by a Victorian teacher

When thousands of Victorian public school teachers stop work on March 24th 2026, the media will reduce the event to a dispute about pay and conditions. To understand this merely as an industrial action concerning enterprise bargaining agreements is to miss its deeper significance. This strike is fundamentally about the role of teaching itself – whether it will be treated as technical labour to be managed and measured, or defended as an intellectual, ethical, and political practice essential to democratic life.

The Practical Philosophy of Teaching

Teaching is a practical undertaking. Those in education are called to make numerous decisions: from policy implementation and curriculum delivery, to determining when to intervene in disagreements between students on the playground. Notoriously, teachers find their work very exhausting, and that exhaustion is more emotional than it is physical. It would not be surprising if much of the exhaustion arises from the continual demand for on-the-spot decisions about a wide array of matters. 

Throughout the day, teachers draw from their professional knowledge and understanding of learners to make informed decisions within contexts that are dynamic and ever-changing. Staffroom conversations spend hours deliberating the most effective approaches to the challenge of deciding. In these conversations, teachers collectively reason through practical, ethical, and pedagogical decisions, so that the decisions which are made may best support both student learning and the broader functioning of the school. A good teacher, even if they believe they are drawing solely on experience when engaging in decision-making, is in fact operating at an ontological level in the sense that they are constantly interrogating what counts as knowledge, what merits as a valid learning experience, and how ethical and pedagogical principles can be used to guide action. Every decision made reflects implicit beliefs about the very purpose and function of education, meaning that practical decisions are inseparable from underlying theoretical and moral frameworks.

Education Within Broader Social and Economic Forces

Concurrently, teaching does not occur in isolation from broader social and economic forces. Our education system is bound up in cycles of reproduction shaped by cultural and political contexts. Market forces, for example, have not only transformed spheres of production and consumption but have also influenced our understandings of material certainty, autonomy, and individual choice. These shifts extend to our ontological perceptions of the purpose and function of education itself. Within these conditions, children are perhaps the most notorious subjects affected by present cultural mechanisms. However, it is important not to neglect the enormity of what teachers too experience, felt through expanding demands for accountability and performance measures, which can constrain professional autonomy and shape how teaching and learning are enacted in schools.

The current moment sees the prioritisation of standardised testing, data collection, and policy requirements, reflecting a broader trend toward treating education as a measurable output. Teachers increasingly spend hours on administration that might otherwise go toward lesson planning, student support, or professional collaboration – a reallocation of time that subtly but fundamentally reshapes what teaching becomes. Seminal critical theorists such as Paulo Freire and Henry Giroux argue that teaching is not merely technical labour but an intellectual and political practice. Freire contends that education is never neutral, while Giroux positions teachers as transformative intellectuals capable of shaping democratic life. Within this framing, the everyday decisions that teachers make are not only pedagogical but ethical and political, shaping how students come to understand knowledge, power and their developing position within society. When a system underpays educators and underfunds schools, it undermines the very conditions for meaningful, emancipatory education and reinforces inequitable power relations.

As the educational philosopher Gert Biesta reminds us, education is not merely about qualification and socialisation, rather it is fundamentally about subjectification: the process by which students become autonomous subjects. Yet subjectification cannot thrive in under-resourced schools where teachers lack the capacity to respond to students as individuals. When a system refuses to fund the conditions for adequate teaching, it communicates with students, implicitly but unmistakably, that their emergence as subjects does not matter.

The Coming Industrial Action

The AEU has planned for state-wide strikes to begin on the 24th of March 2026 for Victorian public-school staff. This must be understood as something greater than an industrial dispute. Educators are pushing back against structures that commodify education, have sought to devalue professional knowledge and treat teachers as interchangeable labour rather than as intellectual practitioners.

Victoria’s public school staff are among the lowest paid in the country. Recent data projects Victorian teachers can be $15,359 worse off than their counterparts in NSW. Teacher retention continues to intensify, workloads are increasingly unsustainable and many schools are struggling to maintain infrastructure. Experienced educators are leaving in unprecedented numbers, where studies estimate up to 50% of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years. Those who remain report regular fifty to sixty-hour work weeks, with mounting administrative demands crowding out time for lesson planning and student support. Meanwhile, student needs in areas such as mental health, disability support, and socioeconomic disadvantage continue to grow, yet the resources to address them have not kept pace.

The strike centres on demands that together articulate a vision of what publicly funded education could become:

·       Funding public schooling to 100% of the School Resource Standard (SRS)

·       Increased pay

·       Workforce retention strategies; support, bonuses, reduced workloads, ES staff

·       Limiting administration, data reporting

·       Smaller class sizes (especially in the instance of students with special needs)

·       Ongoing upgrade of school facilities

·       Further support for aboriginal students and families

The escalating media and government struggle against teachers and the unions has seen multiple types of arguments and tactics. Such tactics are damaging and engage in the devaluing rhetoric towards teachers, which the profession is specifically combating. Education Minister Ben Carroll has urged the union to “prioritise dialogue over disruption,” where he invokes the image of empty classrooms and impeded learning. The framing deflects attention from the disruption occurring daily in under-resourced schools. The Labor government had eight months to negotiate in good faith and chose to delay until days before a strike vote. Having created the conditions that make strike action inevitable, the state now positions itself as the defender of children’s education, using students’ wellbeing as a shield against accountability for its own failures.

This case has only grown more urgent in recent days. On March 16th, after keeping public school staff hanging for eight months, the Government delivered a petty offer that was immediately rejected by the union. The proposal, which the government frames as worth 18.5 per cent including allowances, would deliver 8 per cent for teachers and just 4 per cent for education support staff from April, followed by 3 per cent annually. The union, which has been seeking 35 per cent, described it as “completely unacceptable”, not only because it would leave Victorian teachers more than 13 per cent behind their NSW counterparts by October, but because it fails entirely to address the excessive workloads, unpaid overtime, and staff shortages driving the crisis. This is the very content that the profession is seeking to mediate in order to resolve the teaching crisis and speaks volumes to the inability of the state to reconcile the contradiction and strike a deal. With 98 per cent of AEU members having voted to strike, and negotiations having produced no progress on conditions, the message could not be clearer. The education minister has called the offer “compelling” and “significant,” but as AEU branch president Justin Mullaly observed, teachers have been left with little choice. When they walk out on March 24th for the first time in 13 years, they do so not as a first resort but as a last response to a government that had eight months to craft a different outcome, and instead delivered an offer that makes the case for striking stronger than ever.

In this sense, the action is a collective assertion that teaching must be valued not solely in an economistic lens, but in its relevancy to sociality and democracy. When educators are supported to engage in the profession in a greater capacity, the quality and equity of education for all students is strengthened. On March 24th, Victorian teachers will stop work to defend the conditions that make teaching possible. In doing so, they defend something larger: the position that every child deserves a quality education, delivered by professionals whose expertise is respected and whose work is properly resourced.