CONTRACT TEACHERS

Mrs VLAHOS (Taylor) (15:42): My question is to the Minister for Education. Can the minister advise the house of improvements in job security for contract teachers in public education?

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Minister for Education, Minister for Early Childhood Development, Minister for Science and Information Economy) (15:42): I thank the honourable member for her question. One of the first things that were undertaken on becoming education minister was the fact that we had too many teachers on short-term contracts in our public schools. This is obviously pretty debilitating for teachers, creates insecurity for students and generally is bad for public education.

In February this year we established the Teacher Renewal Scheme which has seen more than 100 experienced teachers looking to get out of teaching replaced in permanent jobs by enthusiastic early career teachers, and that has been a fantastic revitalisation to a number of our schools.

Mr Pisoni: So around about 10,000 to go.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: If that's your assessment about our teaching workforce it's no wonder that you're such—

Mr Pisoni: That's how many you've got on contract.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL: —a loved figure amongst the teachers. Madam Speaker, as you would be aware, in June this year we secured the overwhelming support of teachers for a radical new recruitment strategy. In a poll, 75 per cent of teachers supported this, making sure that more contract teachers would be permanent, giving more powers to schools to select teachers who best suited the needs of their particular school, and ending the rule which forced teachers out of their school, regardless of performance, after 10 years.

The new policy is now in place and, as a result, in July and August we have been able to advertise almost 700 permanent positions available for teachers, including contract teachers. The teachers winning these jobs will all be selected by the schools and will include schools which have not had the capacity to select teachers for as long as people can remember. These are schools that are in demand by teachers and in the past have always had to be filled by the central placement pool of existing permanent teachers. That has meant the contract teachers have never had a look-in at these schools.

On top of this, in order to move from our old system to the new system we have had to place more than 600 permanent teachers, who are in temporary placements, into ongoing positions. These are teachers who were facing uncertainty under the old system merely because of the fact that they had been in one school for 10 years and were often shuffled around from school to school. These advertised positions should all be selected this term and then there will be a further round next term. Depending on the numbers, this next round will also allow schools to directly convert some longstanding well-performing contract teachers into permanent positions in their schools.

This is just the beginning. As the process is beginning, people are cautious about converting the number of teachers into permanent positions, so we are encouraging those schools to take the step to convert as many teachers as possible to permanent. This will open up even more opportunities for our young contract teachers and not-so-young contract teachers. Frankly, there are a lot of contract teachers who have been on contracts for a considerable period of time. We can expect there will be an even greater number of permanent positions available next year.

I want to thank the much-maligned central office of DECS, which did some fantastic work with schools to get this policy over the line. I want to thank the principals of schools, who have accepted this new challenge. It gives them new rights but also new responsibilities. I also want to thank the contract teachers in public education, who have hung in there while we got this new process up and running, and the union for its cooperation in what was a difficult, but ultimately very successful, negotiation process.