Newly-elected State School Teachers Union president Matt Jarman calls for smaller classroom sizes

Class sizes in public schools should be slashed from their “unmanageable” maximum because modern students take up more teacher attention than they used to, according to the new president of WA’s teachers’ union. In his first interview since being elected unopposed to head the State School Teachers’ Union after Pat Byrne’s retirement last month, Matt Jarman said the biggest area of concern was Years 4 to 10, where the upper limit was 32 children in a classroom. “That’s where our behaviour and disengagement is, and that’s where our violence is, so we need to really drop down to about 27 or 28,” he said. “That would be a significant workload reduction for any teacher. It would help keep people in the system, it would also do a lot for the disruption and disengagement our teachers report all the time.” Mr Jarman said the maximum size was set about 40 years ago, when a class of 32 kids was “far different” to one that teachers would see now, with many more students displaying “challenging” behaviour. “So we need to adapt to that, and one of the ways is to do something about class sizes, because it is unmanageable to deal with 32 children where five or six of them may have an imputed or recognised diagnosis,” he said. Formerly the union’s senior vice-president, he started out as a primary school teacher before he “fell into school leadership” in his early 20s. A principal for 22 years, he spent 14 years teaching and leading schools in the Wheatbelt. The most pressing issue he faces as he takes the helm is the State’s growing teacher shortage. “We’re certainly not going to have enough teachers for the start of the year,” he said. Mr Jarman said secondary schools were struggling to plug gaps as more teachers quit after Christmas, particularly in traditionally hard-to-staff subjects such as science and maths. “I think that’s a real problem,” he said. “We’ve already got an ATAR participation rate below 50 per cent, and now we don’t have subject-specific teachers — that’s not a good combination.” Violence in schools will also return to the agenda in the next year, as the Education Department reviews its policies on dealing with aggressive students and parents. Mr Jarman said more clarity was needed on applying violence restraining orders to people entering school sites. “As a school principal I banned parents under the visitors in schools policy on maybe four or five occasions, but you can only ever do it for up to 90 days and some of those issues simply come back,” he said. “Our principals need to know that if they are tackling a violent person on the grounds, they are going to get full support, they’re not going to get questioned.” Mr Jarman said more money should be used to employ staff to pick up non-teaching aspects of teachers’ workload. “We don’t need teachers to do follow up phone calls at the end of the day for attendance and behaviour — anyone can do those sorts of things,” he said. “But when the teachers are doing an hour a day at the end of a day, they’re not preparing or reviewing any of the lessons they’ve done.” Like new Education Minister Tony Buti, Mr Jarman grew up in Armadale and attended Kelmscott Senior High School. He is deeply concerned that the gap between haves and have-nots in the education system has widened since then. “We had fantastic teachers, and there are still fantastic teachers in all of our public schools,” he said. “It’s just that we’re losing them at a ridiculous and alarming rate — and we’re losing them because of things we can control, primarily things like workload and external factors we could do something about. “Just having teachers recognised as being the experts in their field, that’s my three-year goal. Once we get back to that, so many other things flow.”