preÁmBuLo

My personal history with the four communities in the remote region of Tasmania that was the site of this study was the reason for choosing the topic of attraction to and the

retention of teachers in the region. The four government schools were chosen as the focus because they are the remote schools in Tasmania I am familiar with. There was a need to limit the scope of the study to one sector. At the end of 1991, the end of my first year of teaching, I received notification that my 1992 appointment would be in one of these small remote communities. I had never been to this community in fact I had no recollection of having been to the region. At that time, there was no option for refusing the appointment,

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other than leaving the employ of the education department. I was allocated an education department-owned house located right next to the school, and was required to share the house with another teacher based on the criteria that we were both single and female. At the end of the 1992 school year, I was notified of my next appointment, which required me to move out of the region.

At the end of 1995, on the basis of my 5 years’ continuous service as a temporary teacher, I was granted permanency with the education department from the beginning of the 1996 school year. However, there was a ‘catch’. I had to return to the region in which I’d worked in 1992, but to a different community from the one in which I had previously lived. My permanent appointment was for 2 years because I had already worked in the region for 1 year, and there was an agreement at the time that teachers were not required to teach more than a total of 3 years in a remote region.

Based on my previous experience in the region, I willingly accepted the appointment and was quite excited at the prospect of returning there. However, I found that things were very different compared to my first experience in the region. A major difference from my previous experience in 1992 was that the principal had been amazingly supportive and very approachable. His wife was a fellow teacher and she was equally supportive both in and out of school and encouraged community engagement, introducing new teachers to various community members who were not parents of students at the school.

In 1997, in what should have been my second and final year at the school, I received a letter informing me that the ‘rules’ had changed and that a new Industrial Agreement had been introduced requiring 3 consecutive years. Under this agreement I would have to remain in the region for another year. After attempts to negotiate a transfer with various Department of Education (DoE) representatives were unsuccessful I wrote directly to the then Director of Education (the highest position in the DoE at the time) outlining my situation, my attempts to

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negotiate a transfer, and my unhappiness regarding the change of rule, as well as my 0.8 permanent status that had been based on my fraction for 1 year out of 5 years of teaching. I was fortunate to receive a response and was assured by the Director that the original agreement would be honoured. I would be granted a transfer at the end of the year without losing my permanent status and to top it off, my permanent status had been increased to full- time.

My next sojourn to the remote region was in 2003 when I was employed for one day a week in a third community to teach Indonesian to classes in Grades 3 – 8. I didn’t have anything to do with the community in the area for the duration of this appointment and in the winter, I travelled to the community on the evening before my work day and travelled out again in the afternoon after the day’s teaching. During the warmer months, I did a daily return trip. The teaching staff with whom I had contact during the year were all very friendly and welcoming. Some negative student behaviours towards me, however, went unaddressed by senior staff/the principal. As a result, the principal at the school within which I worked for 3 days a week during 2003 put a stop to me continuing my role within the remote school beyond September of that year, and increased my employment in her school to 4 days per week.

In 2007 after a 2-term stint as Acting Principal in a country school near Williamstown (not a remote town), I gained an Acting Principal position for 2 terms in a fourth school in the remote region. At the end of the 2007 school year my appointment was continued for a

further 3 years as Acting Principal. At the end of 2010 I won the substantive position enabling me to stay longer.

During 2013 I decided it was time to leave my position as principal in the remote school, based on a number of factors that had changed during my appointment, one of which was a reclassification of principal salary for ‘new’ principals to the position. Under that

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agreement I was not eligible to receive the additional salary because I was already in the position. The result of this ineligibility was that I was the lowest paid principal in the region because the other small school had a newly appointed principal eligible for the increased payment. However, my request for a demotion to Advanced Skills Teacher (AST) (a senior staff position less than principal but close to the salary I was receiving as principal) was denied because my previous substantive position had been a teacher, so if I transferred out of the region it would be as a classroom teacher. There was a change in DoE managers the following year, and the incoming manager allowed me to transfer as an AST at the end of the 2014 school year.

From my own experience, I was a beginning teacher who initially accepted a teaching position in the remote community in order to obtain work as a teacher and my second

appointment was accepted in order to be granted permanency. For me, my enjoyment of the appointments in the remote region had nothing to do with the geographical location or the community but were based on my experience of the leadership of the school. It was not until my appointment as a principal, that I understood the affect of the never-ending stream of beginning teachers and the subsequent impact on the educational outcomes of the students. I experienced the pressure from the DoE, placed on principals to continually improve student outcomes, in schools with continually changing and mainly novice teachers.

It was while I was principal in the region that I commenced this research and chose its topic, believing there must be a better way of ‘doing things’ but also based on my own

experiences as to why I chose to teach in the remote communities and why I chose to leave. Three of my four appointments to the remote region were due to work related incentives. The first was employment, the second permanency, and the third, the opportunity of a promotion. The reasons for leaving were not all by choice. The first time I left was not by choice, a permanent teacher was moving into the community, the second was by choice, because of the

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leadership, and the last was by choice, with a number of factors influencing my decision but it was mainly influenced by salary. In undertaking this study, I was interested to find out whether my decisions to teach in the remote communities and to leave the remote

communities were the norm – was it employment opportunities that influenced the decision of other teachers to choose to teach in remote communities? Were there distinct influences in teachers choosing to stay or leave the remote communities?