Teachers Dispute

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:04): My question is to the Minister for Education, Training and Skills. Does the government's offer in relation to the education EB include support for principals? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: During the last EB, principals had an extra per cent on top of the other staff pay rise in recognition of the particular challenge of recruiting principals to those positions, a challenge that still remains today.

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (15:04): I thank the member for Morialta for the question. It is a very good question, and he is right. If we look at those extra complexities, the things that have got more difficult in the job over the last few decades, I think you could also make the same case and the same point in terms of the leaders of our schools: our principals. It is certainly harder—and this has been the case for many years—to attract people to put up their hand and become a principal. A lot of people see it as taking on a great deal of extra stress and work. I would point particularly to changes in society across the last 25 years around the rise of things like social media, but you can add to that things like vaping as well.

Last week, the member for Cheltenham and the Minister for Health joined me as we made a pitch to ban these incredibly unhealthy energy drinks as well—all these things that weren't around even when I finished high school at the end of 1999, and now new things and new problems are being heaped on the plate of our principals to deal with on top of the things they have to do anyway. In addition to the work we have to do to make sure we can retain and attract new classroom teachers, the member for Morialta is correct that we have to do something as well to make sure that we can do the same, it can be said, for principals.

We are proposing, in the current offer of the enterprise bargaining agreement, a 1 per cent increase to the Band A leaders. That is already in the offer that we are putting. And there are some things in terms of workload reduction for principals and leaders as well. I would point specifically to changes we had proposed as an election commitment, which we are working on now, around the Inclusive Education Support Program, which is money for students with disability, and there are nine steps of that.

We are proposing to make sure that the first three steps, if we can get agreement, will actually be able to be certified or signed off by the school instead of going through the application process at head office, which is time consuming for the teacher or the principal filling out the application, and time consuming as well for staff in 31 Flinders Street to do that who could be spending their time doing other important work.

So we are approaching this question of what we do to support existing principals and actually inspire other classroom teachers to put their hand up and want to be a principal as well, both with a financial incentive and also a workload reduction as well.