When a local teacher told me she received a Kit-Kat from the principal as payment for a night of parent-teacher interviews, I’d had a gutful. Like stealing free grapes at the supermarket, we have taken for granted the hours that teachers do on top of the 5.5 hours a day that they are paid. Teaching is Australia’s most poorly paid profession and it’s at the heart of why Australian school outcomes are in trouble.

Teacher salaries peak less than nine years after graduation.

Teacher salaries peak less than nine years after graduation. Their working days are impossibly cluttered. Irrelevant tasks like playground and bus duty are stacked on top of social work and behavioural management, simply to avoid Australia having to pay others to fill those roles.

Teachers haul their unfinished work home, killing their personal lives and wiping out time for postgraduate education that should lead to promotion and pay rises. Long after nursing reformed their promotional and professional structures to survive against medicine and allied health, teaching remains where it was nearly a century ago.

My call to pay teachers for every hour they work was misrepresented by vested interests as an attack on the profession. It wasn’t. Much of the magic of teaching lies where it is least expected: quiet counsel under a tree, the excursions that open minds and the extra-curricular pursuits. I want teachers paid for these additional hours, including overtime, because what isn’t paid is ultimately taken for granted.