Amid chaos, with construction workers protesting against mandatory vaccines, Victorian teachers and childcare workers are the latest sector facing compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations before they return to work next month.
Government school staff will be entitled to a half-day of paid time off in order to attend a vaccination appointment in order to make the 29 November deadline.
Victoria’s Deputy Premier James Merlino announced on Wednesday that all staff at schools and childcare centres will need to have their first vaccination by 18 October or have a booking within a week of that date, adding that a survey of 33,000 teachers had found that 75 per cent were already fully vaccinated.
“Anyone who works on-site at schools or early childhood settings, they will not be able to work on site if they are not vaccinated,” Mr Merlino said.
In NSW, such a mandate is already in effect and all school and preschool staff are required to be fully vaccinated from 8 November this year.
The President of the NSW Teachers Federation, Angelo Gavrielatos, told Neos Kosmos that the union supports the mandate.
“We strongly encourage all teachers to be vaccinated and have been doing so consistently throughout this second wave whilst also seeking the prioritisation of teachers as part of the vaccination rollout,” he said.
“The NSW Government has announced that vaccinations will be mandatory for all teachers from 8 November. Whilst the Public Health Order has yet to be made. We have already begun discussions with the Department to ensure the safe, ongoing employment of teachers who are unable to be vaccinated due to a medical condition.”
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By following suit, Victoria hopes that students, who have not been in the classroom since July, will be able to safely return.
Community language schools are also seeking their own sense of normality as students have struggled with daily online lessons, a number of them dropping out.
Tasos Douvartzides, President of Community Languages Victoria and Community Languages Australia, who has 69 after-hours community language programmes under his wing, and told Neos Kosmos that due to COVID-19, some of the students and families have been struggling with online learning and not all have equal access to technology.
He backs the government vaccine mandate in the hope that it will help return normality to the programmes so that students can safely return to classrooms.
“It was a matter of time for us to receive this news, however we have yet to receive formal notification,” he said, adding that his programmes will follow the instructions much as the NSW sister programmes did “though, despite collaborating with NSW, we have yet to receive feedback” regarding reactions to the mandate and the way in which it was implemented.
His understanding is that this mandate will apply not just to teachers but to other members of the industry however believes that there may be “particular exceptions”.
“Personally I’m an optimistic person living in an unpredictable new normal and anything is possible, but we will endeavour to do the best we can to assist and implement this measure,” he said.
Even without the mandate, Mr Douvartzides had encouraged vaccinations and, by coincidence, uploaded a second video on the community languages’ website encouraging parents, grandparents, teachers and students to get vaccinated just as the decision to mandate vaccines for Victoria’s educators was being announced.
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Victoria’s largest childcare provider, Goodstart Early Learning, which runs 180 centres across the state attended by more than 20,000 children, is also in favour of the mandate.
“With children under five unable to be vaccinated, the best way to keep them safe is to vaccinate the adults around them,” state manager Paul Ryan told the Guardian.
“Experience from interstate and overseas shows that as vaccination rates rise, Covid becomes a pandemic of the unvaccinated. While children are at low risk of serious infection, we should do everything we can to keep that risk as low as possible.
“Mandating vaccination of educators will significantly reduce the risk of transmission of COVID in centres as Victoria starts to open up, and is sensible and prudent.”