Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In last week's Q&A show but also in an opinion piece of mine in The Australian last week, we examined the plight of Australian teachers. It's a surmountable but still very serious workplace issue that our teachers are worked so hard with unpaid work that they have to take home. Sure, they might do 41 weeks a year out of 52, but, if they mentally need so much recovery in those 11 weeks, we need to do something about what happens in term time. At the moment, the burdening of teachers with unpaid work is completely unacceptable.

Let's remember: it's fundamentally an education system there for children, not for teachers, and children have slipped in their performance since 2012 compared to the major economies. We know that PISA scores in the top fifth have shrunk by 20 per cent over those years, and we know that the number of kids ending up in the bottom part of performance worldwide has increased by 40 per cent. We need to give teachers promotional scales built not on how long they've been a teacher but on their postgraduate research and their ability to perform better as a teacher. If a person is having trouble as a teacher, they need early help with leadership and subject-matter experts and should not be put into special education where they are away from a classroom of kids.

Lastly, we need state education systems to get serious about a promotion scale that doesn't top out after nine years of teaching, because that leads to the best teachers moving out to look at occupations elsewhere. Nursing has managed to get $100,000 salaries for a quarter of the nurses in Queensland Health. They are not even anywhere close to that—they have just touched $100,000. Teaching deserves what nursing has. (Time expired)