certain functions of school management and to relieve principals of those burdens. That would appear to be a preferred direction. Obviously, the outcomes of that are matters that will be led by the education minister and the Education Directorate and will be clearly be tied into current enterprise bargaining negotiations as well as future school-based management policy decisions.
MR HANSON: Chief Minister, is it your policy, therefore, that you will be removing workloads from principals and relocating that work or function to the directorate?
MR BARR: That is definitely asking me to announce government policy—
Mr Hanson: You just said that is what you were doing—
MR BARR: No, I said they were some of the issues; I was responding to those points. Clearly, workload reduction means the workload has to be moved somewhere else—someone else has to do the work is the implication.
Mr Hanson: Well, they just said they haven’t got enough resources.
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