Hunter's Catholic schools increase COVID-safe measures

Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle Director of Catholic Schools Gerard Mowbray said schools would introduce "additional layers" on top of baseline settings this term, including strongly encouraging all staff, students and visitors to wear a mask indoors especially for the next four weeks; distributing rapid antigen tests and boosting day cleaning, focusing on high-touch areas.

Independent Education Union NSW/ACT branch Newcastle organiser Therese Fitzgibbon said teachers' feelings about returning to classrooms amidst another wave of cases and the flu varied.

"There is apathy amongst some and real concern amongst others," Ms Fitzgibbon said.

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"I think teachers that are vulnerable are anxious and I think those teachers would like to see increasing requirements around mask wearing and cleaning and sanitising and so on, but again, as has been the case for most of the year, I think that is a subset of teachers, rather than the broader view.

"I think most teachers are managing it within their classrooms, they're making sure they put their own processes in place to protect students, particularly vulnerable students.

"Where we have a member that is feeling unsafe or feels that insufficient processes have been put in place to prevent against the spread of COVID or flu we'd certainly be advocating in that school that they should be placing higher priority on those protection activities."

Ms Fitzgibbon said she wrote to the diocese on Tuesday about limiting large gatherings such as staff meetings, keeping students in cohorts, reverting to video calls for parent teacher interviews and doing risk assessments for mass school assemblies.

She said a recommendation to wear a mask was not enforceable.

"If you want to enforce masks you need to mandate it and I don't think any system is going to mandate it when the NSW government hasn't mandated it," she said.

Schools must be COVID-safe environments, she said, because the virus, along with non-competitive pay and unsustainable workloads, was exacerbating staff shortages.

She said she wrote to the diocese last term about pausing professional learning and it had agreed.

"It has the effect of both keeping teachers in the classroom which addresses teacher shortage, but it also has the dual effect of keeping teachers away from mass meetings where one person has COVID and all the kinder teachers come together for a kinder professional development day and then all those teachers go back to every single school and you've got spread."

The Department of Education is also scaling up COVID-safe measures.

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