TAFE & Adult Provision Persistence pays off: TAFE teacher campaign achieves new deal
Members from Victoria’s 12 standalone TAFEs have stood strong throughout a long, hard-fought campaign for an agreement that respects the value and importance of their work. They have finally been rewarded with an in-principle deal offering a 21% pay rise over four years.
Negotiations for a new TAFE agreement started more than two and a half years ago. Since then, members have participated with passion and solidarity in every stage of the process – from establishing their log of claims, securing the right to a single interest employer agreement, and pursuing industrial action that included TAFE teachers’ first full-day stopwork since 2008.
At a time when Victoria faces a shortage of workers in every industry, and TAFEs are expected to fill those gaps, the Allan government’s initial 3% pay offer – with anything more to be offset by higher workloads – was never going to cut it.
Find all the details on pay rises here.
The pressure applied by members’ industrial campaign forced the government back to the table late last year. As a result, the AEU was able to negotiate an in-principle agreement that provides pay parity for TAFE teachers with their counterparts in schools. The initial salary increases of at least 7.4% for all members will be backdated to 1 November 2024; and casual rates will increase in line with full-time and part-time rates of pay.
Achieving this in-principle deal was a direct result of their persistence, solidarity and collective power.
The deal also contains important improvements to workloads, with out-of-class assessment, planning, preparation, curriculum, and student consultation time to increase from 400 to 600 hours per year (from 30 minutes to 45 minutes per teaching hour) – meaning a 200-hour reduction in non-teaching-related duties. Importantly, the deal confirms that all in-class assessment is to be counted as face-to-face teaching.
Another key highlight is better teacher and education manager classification arrangements, including recognition of qualifications for those who have teaching as their vocational qualification or have a higher teaching qualification.
The agreement will apply to all standalone TAFE institutes following a successful ballot of teachers over the coming weeks.
More information for AEU TAFE members here.
Victorian TAFEs have been the lowest funded in the nation for a decade, and our TAFE teachers have been bearing the brunt – facing increasingly unsustainable workloads while receiving almost $8,000 a year less than similarly experienced school teachers. With both teacher shortages and the broader skills shortage as a backdrop, we were determined to reach an agreement that recognised TAFE teachers’ fundamental role in building the knowledge and skills of our future workforce.
It’s never easy to take industrial action, but TAFE members took a determined stand on behalf of their fellow teachers and their students. Achieving this in-principle deal was a direct result of their persistence, solidarity and collective power.
