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Complete the webform below to respond to the Department of Education and Communities’ consultation paper on increased school based decision making – ‘Local Schools, Local Decisions’.

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As a NSW public school teacher, I support policies that enhance the capacity of principals, teachers and schools to deliver higher quality public education. I support greater school based decision making in the pursuit of this goal, when and where it is demonstrable that this approach neither undermines nor diminishes

•	equity and excellence for all students and schools, 
•	state-wide curriculum, resource and staffing guarantees, 
•	teachers’ employment rights and entitlements, and
•	the primacy of the principal’s role as educational leader.

I support the NSW Teachers Federation in opposing devolution policies that undermine or attack teachers’ employment rights and entitlements. Experience elsewhere shows that devolution is used to introduce local ‘hire and fire’ of teachers and replace permanency in teacher employment with limited tenure individual contracts.

In response to the consultation paper ‘Local Schools, Local Decisions’, I believe

•	Cuts should not be made to teachers’ working conditions / employment rights, and students’ learning conditions, to pay for salaries increases that should be directly funded by Treasury.

•	Any shift in decision making from state and regional offices to schools must be accompanied by additional staffing and resources; to do otherwise would merely shift the workload onto current school based staff.

•	Accountability processes must be based on respect for the teaching profession and duly acknowledge the significantly increased workload of classroom teachers, executives and principals.

•	Budgets for permanent staffing entitlements must not be devolved to schools. Rather than improve the quality of education, such devolution is the means for governments to reduce education funding, as evident in Victoria and reported in Boston Consulting Group’s expenditure review conducted for the previous NSW government.

•	Where additional, above-establishment staffing and funding are allocated to particular schools via targeted programs (eg. National Partnerships, Priority Action Schools, Schools in Partnership), collaborative school based decision making should determine how those resources are best utilised to meet student needs.

•	Moves to combine funding into a single overall budget must not undermine the specific purpose of targeted programs – to improve the educational outcomes of the students for whom it is intended.

•	Current statewide staffing and resource formulae must be maintained to ensure equity and quality for all students and permanent career paths and employment security for teachers. Improvements should be made to existing staffing formulae to lower class sizes and increase teacher release time.

•	No public school should be allowed to change the number, configuration and mix of staff in ways that undermine the permanent staffing entitlement or diminish the quality of education for students.

•	School based decision making should not be used to dismantle or undermine the statewide transfer system, which ensures equity for students and career mobility and employment security for teachers.

•	School-generated educational initiatives should be funded through additional resource allocation by government, not by trading-off existing staff positions or diverting funds from other programs.

•	To maintain a curriculum guarantee for students and teachers’ subject expertise, classroom teacher and head teacher positions in secondary education should continue to be primarily curriculum based.

•	School based decision making should determine maintenance and purchasing decisions, wherever this proves to be the most effective and cost efficient approach.

•	Measures to reduce ‘red tape’, paperwork, administrative and other non-teaching tasks should be implemented, providing such measures do not negatively impact on the quality of education.

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