Teacher issues, new COVID restrictions

Last week in parliament I was able to speak on the teacher shortage crisis impacting on our children’s education.

In recent weeks teachers across the electorate have walked off the job in protest – they’re at breaking point.

As part of my speech I read part of a letter from a concerned parent – I feel they summarise the situation well –

“The high school has been operating with at least five or six teacher vacancies for many months now and the reality of this is that our kids now have to regularly endure ‘minimal supervision’ lessons.

“This is where they are told to go into the quadrangle or school hall where a staff member just monitors them. No lessons are taught – nothing. They basically just sit there – for hours on end sometimes. A conservative estimate from teachers at the school is that this has occurred for 250 hours of lessons this term alone.

“The existing staff are at breaking point, they are good people. They barely have time to teach, which means they have even less time to deal with discipline issues so it is a race to the bottom and the whole system is collapsing in on itself.

“I am trying not to sound too dramatic or exaggerate – but it is so hard to suppress this overwhelming feeling of hopelessness.

“We just want to educate our children locally without having to send them away to boarding school and the NSW education department is currently not providing that.”

This year marks 17 years since the Department of Education subjected the work of teachers to an in depth review. During this time the world has changed dramatically, teaching our kids has too. More and more things have been added to the school curriculum and our teachers are subject to a mammoth amount of reporting and data collection.

Teachers have told me the reporting requirements mean for every one hour of teaching they have an hour of paperwork to do.

The NSW Education Minister and the Department of Education have been provided with a roadmap to get us out of this crisis – it’s called the Gallop inquiry and it makes sensible recommendations to the NSW government. I have implored the Minister to read it and implement its recommendations.

COVID and Regional NSW:

Once again COVID has raised its head just before a school holiday period. With international and interstate travel not possible, this should have created a perfect storm for tourism within NSW. Unfortunately, with much of Sydney unable to travel, we will miss out on millions of dollars coming to our communities. It’s incredibly disappointing to see the lost opportunity to drive money through Barwon communities.

My discussions with the Health Minister around COVID has always been to minimise restrictions where we have no cases. This current layer of restrictions is certainly a long way off the lockdown, but many people in Barwon are frustrated with any restriction, when their community has never had a case of the virus. I totally understand and share that frustration. What we are being advised is that the ‘Delta strain’ of the virus is more transmissible than previous strains. One thing I will take up, is a request for more transparency on decision making. With the impact these decisions have, I think it’s reasonable that the public should have access to more of the information that underpins them.

Very mice to see you leave:

I am hearing that the cold weather and rain has slowed the mice down. I have noticed at home they have backed off. What I can never accept is the time it took to firstly see the problem acknowledged by government, and then for assistance to start flowing (due in July).

Communities like Walgett, Coonamble, Gulargambone, Warren, Nevertire and Nyngan (that’s not an exhaustive list) were being impacted by big numbers of mice as early as August 2020. The cost to homes, business and agriculture will reach hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs are rarely met through insurance. The $150 million of assistance to date has been described as a down payment. There will need to be more done. The biggest risk is coming in to spring with big mouse numbers, we need to get them under control as much as possible before it warms up.