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TAFE members and the AEU
The AEU is dedicated to making TAFE and its highly skilled teaching workforce the centre of vocational education and training in Australia.
AEU Victoria has recently reached a new enterprise agreement for TAFE teachers, with improved wages and conditions. The TAFE Teaching Staff Agreement 2018 will apply to all standalone TAFE institutes in Victoria.
Key features of this deal include:
- Immediate 5.4% pay rise, with further increases of 2.7% twice a year – a total increase of 23.7% over four years!
- Salary increase for teachers at T5 classification from $85,613 to $105,877 by November 2021
- Teachers with full AQF6 or above approved teaching qualification to access new increment point of $109,207 by the end of the agreement
- Limit of 800 hours teaching per year, with a further 400 hours for planning, preparation, curriculum development and assessment
- Overtime provision for work outside maximum hours, i.e. in excess of 8 hours per day, 38 hours per week and 1748 hours per year
- Mandatory work plans to be completed by March 1 each year to help ensure reasonable workload with all elements counted in annual hours
- Ongoing limit of 30 hours a week for 42 weeks a year of required attendance
- New clause to convert significant numbers of casual and fixed-term employees to secure employment
- New span of hours with reduction in annual teaching load as compensation for working unsociable hours
- 20 days family violence leave for teachers experiencing family violence
Put Education First campaign
Join the campaign - Put TAFE Education First
From 2008 to 2014, we saw the steady decline of TAFE due to the destructive actions of successive governments. The shift to competitive, market-driven policies for the VET sector – which forced TAFE to compete with private providers for public funding – has been a grand failure for students and the Victorian community.
In an under-regulated environment, VET funding became a cash-cow for unscrupulous private providers, who engaged in a range of cost-cutting exercises at students’ expense. Upon audit, three-quarters of private training organisations do not meet national education standards. The result has been devastating, with the practices of dodgy RTOs seriously damaging the reputation of the skills and training sector in Victoria.
Meanwhile, TAFE institutes have been struggling to remain sustainable - working to deliver high-quality training by qualified teachers and to serve the needs of their communities, while meeting the additional costs imposed on the public system.
The Andrews government has provided much-needed investment in TAFE and greater regulatory control across the system. But TAFE will only be ‘saved’ once it regains its status as the pre-eminent provider of high-quality vocational education and training in Victoria.
The public TAFE system is trusted by the community - and deserves government support. AEU is campaigning for contestable VET funding to be capped at a maximum 30% of total funding, with the remainder quarantined for public provision through TAFEs.
Join Put Education First - and urge the state government to commit 70% of public funding to TAFE.
