Mrs SALLY QUINNELL (Camden) (12:20): My question is addressed to the Deputy Premier and Minister for Education and Early Learning. Will the Deputy Premier update the House on actions taken by the New South Wales Government to support teachers in delivering free, quality education for our families?

Ms PRUE CAR (Londonderry—Deputy Premier, Minister for Education and Early Learning, and Minister for Western Sydney) (12:20): I thank the member for Camden, a former teacher, for that great question. That is how to ask a question in this House. It is somewhat intimidating to answer a question after the answer given by the influencer of the New South Wales Parliament, but I will attempt to do so. First, I say hello to visitors in the public gallery, from Colo High School, and thank them for coming in. Today is probably the first time we have had a debate about TikTok. That is not very common at all.

When it comes to improving outcomes for students right across New South Wales, one of the most important things, if not the single biggest priority for our Government, in lifting these outcomes is, of course, the teachers in front of those wonderful students. To deliver that high-quality, free public education, as we ask our wonderful expert teachers to do, we as a government—and we made it very clear that this will be our priority—really need to tackle the issue of the workload burden on our teachers in all of our schools in all sectors across New South Wales so that we can get our teachers focused on their expert practice, their core responsibility, which is teaching and learning in the classroom. They have been overwhelmed with administrative work.

We are working our way through that, line by line, and conducting a policy audit. We have found more than 300 policies, and any teacher listening to this will think, "I can't believe it's only 300." So many policies have been added to our teachers' workload, and so they are leaving in droves. We have also slowed down the rollout of the new curriculum so that, in a time of teacher shortage, we can get our teachers to focus on delivering the new curriculum in a way that does not jeopardise student outcomes or quality. The previous Government made it so rushed. We are now going through a review of tasks—

The SPEAKER: The member for Port Macquarie will come to order.

Ms PRUE CAR: —that every teacher at every school must do, and there are hundreds and hundreds of them as well. We have put more than 400 admin support staff members in our schools to assist our teachers with the day-to-day admin tasks that really do not have to be done by our expert teachers day by day. [Extension of time]

We scrapped the previous Government's disastrous student behaviour policy, which saw teachers and principals unable to deal with persistent misbehaviour. Whilst we do not want to talk down our system, we must be clear that that is a problem in our classrooms, and one of the most important things that teachers, principals and deputy principals need to be armed with is the toolkit to deal with misbehaviour so that it is cut off at the pass and children can learn in safe and productive classrooms and our teachers can work in safe and productive environments as well. We are doing everything possible through the NSW Education Standards Authority, the regulatory authority in charge of the curriculum and accreditation, to make it easier for teachers to do professional development, be accredited and continue their accreditation to make sure that that admin burden is not seeing our teachers leave in droves.

When we came to government, we saw a teacher exodus like we have never seen in the public school system, thanks to the behaviour of those opposite. Admin burden, underpayment and the undervaluing of teachers resulted in people resigning before they were due to retire and vacancies in excess of 3,000. We are rolling out all those changes in our public schools because we as a government are committed to listening to the educators, to listening to the profession that starts all others, in our classrooms. It would really do the Opposition well to listen to teachers in our classrooms, because teachers are saying that they are happy to have a government that is finally valuing them, and we are building the schools and putting teachers inside them.

The SPEAKER: Opposition members will come to order.