TL log of claims lodged

By Sally Edsall

Federation has presented its log of claims on behalf of teacher-librarians to the Department of Education and Training (DET).

On February 4 Federation Officers met with DET Industrial Relations and Employment Services Director Peter Riordan.

Mr Riordan promised to investigate the claim in its entirety and to immediately look into the anomaly whereby in primary schools with special education classes, those classes do not count towards the staffing entitlement for teacher-librarian allocation.

Federation has on file several examples of this anomaly. For example:

• a school with 14 classes, which includes five support classes attracts a three-days per week teacher-librarian, while a school with 13 classes, none of which is a support class, has a four-day per week teacher-librarian.
• A school with 20 classes, including four support, has a four-day per week teacher-librarian, where a school with 18 mainstream classes attracts a teacher-librarian five-days per week.
• A school where the teacher-librarian services 27 classes, including four pre-school, four special education and one autistic satellite class, has a four-day per week allocation (0.8). A school with 27 mainstream classes would be entitled to 1.2 allocation.

All the matters contained within the log of claims were raised and pressed, including (but not limited to) central school library staffing, the relief from face to face provision of "up to one hour" per teacher, supervision of senior students, the need for technology assistants, and an increasingly worrying phenomenon -- the erosion of school administrative and support staff (SASS) support, where teacher-librarians are increasingly being expected to perform the duties expected of SASS contained within the award agreed to by the Public Service Association and the Department. Since the loss of a formula-based entitlement to library SASS, more teacher-librarians are reporting cutbacks from the levels of support they once had.

Sally Edsall is a Research Officer.

Primary TLs: watch your entitlements

Full text of Teacher-librarians log of claims

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