Page last updated 5/7/2022.
Hence by words not deeds.
The opinion piece below was submitted by me in May 2021, hoping to be posted on the student blog of the Student Voice Hub, a platform supported by our Victorian SRC. The SVH had a blog that accepted and posted pieces written by students, as well as a forum and commenting. The forum and commenting features have since been killed, and the blog is now essentially a VicSRC blog. Whilst at the time SVH had a blog piece submission box on the website, students can still pitch or submit by email.
In the below piece, I argued that our SRC should adopt a more general activist strategy, in particular by playing an active and leading role in the School Strike for Climate movement. This would, I proposed, involve our SRC endorsing strikes, guaranteeing students’ right to strike, and being visible in the movement. The piece was never published on SVH.
The piece at the time was rejected on the basis that the argument for a more activist VicSRC was beyond our SRC’s scope, and that our SRC was designed to focus on issues specifically based in the Victorian education system. The claim that our SRC had never endorsed the School Strike movement was also rejected as inaccurate. It was by this justification that this opinion piece was not published in any form on the Student Voice Hub.
Needless to say, our students are passionate about climate change. Among young Victorians 15-17 years of age, 97% agree that climate change requires urgent action. As the saying goes, what is the point of education on a dying planet? Climate change will be the primary challenge faced by our generation, yet our governments continue to drag their feet, delaying these problems to be dealt with by us. By then, the problems will be much worse, and it might even be too late. Only a grassroots, youth-led movement can pressure our governments into action now.
School Strike for Climate is that movement. It has successfully organised numerous protests and strikes in the last 2 years and is probably the largest movement that enjoys broad support among students. School Strike is endorsed by a diverse range of organisations including the National Union of Students, representing university students across Australia, as well as the Australian Education Union and the Independent Education Union of Australia, which represent our teachers.
Despite this widespread support for School Strike, including by the representative bodies of both university students and our teachers, one organisation has notably refrained from explicitly endorsing and actively campaigning for this grassroots movement – our Victorian Student Representative Council. Which is ironic, given that it purports to represent the secondary student body of Victoria, whilst School Strike is organised by, and enjoys almost universal support from, those very same students. One would think that School Strike is the textbook example of student voice in action. Why has our Victorian SRC not yet fully and unequivocally come out in support of such a relevant movement for young Victorian students?
The nature of our SRC’s regular advocacy amounts to, in practice, lobbying government. Our SRC sits on several Victorian Department of Education advisory groups and meets regularly with the Victorian Minister for Education. The Department and Minister for Education do appear to have some degree of respect for our SRC, and these relationships are of course extremely valuable to us as a student body and are a testament to the hard work over a long period of time that our SRC staff and students have committed. For the role that our SRC continues to play in advocating for our interests, all Victorian students should be deeply grateful. However, this role as a lobby group with a direct line to our government has limited our SRC’s potential to effectively only issues directly and obviously related to purely educational priorities, and has meant that it has not led public, popular campaigns to fight for our priorities.
Working behind the scenes, on the main part, has meant that our SRC does suffer from a lack of awareness. I consider myself relatively politically engaged, yet I discovered the existence of our SRC only after 4 full years of secondary school. In conversations with some of my acquaintances who are student members of their respective government school councils, they were unaware of our SRC at all, let alone its vital role in calling for mandatory student representation on school governance councils. Evidently, our SRC is not in the minds of even some of our most motivated student leaders, which is detrimental to our SRC’s effectiveness even as an advocacy group to government.
This lack of awareness among our students and absence from many of our schools translates to limited potential in student support for our SRC. Among those who actually know about it and its valuable activities in the background, our SRC is universally respected and valued, yet this does not mean much without widespread recognition among the student body which it claims to represent. This perceived lack of support means that the government thinks that it can get away with making major decisions without consultation with our SRC, such as occurred with the unnecessary closure of regional schools in February 2021, risking the mental health and education of thousands of students.
Its limited public presence hampers to some extent the ability of our SRC to campaign for the issues that matter to our students. Part of the reason that our SRC has such a low awareness in many of our schools is that it has avoided campaigning on issues that might not directly relate to educational outcomes. The limiting of our SRC’s advocacy to school-based issues and government lobbying, issues which the average student in Victoria might not feel is as relevant or interesting to them (whether or not that would be accurate), means that it is not as engaged in the broader social movements that our students are engaged in.
Key among these concerns is climate action, yet climate and School Strike are mentioned only once in the Congress 2020 report, in the context of a minor link to the Action Plan of Sustainability in Schools. It is apparent, through Congress as well as the very rare social media or blog post, that our SRC tacitly supports School Strike. However, this is not enough, and it is clear that our SRC must take a more active role in leading and campaigning for School Strike and climate action.
As the representative body of Victorian students, our SRC should endorse School Strike, as part of a broader expansion of its scope to encompass advocating on general social issues that our students are passionate about. This is not without precedent – the National Union of Students, the representative body of Australian university students, publicly supports School Strike as well as other movements that its students are involved in. The NUS as an activist organisation actively campaigns on the issues that university students care about, and this in turn has made it more effective in influencing public policy including in education. Similarly, our SRC has the potential to mature into a greater student movement that represents the interests of students beyond education.
