Every day, ES staff work to keep our schools running, support our students to learn, and our teachers to teach. Their work is diverse, complex, and vital, but it is undervalued. The salaries of Education Support workers in public schools do not match their contribution. Too many ES are considering leaving the profession and will continue to do so unless the Premier and Education Minister act now. It’s about time our ES staff were paid properly for the important work they do.

Urgent vaccination of education staff is essential for their protection as well as the protection of students and their communities. It will also reduce the need in future to move to remote learning, which is so disruptive for students and parents. Most importantly, it is a key public safety measure to slow the spread of future outbreaks. Childcare, kinder and pre-school workers are, in many cases, continuing to work in very high-contact workplaces even when schools and TAFEs move to remote learning. The slow pace of the vaccine rollout, the lack of supply of vaccines and the failure to heed the call to prioritise education workers is putting staff, students and the broader community at risk.

In the midst of the COVID crisis and its effects on universities’ finances and the pressures on many universities to cut jobs we can only hope that a broad public interest lens is applied to universities future rather than a simple cost reduction lens.

The Covid-19 situation in NSW is extremely concerning. Once again, the failure to build proper, dedicated quarantine facilities has resulted in a serious local outbreak, this time of the incredibly contagious Delta strain. Vaccination rates remain woefully low. The NSW Government has acted far too slowly and half-heartedly in relation to the current outbreak. Nobody enjoys lockdowns, but the failure to enact a serious lockdown soon enough has let this outbreak grow, and now means that the lockdown must be extended and strengthened. Allowing the virus to spread would be a health disaster, not just for NSW but for all Australia.

This has been part of a broader trend of universities outsourcing the provision of services to external companies at a lower cost, usually involving an attack on workers’ wages and conditions. With the potential collapse of the Co-op imminent, it’s possible that its ANU clinic will be taken over by another external company. This is no solution for staff or patients. Despite being a registered charity, the Co-op has had to compete with private billing clinics. It’s inability to do so is what has thrown the future of its staff and the patients who rely on its services up in the air. Unless the ANU steps in to run the service directly there’s nothing to stop this from happening again. Seeing a doctor is already more expensive in Canberra than almost anywhere else in Australia. Canberra has the lowest bulk-billing rate of any electorate in the country, with only 32% of patients having their GP appointments bulk-billed - well below the national average of 86.2%. Canberrans also pay higher out-of-pocket costs at mixed-billing clinics. Free, accessible healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. Let’s end the outsourcing of vital university services.

Many people believe that these test results DO NOT represent our ability to teach, in education there are far more important factors to be an effective teacher such as behaviour management, relationship building, resilience, organisation, passion, judgments and drive. There are also flaws in this test. With the majority of questions being multiple choice it has been heard of that students will sit it for 30 minutes, guess the answers then receive their results to find that they have passed. Whereas students and myself who have achieved HDs in their assessments, and have passed exams, may fail this test. Therefore achieving nothing and leading to a low sense of worth!

This is extremely important to all Australians as not only could Neale pass away at any moment but also because of the countless hours he puts into raising money, helping with research, hosting, organising and attending events as well as helping others despite raising over $50 million dollars for Motor Neurone Disease (MND) and suffering with it himself which is currently in the last and worse stage of the heart breaking condition not to mention the other stuff he has done outside of his campaigning and the football career he has had, therefore this man deserves no less than to be awarded the Companion of the order of Australia immediately.

Dr Jan Bryant has been teaching in Monash's Art, Design and Architecture faculty for 11 years. In that time she's taught thousands of students, supervised dozens of PhDs and published books, papers and essays. For all of those eleven years, Jan has been employed on short-term contracts. Now Monash is letting her go. To add insult to insecurity, Monash University advertised a job for Jan's exact role, and Jan applied. Monash then told her she wasn't good enough for the role. No-one got the job. Jan is the unwilling face of workplace insecurity in Australian higher education. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 17,000 university workers have lost their jobs. Monash University's Art, Design and Architecture faculty is in crisis. Several employees have resigned due to workplace bullying. Now MADA has engineered the departure of a popular teacher. The NTEU asked the Dean of the Faculty, Professor Shane Murray, to meet with us. He refused. Jan is a beloved teacher at Monash University. As a result of this decison, many of her PhD students will be left in the lurch. Jan says: "I've struggled with 11 years of insecure work, but through that time have worked hard, and been dedicated to my teaching and research, only to discover that my contract is not being renewed." "I face a precarious future." Jan deserves job security, and her students deserve to keep their teacher. Every employee at Monash University deserve secure employment.

Australian Services Union members throughout South Australia provide crucial library services to our local communities but State Government funding for our libraries runs out on June 30. If Premier Steven Marshall cuts funding to our libraries, local communities will lose access to: books, access to computers and community activities for new mums, the elderly and the wider community. Approximately 80% of the library workforce are women. Cuts to library funding will mean cuts to jobs when South Australia is facing the highest unemployment rate in the country. We need your support to save our libraries.

Macquarie Students Against Uni Cuts have been informed by staff of the uni's plans to increase the late assignment penalty for Arts in Semester 2, an increase from a 2% to a 10% deduction per day! After countless cuts, restructures and sackings, the Macquarie's management are already looking for new ways to turn our university into a degree factory. This is made worse considering the Liberals 2020 education bill, which states that any first year student who fails 50% of their courses will be kicked off HECS! The overwhelming majority of domestic students rely entirely on the HECS system to study, so many students would be kicked out of their studies for financial reasons. Student life is already stressful, with most students having to balance their studies with part-time work. In the middle of a global pandemic and economic recession, this attack is absolutely shameful. Attacks such as these will hurt the people who are already the most disadvantaged, particularly LGBTI+ people, working class women, Indigenous Australians and other oppressed minorities. Amy Lamont MQ Students Against Uni Cuts

A good apprenticeship provides all the tools you need to get started in a trade, setting you on the path to a rewarding career. But these days, some apprenticeships can be like the Wild West, with cowboy operators not properly training us, leaving us unsupervised, stealing our wages or - worst of all - putting our lives at risk by forcing us to do unsafe work. I went through a lot of this during my apprenticeship. I was excited to start my Boilermaker apprenticeship. I said to everyone; I want to fabricate things, forge things and it's going to be really cool. But during my apprenticeship I'd be working inside these barrels, no ventilation, no extraction fans, nothing. I'd have a p95 mask and I'd be in there for four hours, but within an hour the thing would be black and you couldn't breathe through it. I'd ask the boss for a new one and he would ask why I'd needed it. Often there was no one supervising me and the boss wouldn't release me and the other apprentices so we could go to Tafe. Unfortunately, my story isn't unique. It's become so bad that only half of Victorian apprentices ever finish their training. This has to stop. I'm joining forces with other apprentices and young workers to campaign for change. Sign our petition to call on the Victorian Government to fix the apprenticeship system and protect all apprentices from abuse and exploitation.

The cuts come at a time when UOW is moving many classes online in what looks to be a permanent arrangement. Meanwhile, students are being made to pay the same fees for lower quality, online degrees which often resemble tuning in to a Youtube channel. Fees for many degrees are also increasing, with Arts fees doubling.