The recent Award agreement and subsequent settlement between Federation and the Department of Education not only delivers significant improvements in members’ working conditions but supercharges the demolition of Local Schools, Local Decisions (LSLD), the devolutionary policy of the former NSW Coalition government.
The policy was foisted on schools in 2012 and rebadged as “The School Success Model” in 2020 due to brand name damage. Its remit was the same, however: to shift or devolve all responsibility and blame away from the government and its department to the local public school, cut costs and deliver efficiencies, while dismantling public education as we know it.
While attempting to mislead the education community with terms such as “local choice”, “school autonomy” and “local decision making”, LSLD has been a damaging and divisive policy resulting in rising, excessive workloads for teachers and principals. This is well documented as having been brought on by managerial obsessions with compliance regimes and data collection without systems support, and taking teachers and principals away from their core business of teaching and learning.
The professional voice of teachers was often ignored under LSLD. This new agreement struck with the Department delivers the cultural shift required to redress this damage. It tackles unsustainable workloads and levels of burnout and embeds significant measures to address the attraction and retention of the teaching profession.
Federation’s workload survey of more than 13,000 members, undertaken in September, provided a recent and substantial evidence base to pursue targeted measures to address the crippling workload pressures through the voice of the membership.
These improvements to members’ working conditions directly reflect members’ feedback in our workload survey and address the key factors we all know are contributing to the crippling workload pressures impacting your work, your health, your family, your relationships and your profession.
Evidenced by the former government’s own evaluation, LSLD has proven to be an unmitigated disaster that has failed to produce any significant improvements in either student or school outcomes — surely the most important measure of any departmental policy or government reform — and heavily weighed on teacher workload.
The NSW Government’s commitments to both the professional respect and trust of the teaching profession and the rollback of LSLD is delivered in spades with these new working conditions for Federation members.
The 2025 school year will open with this optimistic new pathway for our members at work, including four school development days — of which two are for teachers to prepare, plan and undertake professional learning for students’ education — to start the year the way it should.
