Victorian teachers’ strike reflects a crisis decades in the making

In the days leading up to this week’s strike by Victorian government school teachers, the first such action in 13 years, officials from the Australian Education Union (AEU) began to suspect that this was going to be big.

Each day as the strike came closer, teachers, principals and school support workers were signing up for union membership – and with it legal protection for those taking stop-work action – in their thousands.

By Tuesday morning, union insiders knew that earlier predictions of 10,000 to 15,000 educators taking to the streets of Melbourne to demand better pay, conditions and government funding of state schools, would be well short of the mark.

They also knew Premier Jacinta Allan had been wasting her breath on the eve of the strike when she called on teachers to cancel the action and consider accepting the 17 per cent pay offer made by Education Minister Ben Carroll a week earlier.

When 35,000 teachers, principals and school support workers showed up for the protest that brought parts of the CBD to a standstill and dominated the day’s news coverage, it was plain that the rage that has been felt for years by educators towards successive state governments was finding expression on the streets.

But the scenes in the city on Tuesday left observers wondering how a wealthy state that has elected centre-left governments for most of this century ended up with the lowest-funded schools in the nation and the worst-paid teachers.

Pay gaps of up to $15,000 a year that have opened up between Victorian teachers and their NSW counterparts have fuelled resentment, with government schools across the state beset by a serious shortage of teachers and forcing educators to work harder for less while plugging the gaps.

When The Age revealed last year that the Allan government had secretly delayed its commitment to fund the state’s schools to the nationally agreed Schooling Resourcing Standard (SRS) by three years, depriving schools of $2.4 billion, many in the sector were incensed.

Veteran AEU activist Lucy Honan said educators were angry about much more than just the present round of wage talks, and said that the surge in union sign-ups before Tuesday’s industrial action reflected a longstanding desire by many to send a message to the state government by walking off the job.

“People were keen to strike, absolutely keen, and the chat in the staff room afterwards was that [the strike] hasn’t actually satisfied the depths of rage that people feel,” Honan said.

For many strikers, the issues of school funding and their own pay and conditions are inseparable. Many said they were fed up working in institutions so short of money they were propped up with cash donations, fundraising by parents or teachers using their own pay to cover essentials.

Honan, who led a “strike against the crisis” ticket at union elections in 2024 that pulled in 37 per cent of the vote, said she believed the “crummy” deal of annual pay rises worth just 2 per cent that teachers achieved in 2021 had much to do with the present position.

Honan also said she believed former Liberal premier Jeff Kennett set the tone in attitudes towards public institutions when he closed 350 schools, sacked 7000 teachers and introduced a market-driven “devolved” system of school management in the 1990s that governments of both major parties have followed since.

“Victoria was the very first state where devolution happened, running schools like small businesses,” she said. “It means that each school is a little fiefdom of its own, and the fight for funding is very internal.

“Labor – federally and state – has been interested in education reform towards neoliberalism, not away from it. So things like NAPLAN, My School, that’s all part of the same devolution model and has really cemented the problem.”

Appearing in front of a state parliamentary committee examining school funding the day after the strike, Department of Education secretary Tony Bates defended Victoria’s record.

Bates argued the state had spent billions of dollars building schools, constructing 45 of the 91 schools built in Australia between 2018 and 2025.

The secretary also said that on some measures such as face-to-face teaching time or teacher-to-student ratios, Victorian educators enjoyed the best or close to the best conditions in the nation.

Bates said the pay gaps between teachers across the border had emerged because their enterprise bargaining agreements were “out of kilter” with those states’ more recent agreements.

“You get different timing of new agreements,” Bates said.

“So again, if we go back to after the last agreement was implemented, we were the best paid. Our principals are still the best paid in the country.”

Trevor Cobbold, of the campaign group Save Our Schools, has been analysing public school funding around Australia for decades and agrees that the present crisis has deep roots, with successive Labor and Liberal governments sharing the blame.

“In the last couple of years of the Brumby [Labor] government, funding per student was actually cut in real terms,” Cobbold said on Friday.

“Then the Baillieu and Napthine [Liberal] governments continued to cut funding in real terms to public schools. And to their credit, the new Labor government in 2014 started to increase funding rather than cut funding, but it’s been a very, very slow process. It’s nearly 12 years of the Labor government, and we’re still in the position where Victoria is a national laggard funding education.”

Cobbold also noted Tuesday’s strike should have come as no surprise, saying, “I’m surprised it hasn’t happened earlier.”

With the union’s leadership threatening more strikes and disruptions unless the government offer significantly improves, Honan warned the mood among rank-and-file teachers remained militant.

“I worried that [the strike] would be a one-and-done, but it’s only lifted the lid on the rage,” she said. “The expectation is that there will be more … people want to do more.”

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