Page 2321 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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are requesting that you reverse yet again one of your less than brilliant solutions to a problem and enable teachers to do their jobs, let teachers get on with teaching.
This time around, in the middle of what one might suggest is a less than cordial negotiation on pay structures, and in the context of his usual hyperbole and false hopes surrounding six-figure salaries, the minister decides that what teachers and principals need is more paperwork.
Let us be very clear on this issue. We are not suggesting or supporting poor record keeping. We are not suggesting that teachers should be any different in accountability for their attendance at their workplace. We merely ask that common sense prevail in what should not have dragged on for years and years.
The situation is this: the ACT Department of Education and Training teaching staff enterprise agreement 2009-11, and presumably in the previous agreement, states “all teachers are required to complete fortnightly attendance records for leave purposes”. For some years—in fact the department indicated it has been going on for the entire duration of the Stanhope government—this has not worked as well as it might, and some teachers in some schools have not completed their attendance sheets in the correct manner. Some forms go missing. They go missing either because they were lost somewhere in the system or because they were not submitted in the first place.
Understandably, if leave is not debited against an employee’s records when it has been taken, it creates an ongoing financial liability on the public purse. The department’s internal audit process has been critical of the mismatch of paperwork for years. However, there are processes in place to address the recurrent and recalcitrant offenders.
The enterprise agreement says that “absences not covered by approved leave will be treated as an unauthorised absence and may result in salary and/or disciplinary action in accordance with the department’s Mandatory Procedures for Managing Employee Absences”. It would appear that, for whatever reason, the minister has not chosen to implement this clause, despite, I am advised, urging by the Australian Education Union to chase the offenders if they are known and are recurrent. Instead, in an effort to correct this ongoing failure, the minister decided, strangely, to insist on more paperwork. All staff employed under the ACT teaching staff enterprise agreement must now submit fortnightly returns in a most cumbersome manner.
An example of the system adopted at one primary school is onerous to say the least. It requires downloading a form to your own computer, filling in the details, keeping an electronic copy of any absence record, completing a leave form, photocopying it, forwarding it to the school’s front office, and attaching it to the fortnightly absence record for the team leader. On even weeks you give your form, with a copy of the leave form attached if leave was taken, to your team leader during the team meetings. If there are no team meetings, you have to make arrangements to give the form to your team leader before the close of business. Then there is a raft of processes for the team leader, who has to pass the forms to the principal, who then is required to keep the files for two years.
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