Teachers prepare to stop work on TT mess

· Teachers are furious with David Bartlett’s totally inadequate response to the mess he has made with Tasmania Tomorrow

· Strong support for stop work meetings

· There must be a moratorium and independent review but the Premier is putting his short-term political interests ahead of the long-term interests of Tasmanian students

Teachers are preparing to stop work to try to get through to the Premier about the mess he has made with Tasmania Tomorrow.

Teachers tell me they are furious with the Premier’s inadequate response to the serious issues that have been raised all year, and which culminated in the Ivan Webb report, Needing to be Heard, which the Premier has now been sitting on for almost two months.

They feel Mr Bartlett has arrogantly washed his hands of the problems and is now talking about funding for new computers as some sort of panacea for a system that is falling apart at the seams.

Mr Bartlett inflamed matters yesterday when he accused the College system, and its hard-working staff of having taken Tasmania to the bottom of the pile when it comes to retention and qualifications.

This ignorant statement completely ignores the fact that the real problems with retention, and students falling behind, start well before students enter post year 10 and have been completely neglected by the Labor Government for the last 11 years.

Any student of the change process knows that good relationships with staff is essential to success. David Bartlett is not only failing to see that teachers have lost faith in the new system, but that they have also lost faith in him as he tries to bluster his way through.

An AEU letter to secondary colleges staff, obtained by the Tasmanian Liberals, includes such comments as:

David Bartlett received the (Ivan Webb) report seven weeks ago and has done nothing to have the secondary college’s concerns addressed. In fact in parliament last week he demonstrated he had also dismissed the Ivan Webb report and adopted the same line as the CEOs when he proudly announced that the funding for new computers had been found…

So here we are then. Hundreds of our colleagues have had their teaching careers turned upside down and their students’ education compromised, Many have had their health affected. Four colleagues have been dismantled. Two more are heading into this mess. Nothing has been fixed. The problems that in the first few weeks of Term 1 this year are still there now.

AEU meetings are now being held to support stop work meetings when they are called. Rosny and Launceston have already agreed.

It’s ironic that in 2006, Mr Bartlett happily dumped on his Education predecessor, Paula Wriedt, over the way she managed Essential Learnings, saying amongst other things that she did not do a very good job in communicating or implementing that reform.

But he is too arrogant and self-obsessed to even understand the mess he has made with Tasmania Tomorrow.

The Premier must agree to a moratorium on further transition to this mess, and a full independent review, to ensure that we get this right for our students and teachers.

The Premier must also ensure that the Auditor-General goes into the Polytechnic and Academy systems right now to look at active attendance and enrolment figures. Asking him to sign off on a set of numbers when they are presented to him, after school has finished for the year, would be meaningless in light of the revelations that students are still being listed as enrolled when they have not turned up all year. The Auditor-General needs to talk to the teachers, cross reference their own attendance lists they keep, and what shows up on the system.

Again today I have had further reports from another College of high levels of dropout, non attendance, and what are now being referred to as phantom students.

Tasmanian students and their teachers deserve a lot better than an Education Minister who sees the whole Tasmania Tomorrow mess in terms of his political fortunes, rather than bedding down a reliable and positive post year 10 educational system for Tasmania’s future.
Sue Napier MP Shadow Minister for Education