The support of our SRC would provide School Strike with a welcome boost as it regains momentum out of the lockdowns of 2020. School Strike is broadly supported by Victorian students – the endorsement of our SRC would take that one step further, granting it greater credibility and helping to increase turnout. The legitimacy that our SRC can provide, as well as our SRC’s existing relationship with sections of the Victorian government, would help to strengthen the pressure that School Strike can exert on our governments to take action on climate change, as our students demand.
Moreover, our SRC should campaign for the government to ensure that students who go on strike will not suffer consequences of any kind at school for exercising their right to protest. In the past, students and teachers have been subjected to intimidation to discourage them from participating in school strikes. Having the support of our SRC will be essential to students having the confidence that the SRC will have their back when they turn out to School Strike, and it is vital that students have a guarantee that they will not be punished for fighting for their own future.
Strikes have always been the most successful organising method to secure rights for workers, and School Strike will be vital in sending an emphatic message to the government that we students will not give up, not only for climate action, but for the right to freely protest. The endorsement of our SRC in the fight for the right to strike will not only strengthen School Strike, it will allow students to take strike action on a range of other issues essential to us and our education.
Becoming an activist SRC will allow us to build mutually beneficial relationships with other organisations and movements, advancing both the causes that our students are passionate about and the public presence of our SRC. School Strike’s large online and media audience can be a valuable platform for promoting our SRC and its mission to advance the issues facing Victorian students, both purely educational and more broadly. Building stronger relationships with other advocacy organisations such as our teachers’ unions will help to spread the message of our SRC.
By becoming an activist SRC, it can become a more representative and holistic advocacy organisation, fighting for what Victorian students care about, in all domains. By becoming an activist SRC, it can build an audience that encompasses the entire student body, strengthening the ability of our SRC to coordinate public campaigns that can more effectively pressure our government to listen to student voice, to address our educational priorities.
Through the awareness and image that an activist Victorian SRC can achieve, we can inspire and reignite student voice in other states, so that they too can campaign for their education and future, and help to build a coordinated nationwide student voice movement.
An activist SRC will revitalise student voice in Victoria, giving us more power to achieve our goals. That can begin with an outright endorsement of School Strike for Climate, to actively commit to fighting for action on an issue that practically all of us agree needs urgent action now.
This was a clarifying comment for my piece.
The intention of my piece was to raise the possibility of the VicSRC engaging in activism more broadly beyond education, including participating in protest movements such as School Strike for Climate specifically. I believe that the involvement of groups such as the Youth Affairs Council Victoria and School Strike organisations should not preclude the VicSRC from actively engaging in these causes, and I think that each group can have a slightly different role to play. I would point to the willingness of the National Union of Students, which much like the VicSRC represents a major section of the demographic that YACVic covers, to substantially participate and organise in social causes beyond education.
In particular, my piece highlighted the difficulty of students in relation to their schools that discouraged them from attending the strike, and the May 2021 strike did raise some issues in terms of individual schools. A school in Ballarat, for example, used its teachers to blockade students from being able to leave to strike. The VicSRC, I believe, has a potential role to play in lobbying for government’s and schools’ observance of students’ right to strike, considering its unique position of influence and credibility in relation to the Victorian government. The VicSRC’s active participation in the strike movement would help to legitimise strike action specifically, as a valid tool to advance the causes of school-aged students which could be extended to application towards other movements including for education issues. I see this as one of the several areas in which the VicSRC especially can make a significant impact towards climate action and the causes of school students, as well as our educational priorities.
I recognise that what might be proposed would be a considerable commitment to alter the strategic direction of the organisation.
Some members of the Victorian Student Representative Council Student Executive Advisory Committee gave the below reply, in essence, to the above piece.
Victorian Student Representative Council was created to be a voice for students about education issues rather than a body that lobbies on social issues. The Student Executive Advisory Committee [I note that this reply was not issued by the Committee as a body, which had not discussed my piece. This response should be interpreted as representing the views of a few individual Representatives and perhaps the VicSRC staff.] believe that becoming more of an activist organisation more broadly could negatively impact our reputation leading to a decrease in our influence at the system level. We are the only organisation in Australia of its kind and this uniqueness is important to our ability to advocate effectively for Victorian students.
Our advocacy platform is created by students through our annual event Congress. At Congress, action plans are developed to work towards an ‘ideal situation’ when it comes to certain issues in education. If students identify certain actions that should be taken, VicSRC does its best to take these actions as an organisation, as well as collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders to work on these issues. This means that the Executive Committee often work alongside other education and community organisations to advocate for what students want to see in education during meetings with the Victorian government (such as the DET) and through webinars rather than more grassroots actions such as strikes.
Our Ambassadors program is designed to support students lead more grassroots actions in their local communities that are connected with our statewide advocacy. We would recommend that those interested consider joining the Ambassadors next year, or if they are interested in being more influential in the organisation, we would welcome them to nominate for the Student Executive Advisory Committee! We also invite students to come to Congress.
The more students that are involved in VicSRC the more powerful our advocacy is so we would encourage you to spread awareness through your school, peers and community about our organisation. We need students all across Victoria to join us to ensure that every decision in education includes strong student voice.