From the President: United in our pursuit of professional independence and employment security

The education environment in which we currently operate consists of professional, industrial and political spheres; each interacting and overlapping to create a complex context for professional practice.

With this in mind, I want to propose two goals that should drive both bargaining and campaigning over the foreseeable future.

Professional independence

When did it become okay for someone else to come into our schools and our classrooms and tell us how to do our jobs? Most odious are interventions designed to exert command and control, rather than support through coaching, mentoring and professional development.

In a grossly Orwellian experience, we must now acknowledge that autonomy lies at the heart of this deliberate degradation of the teaching profession. Why Orwellian? Because autonomy in this new world is about devolution of additional responsibility and accountability and restriction of true independence. The simple truth is that the more autonomy we are given, the less independent we will become. Examples of this in operation in our schools include:

• curriculum: C2C, a useful resource to support the implementation of the national curriculum or a whip to “flog a willing professional”?
• OneSchool: effective tool to support modern educational practice or oppressive techno overlord?
• data: guideposts to improvement or tyrannical master?

Each scenario is equally possible: but of most concern is the direction of the department and the politicians who, underpinned by “autonomy”, compel it towards the negative manifestation.

No school I have visited over the past two years has been free of at least one of these blights, and yet they have coincided with a stripping away of professional independence rendering confident and assertive individuals hesitant and insecure.

We must restore the independence of our profession. We need to take back control of what we do, define why we do it and declare our right to decide, in the best interests of students and their education, who will do it. Doctors and lawyers have been doing this for generations. Professional educators have too. It’s time to clearly define who we are as a profession and make our voices heard.

Employment security

This professional independence must be reborn on the platform of security of employment, which in this context means tenured employment on the same or better terms and conditions than currently exist. This is not just about permanent jobs versus temporary or casual jobs. It must be a crusade to protect and enhance the terms and conditions of our employment, to ensure the viability of the profession long-term and the capability of those engaged in it to sustain that involvement.

Do a straw poll of any staffroom in any Queensland state school, there will be people who are now seriously questioning their capacity or willingness to remain in teaching. That is insecure employment.

Over the coming months we will have our mettle sorely tested as we oppose the consequences of a legislative regime designed to wreak havoc on the very basis of the employment security of public servants, professionals and others.

The second outcome from our campaigns needs to be the re-establishment of confidence in our terms and conditions of employment, such that teaching professionals can do that which they are bound to do by the very nature of the profession: work always and forever for the best interests of the students we teach.

The horns of a dilemma

One idea burning brightly for me at the moment is the restoration of a code of ethics for the teaching profession. Doctors have the Hippocratic oath, lawyers have a complex ethical framework within which they operate and many other professions adopt a similar approach.

Teachers too have a code of ethics. Not a code of conduct - a yoke devised by the employer - but a statement of the goals and aspirations of those called to the vocation of teaching (see my April Journal column for more on this). Reinvigorating this blueprint of the profession would serve us well as we struggle to wrest back control of the education agenda by providing an unassailable foundation for debate. All we do we do for the students in our schools. And unlike the Queensland Government, we actually mean it.

Kevin Bates
President

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 119 No 4, 23 May 2014, p7