‘Best paid in the country’: Teacher deal to push top wages above $150,000

Victoria’s teachers’ union has struck an in-principle $4.6 billion deal with the Allan government for pay rises of up to 32.4 per cent over four years, in a move Labor hopes will avert further strike action.

The union leadership will now attempt to convince its 60,000 members to vote for the offer, with Australian Education Union (AEU) branch president Justin Mullaly saying on Friday that a series of half-day strikes scheduled across the state throughout May and June would remain on hold while the proposal was put to a ballot.

The AEU’s Victorian Branch Council voted on Friday afternoon to endorse the agreement that the union leadership said would boost the pay of an experienced teacher from $118,063 to $151,419 by 2029.

But the 32.4 per cent figure applies only to those at the bottom of the pay scale, with the pay increase sliding down to 28.3 per cent for teachers in the upper brackets.

The deal on offer also contains an extra three student-free days each year, on top of the current five, but not the decrease in face-to-face teaching time demanded in the teachers’ log of claims, which also called for a 35 per cent pay increase over three years.

Mullaly said the deal would make the wages of Victorian public school teachers – currently the lowest paid public education workforce in the nation – competitive with their interstate counterparts.

“It’s an agreement that does what members sought us to do, and that’s to lift us from the bottom of the pile, up towards the top,” the union leader said.

“A Victorian teacher at the top of the scale, by October, will go past their New South Wales counterpart.

“That’s over a $15,000 increase.

“That same teacher will go from $118,000 to over $151,000, more than $33,000 over the life of the agreement.

“I think any worker would think that’s a pretty good deal.”

Premier Jacinta Allan said the agreement would make Victoria’s teachers “the best paid in the country”.

Education Minister Ben Carroll said the offer, if endorsed by the union rank-and-file, would cost $4.6 billion over the life of the agreement.

That spending would be counted toward the state’s share of any future agreement with the Commonwealth to jointly fully fund Victoria’s schools to the minimum standard agreed under the landmark Gonski review of public education in 2012.

The state’s schools are currently funded at nine to 10 per cent below the full Schooling Resource Standard, the minimum amount required for a good education.

Chronic underfunding of schools was a key grievance – along with wages and conditions – among the 35,000 teachers, principals and education support workers who walked out of their classrooms in March to protest in the streets of Melbourne’s CBD.

Carroll said the agreement was “an important step” in fully funding the state’s public schools.

“We’re really proud of this,” he said on Friday.

“We’ve already grown our student investment by some 34 per cent in Victoria.

“We are undertaking a massive reform agenda from the biggest build in the nation, one in two schools built across Australia, built here in Victoria.”

Carroll said he thought the time taken to reach a deal with the union’s leadership, which has been bargaining since July, was reasonable.

“This education agreement is one of the quickest that has been done, and that has been a cooperative effort with the union,” the deputy premier said.

“They started at 35 per cent, we started at 18.5 per cent.

“We always know in a negotiation you’ve got to get an outcome, and they had to give a bit, and we had to give a bit, and this is really important.

“We think it’s pro-teacher, pro-student, and pro-parent.”

The AEU also endorsed an offer to boost the pay of early childhood educators by 39.1 per cent on average over four years, a deal which will bring kinder teachers, mostly in the state system, to pay parity with their school teaching colleagues.

But some delegates at Friday’s union meeting were already mobilising as Mullaly was speaking to journalists, preparing to campaign for a no-vote in the union-wide ballot on the proposed teachers’ deal.

Caitlin Wood, a teacher from Footscray Primary School where union members had voted to condemn suspension of the strikes, said she believed many educators would be unhappy with the wages offer.

“Pay is the major sticking point,” Wood told this masthead.

“So 35 over four years does not add up to 28 over three.

“I’m not a maths teacher, but this doesn’t add up.”

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