Treasure this - teachers offer twice the passion for half the pay

Hello Mike,

I write to you in despair as a result of the 2.5 per cent public sector wage freeze policy announced by the government.

Teaching these last two terms has been particularly difficult. I arrive at school at 7.15am and prepare my resources for the day. Once the bell goes at 8.55am there is literally no break until 3pm. Recess and lunch are usually spent with students to catch up on work missed, detentions, reports on classroom incidents, committee meetings or supervision duty. Monday afternoons I spend with students at ''homework club''. The rest of the week, between 3pm-5pm, I write lesson plans and prepare resources. If I have any marking, I generally take it home with me.

Last term, I spent four weeks in my own time with my head teacher applying for a $20,000 grant from the federal government to introduce Asian Studies into our curriculum. We would often leave the staffroom at 7pm and go home to complete the rest.

If I take a ''sick'' day it is usually to complete marking at the end of exam periods as I physically do not have any time left in my day.

I am not special. I am not asking for a pat on the back. This is my job and I enjoy doing it but I do not know how much longer I can continue like this. I have worked in the private sector, in human resources at Bayer and in hotel management, so I have experience in other industries but I have never worked harder than I do now. I am 36 and have been teaching for seven years. I can either go for promotion or move back into the private sector and get paid twice as much for a job which is half as hard, but half as fulfilling.

I do not know any area of my job where I could improve my productivity or achieve ''cost savings''. I am proficient in all areas of information technology, I run video workshops for students, I help them design websites, I train a girls' touch football team at lunchtimes, I am involved in the school's upcoming drama production, I attend all school fund-raiser evenings to raise pathetically small amounts of money, I am undertaking a degree by correspondence and I complete all of the tasks mentioned earlier.

The NSW government loses millions of dollars each year through a corrupted tender system that uses ''preferred suppliers''. Once listed, these suppliers increase their prices and schools have no choice but to purchase equipment at inflated costs. When builders or plumbers do a job for a school, there is no foreman or competent workplace supervisor on site and they often over-quote and complete unnecessary work.

Tradespeople arrive in the morning at a school then leave, complete other work, and charge for a whole day. I recently applied to buy three data projectors and three personal computers. The quote from the preferred supplier was $1400 more than market value. These are small anecdotes but if you multiply them by every state school in NSW these costs start to add up.