28 November 2024

Yesterday, your IEU team met with the CESA (the employer) to continue bargaining.

Our agenda was focused on practical class sizes and ESO workload.

The employer wanted to talk about their ideas on teacher workload, changes they want to teacher conditions of employment, and give feedback on our class size and complexity proposals.

Graham Thomas, a Tech teacher from Cardijn College, joined our team to share his experiences as a teacher with 39 years’ experience in Catholic Education. He put the case well for having smaller practical class sizes, and to use a health and safety approach to class size and composition.

The employer seemed receptive to our arguments that this needs to occur. As Christian Lorensini, from St Columba College, suggested, workplace safety shouldn’t be dependent on trading away other conditions.

Jane Gibson from St Mark’s College, Port Pirie (who drove the 5-hour return journey to be in person) outlined the issues with the pay and conditions for ESOs, and how this was making it hard to get specialised staff in the country. She also highlighted the unpaid work ESOs were doing in our regional schools.

The employers’ agenda items can be summed up as:

• At this stage they do not support reducing class size or our measures to address class complexity. We feel CESA may change their mind with a better understanding of the challenges facing classroom teachers and how complexity has increased in the last three years.
• The employer wants to be able to ask teachers to take more relief lessons due to the shortage of TRT’s.  We believe that this problem can be addressed by CESA making themselves more attractive for TRT’s. The obvious starting point would be pay.
• The employer wishes to change camp arrangements for teachers attending camps on weekends and public holidays so that the amount of CEA hours counted is halved.