Early childhood & education
Our schools are in crisis.
Working class kids are being let down by an education system which is underfunded and stretched to breaking point. Teachers are underpaid and burned out, forced to take on more work and plug the gaps caused by a statewide teacher shortage. Labor and Liberal governments have refused to adequately fund public schools while funnelling money into elite private schools. Public Schools across the state are increasingly overcrowded, reliant on demountables and temporary fixes to a looming infrastructure crisis.
The ‘Gonski reforms’ promised better outcomes but have instead delivered record funding to elite private schools. Sydney’s elite private schools are building luxury amenities like the eight new tennis courts at Waverley College or Cranbrook School’s $125 million sandstone building featuring an Olympic-sized swimming pool and 267-seat theatre. NSW Socialists oppose private education as a matter of principle: every child deserves a high quality of education regardless of their parents' wealth.
Running childcare and early education for profit has been a sick experiment in neglect and exploitation.
The early learning and childcare sector shows the grim reality of privatisation. Workers are grossly underpaid, children are warehoused and in the worst instances neglected and abused, while the multinational corporations that dominate the sector are raking in profit. The drive for profit drives down staying ratios, encourages cost cutting and rewards low pay which directly impacts the quality of care and education for kids.
Our education system is unfair for students, for teachers and for communities. We need a radical shift, in funding and in power, to address the crisis.
We’ll fight for
Fix the crisis in childcare & early education.
- Free publicly owned child care, five days a week.
- Bringing childcare back into public hands, run not for profit is the only solution to fix the crisis.
- Expand the network of state-run early learning and childcare centres, prioritising rollout in areas of greatest need and lowest existing service access, so that all children have access to a state-run early learning and care centre.
- Better educator-to-child ratios that are enforced by regular site inspections. Strengthen ratios by counting children who require higher care as 2 and abolishing loopholes like "under-the-roof" ratios that let centres average out staff numbers across buildings or count non-floor staff.
- Significantly raise the pay of all early educators. At a minimum an immediate 25% wage increase is needed to rectify decades of systemic gender-based undervaluation.
Increase funding for government schools.
- Grant above-inflation pay rises for teachers.
- Pay teachers and education staff for all overtime performed.
- Free school lunches for all government primary school students.
- Cease state funding to high fee private schools.
- Fund the full cost of an education including excursions, buildings, maintenance, devices and uniforms. End so-called "voluntary contributions" from parents in state schools.
- Reduce class sizes to 15 by 2030.
- Hire 10,000 thousands of additional teachers and support staff for the state’s 2,200 public schools, allocated on the basis of need including administrators, counsellors, educational psychologists, nurses, doctors, lawyers, disability workers, youth workers and social workers.
- Provide schools with the necessary specialist staff and facilities to properly cater for the needs of students with disabilities.
- Require all public schools to have a school library staffed by a qualified librarian.
- Provide additional funding for supported playgroups, parenting support programs and early language development.
- Abolish NAPLAN and performance reporting which drive social segregation in schools.