Class and Education: An Interview With Dan Hogan
Giacomo Bianchino
20/08/2021
Dan Hogan is a radical educator and award-winning poet originally from San Remo on the Central Coast. They are now based in Sydney, where they teach across the public school system. When not teaching, they also run Subbed In - an independent poetry publishing group. They also write for a range of publications on issues of education and class. In this interview, Dan gives fascinating insights into the world of precarious work, the class divide between schools that is passed on in terms of standards and expectations. They also trace the historic development of the current unjust situation that shapes the lives of working class students.
GB: How long have you been a teacher?
Yeah, so been a teacher since 2012, if I count with my fingers that’s 9 years. After I finished in Melbourne, I actually finished my degree and moved straight to the UK actually. They used to do cheap flights from Melbourne to London- got a 900-dollar flight, moved there, and got a teaching gig there because I love to suffer. I worked there for two years and then came back to Sydney. So I’ve been technically teaching in Sydney since 2014.
GB: On what basis are you working as a teacher in Sydney now?
My employment status has chopped and changed since 2014. When I was a casual, I set up with an agency and they would throw work at me and I would go wherever- as long as it was on the train line. Then I got some temporary contracts, and that’s what most teachers are on if they’re working full-time. I started in July or August and they said, “here’s a temporary contract until the end of the year, ‘til December.” So they’d say at the end of every school year “we’ll let you know in the holidays if we’re gonna get you back next year.” I was on that for a while, but got burned out and sick of it, so I went back to casual- that’s where I’ve been ever since. I’ve done a few temp contracts since, but not ones that are for a whole year- just for a term.
GB: What are the differences between casual, temporary and permanent contracting as a teacher? How do you go about getting work?
So as a casual, you have to hustle your own work. So, I’m a teacher, I’m qualified, I’ve done all me own paperwork and I can go and teach. So I download the app [Class Cover], but I have to approach schools myself to ask them, basically “add me on the app please - here’s my CV and my information.” So, when I first started teaching, the expectation was just to go physically around schools and drop off your resumé - which I didn’t do, and which is why I signed up with an agency. They’d have schools on their list, so they’d just send me there. But now I’m a casual I don’t do it through the agency I do it through the app. I’ve taught at a few schools … who prefer to text me or leave a voicemail, rather than use the app. So that’s sort of it - but I’ve worked to the point that I’ve got a lot of schools on my app now which is a kind of job security just because of how probability works: the more schools I’ve got on my app, the more likely I am to get a gig. But the schools can make it as biased or unbiased as they want - they can categorise, make their own lists, whatever. So, in the day to day, it’s a matter of getting a notification on an app, racing to accept it (cause a lot of other teachers are racing to accept it as well) and hoping you were the first to accept.
GB: What was it about the temp contract work that you found so exhausting that you would go to casual work that, to my mind, would be just as exhausting?
The pros of temp work compared to casual work are a little more job security - so you know when you sign the contract for that period that you work five days a week. You do the exact same job in your labour as a permanent teacher, but you have security for the duration of that contract. With that comes pro-rata sick leave and stuff. But your pay rate is that of a full-time teacher. The con of casual is that it’s precarious; you don’t get sick leave and whatever. But the pay-rate is a lot better, and the hours are a lot better. So you’re doing all this work as a temp getting a sub-standard pay compared to the hours your putting in. And it just consumes your whole life. With casual, you don’t have homework. You start at the same time every day, and you leave and that’s it. So, it was sort of like, do I cop the precarity for a better work-life balance, or do I just have no work-life balance for the security, but less pay. What I’ve found- and this only works in cities like Sydney that are so densely populated and have so many schools - I’ve got security cause there’s more work than there is casual teachers. What I found with the temp thing is that it’s super exploitative. You might be a temp, but you are trying to impress the boss to get permanency. The permanency never comes. But it’s always the temps that are taking on extra jobs, giving up their lunchtime to coach summer teams, do gardening clubs, whatever. While the permanent teachers, once they get it, they’re like “that’s just what the temps do to bump up their CV.”
GB: What is the situation with public schools in Sydney and Australia in terms of worker organisation?
