Ninety-eight per cent of teachers, principals and education support staff in the union have agreed to strike on Tuesday, March 24.
The union is expecting more than 10,000 people to rally in the city, with thousands more to stop work across the state.
Schools are informing students to brace for cancelled classes and replacement teachers.
After eight months of negotiations “with no offer at all”, AEU Victoria branch president Justin Mullaly, said that the Allan Government had left staff with no choice but to stop work.
“... staff will stop work ... for the first time in 18 years under a Labor Government because of the failure of the Education Minister Ben Carroll and Premier Jacinta Allan to deliver pay and conditions which respect school staff and the important work that they do, as well as fully fund public schools,” Mullaly said.
“This decision has not been taken lightly, and we keenly understand the impact this can have on parents, but we have arrived here because the Government is continuing to disrespect public school teachers, principals, and support staff by not putting any offer on the table, let alone a decent one.”
Mullaly said the Government had deliberately denied Victorian public schools $2.4 billion in funding through to 2031, “cementing our schools as the lowest funded in Australia by a long way”.
“It is a joke for this government to call Victoria the ‘education state’, when teachers, principals and support staff continue to be undervalued and underpaid,” he said.
Later this year, the AEU said, teachers will be earning as much as $15,359 a year less than their NSW counterparts, while a classroom based education support worker starting out will be 10.5 per cent behind.
A starting school principal will start $27,841 or 18 per cent behind, it said.
Following the vote of union members, the Fair Work Commission has given the green light for public school staff to take protected industrial action which includes stopping work for 24 hours on March 24.
Earlier this week, a public hearing of the Legislative Council’s Legal and Social Issues Committee heard the AEU describe the Victorian Government’s “failure to deliver the required levels of public school funding” as “despicable and duplicitous”.
“This failure, which deprives more than 655,000 students in public schools of the resources and supports they need, also means that additional funding from the Commonwealth, which is contingent on the state increasing their share of the Schooling Resource Standard, does not flow,” Mullaly said.
In January 2025, Allan announced her Government had reached an agreement with the Commonwealth to deliver full and fair funding for Victorian public schools.
But, in May it was revealed that instead of delivering this funding, the State Government, the AEU said, had in fact “acted to rip $2.4 billion of funding” from public schools.
At no time since the SRS was established in 2011 have Victorian public schools ever been funded to 100 per cent, the union said.
“At a time when Victoria’s public schools are required to meet growing student learning and wellbeing needs and are facing chronic and continuing staff shortages, the Allan Government’s failure to deliver the required levels of funding is as duplicitous as it is despicable,” Mullaly claimed.
“It is not only an affront to Victorian public school students, their families and employees, it denies the broader Victorian community the benefits of a properly resourced, fully funded, and flourishing public school system right now and for the future.”
