Thursday, 17 August 2023

Education system

Matthew BACH (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:48): (418) I was really saddened today to learn even more about the true impacts of Victoria’s crippling teacher shortage crisis. I read this morning that Craigieburn Secondary College has in fact written to the Department of Education, given the fact that they find it so hard to recruit teachers, to say that the only way that they can carry on is to move to a four-day week, to send children home to be with their parents one day a week.

Some of the impacts of this crippling crisis are particularly bad in Melbourne’s growing north and Melbourne’s burgeoning west as well, but the impacts are felt right around the state. So my adjournment matter tonight is for the Minister for Education, and I would seek from her an update as to how many schools have sought alternative arrangements from the department, like Craigieburn Secondary College.

As a young Christian growing up, I used to ask myself from time to time, WWJD? Now, as the opposition’s education spokesperson I find myself also asking the same question from time to time: What would James Merlino do? I had differences on points of policy with James Merlino; however, he was a good and honourable person. Since James Merlino vacated the most senior position in the Department of Education and that was given to Natalie Hutchins, we have had the schools tax smashing aspirational families – 42 per cent of Victorian families choose to send their children to an independent school – with school fees that will be higher in the order of hundreds and hundreds of dollars in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. We have had cuts, as we just heard from Ms Lovell, to 86 – I think it will ultimately be 117 – teachers for children with special needs. We have also had the impending mass kinder cuts and closures through Labor’s policy of kinder privatisation by stealth, but perhaps worst of all now we see this crippling workforce shortage.

It is all very well for Minister Stitt to chuckle over there, but I actually agree with Meredith Peace, the head of the Victorian branch of the AEU, who is running a stunning campaign in both our daily newspapers calling on the Premier – because Minister Hutchins will not listen, or if she will she lacks the clout that Mr Merlino had in government – to actually do something.

Today Victoria’s teacher workforce shortage is worse than it has ever been in the history of our state. The education department tells us that today there are 2275 teaching vacancies across our public schools. There are further issues in our independent schools, but I want to focus tonight, as I so often do, on public schools.

Ms Peace is right. The government has done nothing to alleviate this crippling crisis. The numbers are bad enough, but the impacts are being felt first and foremost by Victorian children, children who experienced some of the world’s longest lockdowns and who continue to have the worst learning outcomes that they have ever achieved. So I would like to know, and I dare say other Victorians would like to know: how many schools are in such a bad way as Craigieburn Secondary College, and what will this minister finally do about it?