Teachers are super well-organised. That’s one thing that I really liked about coming back to Australia. Culturally, public school teachers are very pro-union. You’re an outlier if you’re not pro-union, in the schools I’ve worked in anyway, which I think is pretty great. In terms of casuals there is a low density of casual membership, I think, and the union does have a challenge to recruit casual members as well as full-time. There’s also a problem with retention- when teachers decide to go back to casual, for whatever reason … they’re like “well, I’m a casual and the union doesn’t represent me now.” And that’s untrue. I’m the union’s propaganda machine in the lunchroom because when someone’s a casual I’m like “No, no, you should join the union ‘cause when I’ve been a casual, they’ve helped me, and this is how they’ve helped me”, and I’ll give examples. When I was teaching as a casual at one school, I had a problem with re-signing the contract, so I went straight to the union - the NSW Teachers’ Federation (which is part of AEU - or is the AEU but has retained its historical name). So, I went there and told them my situation and it was a no-brainer for them. Straight away they were like “well, tell me more about it. We want to know more about it, cause it’s obviously important and it’s probably happening to other people so tell us.” So they intervened, and I got my temp contract for the next year.
GB: In some of your published works, you have spoken about the material under-resourcing of public schools in Australia and particularly in Sydney, and the burden this imposes on teachers. So what is it, in net terms, that public school kids don’t have access to that kids at wealthier schools do?
It starts with having a pencil to write with. My biggest struggle when I’ve been casual teaching, full time or even temp contract is, like, having a fucking lead pencil that a seven or eight-year-old can write with. Then we move to technology, the biggest thing - the biggest chasmic difference between private and public. And because I’ve worked in lots and lots of schools, even between public schools it is wildly different. Because the state has localised- no, atomised - their responsibility by lumping it onto principals. There’s this policy called “Local Schools, Local Decisions”[1]. The department of education dresses it up as something cool like “we’re not going to dictate to you what you can and can’t do.” But what it really means is that you are at the mercy of one person. One person- usually a man - the principal. So if they’re a Luddite, they might not want to update the technology. Then the laptops are wildly different form school to school. I have never, ever, been in a situation where there are enough laptops for every student in a public school. And then, when we manage to get enough devices for a whole class, by borrowing from other grades, swapping some out for others that work, getting kids to use my computer out the front; by the time you’ve done all that, you’ve lost an hour.
GB: These deficiencies, then, are in the actual material resourcing of schools - who picks up this slack?
This is where it gets even more fucked, and why I went back to casual. In my last year as a temp, I went to this thing called L3: an offsite Professional Development course I had to do all term. They had a retired teacher who now worked for the department full-time, with a PowerPoint, showing us furniture and stuff we could get. She was regaling the room with stories about how, when she was teaching, she’d get down to Ikea at Tempe before it opened on a Sunday, get really cheap desks that do this or that, with her own money. So that’s anecdotal, but it’s an example of who pays for it. I mean, in the end, I end up buying pencils and stuff like that.
GB: How do you think these factors impact the development of kids, and do you think in this setting that students are able to develop academically and creatively?
Yes - my answer is yes. My answer to your question is part of why I love teaching. It’s got that DIY spirit about it, and that’s what I came from - a public-school background. Some kids are very resourceful because they have to be- they have no choice. That’s not me teaching it to them - they’ve had no choice to develop it. On top of that, the teachers also have no choice but to develop that. So inadvertently, there’s definitely opportunities to develop or foster creativity there.
GB: Given your experiences in education, what would you say to someone who said that classes didn’t exist in this country?
I’d say they’re full of shit - but I’d challenge it in a hopefully eloquent way. But that’s the thing - Australians think that this is some classless thing, but whenever I’ve come across that I’ve found that people just describe class in a different way. And often it’s working class people that you’re talking to about that who have been fed the Kool-Aid that “you work hard enough; you lick enough boots and you can get there.”
GB: In building on that, how would you say the education system participates in the reproduction of this class system?
A friend with pre-school aged kids asked me recently “would you send your kids to a public school? Because you always go on about how fucked they are.” And they’re a working-class family. I was surprised. Cause I’d never thought about it from that perspective. So I was like, “Yeah send them to a public-school cause fuck private schools”, though I didn’t really have an answer. But I went back, and I thought about it and what it comes back to is that they’ll still get an education, even if we go on about resources and stuff. But they’ll learn that resourcefulness and get a more rounded and more realistic education. Like the more fancy a private school, not just the cheapo Catholic schools, but the real independent schools that cost $25 000 a year to go, like that’s a whole other world. Talk about the pipeline - they’re the people that end up being politicians and people are like “Why would you do this or that? What world are you from?”
GB: The irony of the situation is that the world that those private school kids are getting taught to live in does exist - it’s the real class-world of the bourgeoisie in Australia. So which world are you taught to live in by each school system?
