Emotional blackmail is the rotten foundation on which teacher working conditions are built. We don't do it for the money, we are constantly told. We do it 'for the kids'.
Don't want to volunteer your Sundays to the musical? It's a shame that the kids will miss out. Don't want to coordinate debating for free? So sad for the kids who don't get to form a team this year. Can't give up your one free lunch break to coach the soccer? I guess that's fine, but it would have been a fantastic chance to get the kids out and moving! This kind of emotional blackmail is particularly effective because it does not need to be explicitly articulated. Saying 'no' to an adult can be difficult. Saying 'no' to the pleading eyes of a child feels like a crime.
For years, teachers have been programmed to ignore the systemic gaps that leave their extra labour uncompensated. Instead, we are encouraged to internalise guilt when we don't go out of our way to facilitate opportunities outside the official scope of our jobs — even when taking on these responsibilities is at the expense of our own wellbeing. Stressed and overworked teachers are, apparently, to blame for denying students fantastic prospects, not the school systems that foist an untenable workload upon their employees. Not only do teachers suffer because of this but so do students, who do not have their teachers' full attention and energy.
How are teachers supposed to say 'No more!' without becoming the bad guys? This is where unions can step in. The transactional dynamics of obligation and guilt are so prevalent in schools that explicit entitlements, enshrined in enterprise agreements, are needed to protect teacher wellbeing. Approximately 40 per cent of education professionals hold union membership, making teaching one of the most highly unionised jobs in Australia. Yet education unions have been largely ineffective at enacting substantial and tangible change for teachers in recent years.
This is because education unions tend to focus on one thing when it comes to enterprise bargaining: money. Working conditions are sometimes addressed, but mostly in the context of preventing further degradation, rather than substantial improvement. In teaching, this has led to a subtle creep of job scope as more administrative tasks become ingrained in the professionm, while teacher release time remains basically stagnant.
It's a common cry among progressives that teachers should get paid more. In some instances, this is true. What is, however, more pressing are the poor working conditions that destroy the drive of our teachers and lead them to leave the profession in droves.
It's well known that teaching has an astoundingly high attrition rate. In my experience, the teachers we lose are often those who are high-achievers and hard-workers; those who burn out because the system pressures them to ignore their own needs. This is, again, not just a problem for the teachers but for students who lose highly gifted educators to burnout. The flight of good teachers is not a problem pay alone will fix; a well-paid but overworked teacher is still overworked.
"Rather than accept a token pay increase, we need to internalise the fact that higher wages can be not only an inferior form of compensation, but a distraction from solving the issue of workload."
The New South Wales government recently released its Understanding Work in Schools report, revealing that full-time teachers work an average of 50 hours per week. Standard full-time work in Australia is 38 hours per week. The requirement of home work on the part of teachers is considered a feature, not a flaw, of the system. It is supposedly the trade-off for slightly shorter at-work hours, and school holidays. While it's undeniable that less mandated time spent on-site has advantages, the numbers simply don't add up.
The problem with a mindset suggesting holidays make up for increased workload is that it ignores the reality of teachers' work, which is often time sensitive. Most tasks cannot simply be left until school holidays come around; work can't be redistributed to a quieter time of the year. Instead, teachers are left with frequent, regular, and intense crunch periods that cannot be balanced by a normal human. No wonder new recruits are fleeing. Not only are they ill-equipped by universities to deal with the reality of teaching, but they are thrown into a profession with inbuilt disregard for their wellbeing.
The recent addition of onerous data collection requirements has further decimated teachers' out-of-class time. Implementation of baroque pre- and post-testing, collation of data from these tests, and the entering of this information into relevant mandatory databases, can take hours. Somewhere between all our other duties, teachers are then — often with minimal or no statistics training — expected to make sense of these reams of numbers.
Unions do not like the idea of abandoning wage increases in favour of condition improvements, because this idea is unpopular with members. Everyone likes more money; we are a nation of workaholics. Our capitalist society uses income as the primary measure of success. Income going up is perceived by workers, and therefore union members, as unequivocally good. Wellbeing and happiness are abstract metrics, rarely considered until the situation has deteriorated beyond what can be easily fixed. Rather than accept a token pay increase, we need to internalise the fact that higher wages can be not only an inferior form of compensation, but a distraction from solving the issue of workload.
While wages should be updated to (as a minimum) reflect inflation, unions must change tack in bargaining. Firstly, they must dramatically increase available non-teaching hours to allow staff time to complete the tasks assigned to them. Secondly, they must institute mandatory compensation for extra-curricular work in the form of reduced teaching loads. Teachers must be given the time needed to fulfil the needs of students without having their own needs subsumed in the process.
Next, we must acknowledge that real change will not come without serious money from governments. School budgets, even those of non-government schools, are decided by politicians. Instead of looking inward at the education bodies, unions must look outwards to how they can change the hearts and minds of the electorate.
Obviously, schools are not the only workplaces where good will is taken advantage of. It is symptomatic of a wider trend in our culture where overworking is valued and, subsequently, monetarily rewarded. Schools are, however, one of the places where the vulnerability of those we work with is weaponised by employers. A key role of unions should be to prevent teachers being put in the awkward position of choosing between students and their own wellbeing. If they don't, the system will continue to haemorrhage high-quality teaching staff, and everyone — staff and students — misses out.
Tim Hutton is a high school teacher and occasional freelance writer. His ramblings can be found over at www.mrhutton.com.