Victorian teachers call off a third strike after 79 per cent back a four-year pay deal

Victorian public school teachers voted on 17 August 2026 to accept the state government's revised pay and conditions offer, cancelling a third statewide stoppage that had been called for Wednesday 19 August. The Australian Education Union's Victorian branch said 79 per cent of members who voted backed the offer. The ABC reported a turnout of 83 per cent.

The package runs four years. Reported increases range from 28.3 per cent for education support staff and principals to 32.4 per cent for teachers, with a $2,000 lump sum at the start and pay backdated to 10 August 2026. EducationHQ reported a minimum first year increase of 13.04 per cent, then annual rises of between 4 and 4.9 per cent, and said an experienced teacher's salary would move from $118,063 to $151,419 by 2029. Australian Associated Press reported a cap on face to face teaching hours, a 1 per cent annual lump sum for staff already at the top of their scale, and a cut in required meeting time from 80 hours a year to 40. Four professional practice days a year are also included.

The instrument being replaced is the Victorian Government Schools Agreement 2022, which the Fair Work Commission approved on 18 July 2022 and which took effect on 25 July 2022, according to the Victorian Department of Education's own policy and advisory library. Bargaining for its successor ran for roughly a year and produced two full day stoppages.

The first was on 24 March 2026. Green Left, whose account was written by an AEU member who attended, put at least 32,000 teachers and education support staff at the Melbourne rally and called it the first statewide strike in more than a decade. Human Resources Director put participation at about 35,000 and dated the previous statewide strike to 2013. The two accounts do not agree on either figure. Green Left also reported that the union entered the dispute seeking 35 per cent, and that the government's position at the time of the March strike was 18 per cent over three years for teachers and 13 per cent for education support staff.

That position moved. By May the government had put an in principle deal of 28 per cent over four years. On 19 June 2026 members rejected it, by close to 58 per cent according to Green Left, which reported that it was the first time in more than 40 years that Victorian members had voted down a deal their own leadership had endorsed. A second 24 hour stoppage followed on 23 July 2026. Branch president Justin Mullaly said then that staff were working an average of 12 hours of unpaid overtime a week, and the union put the funding shortfall for Victorian public schools at $2.4 billion. Neither figure has been tested by an independent body.

The last movement came in early August, when the government added the $2,000 lump sum. After the result, Mullaly said increases like these are "why it pays to be a union member". Premier Ben Carroll described the deal as an investment in the future and put its cost at $5 billion over four years, rising to as much as $5.5 billion.

The scale of the increase should be read against the wider wage picture. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, in its Wage Price Index release of 13 May 2026, recorded annual wage growth in Victoria of 3.1 per cent in the year to the March quarter, against 3.2 per cent nationally and 3.3 per cent for the public sector. A first year rise above 13 per cent sits far outside that band, which is one reason the cost figure matters.

What happened on 17 August was a union ballot, not the vote that makes an agreement. Under the Fair Work Act the employer must put the proposed agreement to all employees it would cover, and the Commission must then approve it, including by applying the better off overall test. Education Minister Gabrielle Williams said the employee vote was likely to take a few weeks, with endorsement expected by about October 2026.

Several things are not yet known. The full text of the proposed agreement has not been published, so the enforceability of the workload and face to face teaching limits, the point on which the June rejection turned, cannot yet be assessed from the document itself. It is not known how the 21 per cent who voted no were distributed between teachers, principals and education support staff, whose headline increases differ by about four percentage points. Nor is it known whether the settlement shifts the retention problem the union campaigned on. And no date has been set for the statutory employee ballot.