That is absolutely the question. My two-pronged answer to that is that when I was at school, I was taught to live in a working-class world. I was coming first in subjects at the cheapo Catholic school and they’re still trying to make me go to TAFE. I was like, I want to go to uni! Why would you make your best student in English not want to go to university? But they know that your parents are from San Remo - you get the “7” bus or whatever it was. But then the world I teach in … teachers are realising that kids can go to university. Like when you ask a kid what they want to do they say “I’ll probably just work at my dad’s shop” or “my dad does this and I’ll follow him” or “my mum” or “my cousin” - essentially “I’ll do something my close family member does”. And I think the difference between my own experience of primary school and the world I teach in now is that culturally it’s different. I was raised and taught by working class teachers, and they were brilliant, but they were still pushing that falsity of “stay in your lane” or “work yourself crazy’"or “do something exceptional” whereas now it’s more realistic. If you’re a teacher that does that, it really sticks out. You have to be realistic and authentic with kids these days.
GB: So how do you, as a teacher, try to buck that trend? Like how do you try to subvert that?
So it’s an ongoing practice of reflection. I’m always thinking about that and trying stuff and reading stuff. And not necessarily stuff that is just ‘teaching in a radical way”, reading other things but relating it back to my context walking into the classroom every day. Schools operate in very similar ways to prisons, I think. The way the students are managed - it’s not great. So what I do with that knowledge is to try and catch myself and stop myself reinforcing that. There are a lot of rules in primary schools around respectability politics. There’s this real thing that kids must respect you. And what they mean by respect is actually more like worship, in a very authoritarian dictatorship weird way. I want the kids in my class to do great things because they want to do it; not because if they don’t, they’ll get in trouble.
GB: The proportion of private and Catholic to public schools in NSW seems to be uniquely large in the Australian context. Do you know anything about the history of this development?
I’m definitely not an expert, and this is interesting, but what I do know is that the first public schools in Australia were in the colony of New South Wales. Interestingly, it was born out of the Irish wanting free education, basically. Saying “you’ve removed us from our land, sent us over here, we’re having all these kids and you want us to build everything, but you’re not going to give us a school for our kids to go to?”. So, what they did was basically copy and paste the “Irish National System.” And they called it that- said “we’re going to adopt the Irish National System”- which is public schooling, to put it in a very straight way. Which is interesting to me, because of how anti-Irish the colony was. So even after they implemented that, there was a lot of pushback from denominational schools and, for example, Anglican schools who were like “no, that’s how we get money. You’re going to take our students away and that’s how we get money.” But the agreement they came to with the government, the colony of NSW government (which is now just the government of NSW), was “well you can do that, but you’ve gotta subsidise us - you’ve gotta give us some money as well.” Which happens right up to this day. So, these schools say they’re private but they’re not- they’re majority-funded by the taxpayer.
GB: So that’s something specific to the NSW colony?
Yes, it’s specific to NSW, but it also informed the federation. So now the Federal Government is the number-one funder of all private and independent schools, be they in the Catholic system or independent, denominational and non-denominational. Before that the colonies and the actual communities funded the schools. But that’s where it started, and now it’s done federally. But the Federal Education Department doesn’t touch public schools. Why they exist is to subsidise the Catholic schools and the independent schools. It’s the reason why the education system has never been nationalised, cause they were all already established to a high level of bureaucracy before Federation. Then it went through different iterations - that was in the late 1840s, and then by 1880, the anti-Irish and anti-Indigenous sentiment amongst the white settlers got to the point where two things happened: they were like “my kids are going to school with these Irish kids and these Aboriginal kids? I don’t want that!”. And so, two things happened - they created Aboriginal schools and segregated it. And with the Irish they didn’t segregate it, but they subsidised the Catholic schools more in the hope that they would go and be with their own kind in the Catholic system. That survives up until this day. But interestingly, and I’m a primary school teacher, school was only primary school. There wasn’t pre-school and there wasn’t high school. High School didn’t really become a thing until after WWI, I think, and even then it was that you went there for a couple years and then you went and got a job when you were 13 or 14. But secondary school developed around the material needs of the colony and the social-cultural aspects. So, after WWI, this white nationalist mentality among Australians led to them wanting to integrate the Irish, and they started to build the high school system around that.
References:
[1] The “Local Schools, Local Decisions” initiative was replaced with the “School Success” Model in December of 2020- https://news.nswtf.org.au/blog/news/2020/12/school-success-model-replaces-local-schools-local-decisions-name-only