HUNTER representatives for the two teachers' unions have labelled Premier Dominic Perrottet's floating of performance pay as a "distraction", ahead of a historic joint meeting that could lead to further industrial action.
The Independent Education Union of Australia NSW/ACT branch and the NSW Teachers Federation will meet on Tuesday to consider any pay offers the state government makes in the NSW budget - and that Catholic employers pass on - and determine an appropriate course of action.
IEU NSW/ACT Newcastle organiser Therese Fitzgibbon said the stakes were high.
"Unless there is some sort of significant announcement in relation to teachers' pay and teacher shortages that goes well beyond what they've released so far, there is a high likelihood that we will move very rapidly to joint action," she said.
"It's been at least a quarter of a century [since that happened], so it's a significant shift and indicative of just how dire the situation is that we're contemplating this action."
The government's new two-year wages policy will give public sector workers a three per cent increase per annum in 2022-23 and 2023-24, with a possible further 0.5 per cent next year for those who contribute to 'productivity enhancing reforms'.
Teachers want annual increases of between five and 7.5 per cent.
"I don't think you can get higher levels of productivity at the moment than teachers taking two classes at a time," Ms Fitzgibbon said. "Do they want them to work the 2am to 4am shift? Because that is about all there is left."
Federation regional organiser Jack Galvin Waight said the policy was "insulting" and "well below inflation".
"Of equal importance, [it] completely ignored unsustainable teacher workloads," he said.
Mr Perrottet is reported to be considering the introduction of performance pay for teachers, but the unions said this does nothing to address the teacher shortage caused by non-competitive salaries and unsustainable workloads.
Ms Fitzgibbon said performance was "extraordinarily difficult [to] measure in education".
"Are you measuring student performance, are you looking at how much a teacher improves learning outcomes?" she asked.
"If that's the case all sorts of factors come into play in relation to the capacity of the student cohort, how do you measure performance of a teacher working in a special needs environment?
"Schools are collaborative workplaces... how do you extract individual performance from what are often collective achievements?"
Even teachers who need to demonstrate they have met standards in order to be paid as a highly accomplished or lead teacher find the process "so arduous that teachers just don't have the time to apply for it", she said.
"We know this is a distraction from what the real issue is, and that is teacher shortage. There are no teachers available."
Ms Fitzgibbon said the union had recently spoken to the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle about encouraging teachers in the Catholic Schools Office to return to classrooms, as well as about "pulling back on" professional development and performance analysis because it took teachers away from students.
She said the union had also spoken to the diocese about engaging casual teachers on longer term contracts to attract them to schools and to the sector.
Mr Galvin Waight said the Premier's comments were "hollow and deliberately designed to distract attention away" from the issues leading to shortages.
"The government's own documents show that it is these issues that are crippling our schools and leading to a profession in crisis," he said.
"Performance pay has been discredited by international research repeatedly.
"It is impossible to quantify success in a classroom because there are so many elements involved, and there is simply no evidence that it works."
