Nonetheless, the union conceded this week that if an acceptable interim pay offer was made, debate on the funding model could wait for another day.

“The government has changed the parameters of the dispute by lodging a request to go to arbitration,” Haythorpe explains.

Thus far, negotiations have continued with the belief that any pay agreement would be backdated. This is no longer the case. With arbitration likely to take up to a year, “it will be effectively this time next year before anyone has a salary payment”.

“Our capacity to deal with the funding model has been taken off the table.”

At the heart of the union’s concern about the funding model is a perceived lack of industrial protection. At present, “around 85 per cent of the education budget, (Kevin) Foley can’t get his hands on”.

“If that protection is taken out of our agreement, our budget is open to the whims of Treasury.”

The average age of teachers in South Australia is around 47. Most of them remember 800 of their colleagues losing their jobs the last time Treasury had access to the education budget in tough economic times.

“They saw their class sizes increase with changes to the funding models, and they don’t want to go through that again – enough is enough,” Haythorpe says. “We have a very highly feminised workforce...they generally tend to be fairly conservative about getting involved in industrial disputes. This year many have just really stood up and said: ‘We won’t accept this!’”

Janet Giles, now secretary of SA Unions, can attest to the challenge facing Haythorpe. She was AEU president when, back in 1996, the union embarked on what was then its most bitter industrial campaign, going out on strike for five days.

“Getting teachers to strike is very hard work – I know that from personal experience,” she recalls. “They’ll do it as a last resort.”

At that time, Rob Lucas was treasurer and Dean Brown was premier. By the time the strike was resolved, Brown was no longer premier. His challenger, John Olsen, made resolving the strike one of his first orders of business.

Giles says there are parallels with the current dispute, with one key difference – the involvement of a Labor government. As far as the union is concerned, that is the great betrayal. In a sense, the Liberals were just adhering to their political ideology; but the union movement and the ALP were supposed to be hewn from the same rock. “The Liberals were clearly out to smash the union in ’96, dramatically cutting staffing and education resources...but this is largely just mismanagement of the bargaining process,” says Giles.

The dispute has already seen off one industrial relations minister, with Michael Wright exiting for Paul Caica in the mid-year reshuffle.

Caica didn’t contribute to this article, feeling that he had little insight to offer on Correna Haythorpe. Whether this reflects the minister’s aloof approach to mediation or the union leader’s background – unusually, she is not an ALP member, and came not from the industrial circuit, but the classroom – is not clear. Possibly a little of both.

Haythorpe’s quiet origins belie her emerging status as one of the state’s most recognisable public figures. She grew up in the western Eyre Peninsula fishing community of Streaky Bay, and left school in Year 11.

“For our community there was no Year 12 curriculum... a lot of kids dropped away as time went on,” she says. “Some went to private schools, but for me that was never an option.” Instead, she became a “deckie” – a deckhand on her grandfather’s fishing boat.

“It was probably not quite what my parents had in mind,” she laughs, “but it was a good life. It certainly gave me a grounding in how to work hard, because it was seven days a week, 5am starts.”

Finally, the community rallied together to map out a Year 12 syllabus. Haythorpe returned to complete her studies.

“That cemented my desire to get involved in teaching – the extra work and commitment that the Year 12 teachers put into that year for us, to make sure we had all the skills and experience to be successful; I thought, ‘This is what public education is about!’ It actually gave me a different future than what I was probably going to have.”

After graduating from teachers’ college, Haythorpe worked at under-privileged schools in Port Pirie and Adelaide’s northern suburbs. It was during this time that she became active in the union movement, as the state’s teachers took on the then-Liberal government.

It was the debate over the proposed Partnerships 21 scheme, which represented a “major change to the way schools were managed”, that steeled her resolve.

“That dispute really fuelled my commitment to wanting to do more within the AEU…certainly the impact that had on staff morale, the divisions that it caused for people,” Haythorpe recalls now.

She gained a foothold in the union movement, working her way up at the grassroots level in Port Pirie, where she ran for election for the union’s executive. Then, three years ago, she opted to work for the union full time, as its women’s officer. Last year, she successfully contested the AEU presidency, with the support of outgoing president Andrew Gohl.

Her ticket united members from a diverse range of education professions.

“Fundamentally we believe in the concept of public education being free, that it’s a right for our students, that it needs to be adequately resourced,” she says.

Haythorpe began her tenure on January 1. The enterprise bargaining dispute began within days. Not that she – or anyone – could have expected the issue to so dominate her first term.

“I don’t think anyone really had any sense that this EB year was going to be so difficult…It’s been a huge learning curve,” she says.

It’s a curve she has navigated with the aid of a tight leadership team and “a very tolerant husband and children”. Her daughters, Anna, 9, and Kate, 6, are both at primary school – public, of course.

“I have to say the dispute has taken quite a toll on my family life,” she says, a grim weariness creeping across the face that fronts the cameras day after day.

“I guess for me there’s a sense (my daughters’) schools are likely to lose anywhere around $40,000 a year…Kate is in reception; with another six years of school, that means her school may have $240,000 less for the time she’s there.

“So there’s a sense of personal commitment to it as well, and not wanting to see this happen...the impact it’ll have on my children, but also the impact for our members and their children.”

Even amid the bitterness surrounding the Partnerships 21 debate, the Olsen Liberal government offered one key concession – a promise that no schools would be worse off. And, says Haythorpe emphatically, “they funded it”.

The Rann government has constantly evoked the same mantra, that no school will lose money under its funding model. But, unlike its Liberal predecessors, Labor is not putting its money where its mouth is.

That, coupled with the newly elected WA Liberal government immediately acquiescing to a 20 per cent pay rise over three years for teachers in that state, has led Haythorpe to a grim assessment of this state’s first Labor government since 1993: “It’s been a huge disappointment.”

“Mike Rann actually addressed our branch council before he was elected; he pledged to be the ‘Education Premier’,” Haythorpe recalls. “I think the disillusionment our members are expressing is about the way he’s not met that commitment, and the way he’s let education down.”

Rann’s focus has been on infrastructure development, often with somewhat hyperbolic titles. (Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s… a Super School!)

There was widespread anticipation that the Premier might “come out and have some positive intervention” in their dispute. Needless to say, his public utterances have not borne that out.

“Any threats to disrupt kids during exams would be an appalling thing to do and, I have to say, I can’t imagine the vast majority of teachers agreeing to that,” Rann said this month.

The government is taking on the teachers with the zeal of a political campaign; indeed, this dispute is easily as hotly contested as any election. But there is much at stake, for both sides. As Janet Giles explains: “Nobody wins when you take on teachers.”

Haythorpe plans to stand for re-election when her two-year term ends, if nothing else, to experience a peace-time presidency.

“I’m yet to find out the other aspects of AEU president’s role,” she laughs.

She wants her tenure to be remembered “not as the time when public education was destroyed”, but rather as a time when the union movement was galvanised, and 2008 as a year that saw the AEU gain 1000 new members.

But for now there are dark clouds to be weathered; as such, the president must draw strength from wherever she can. She recently held a phone conference with country delegates, many of whom come from rural communities that are bearing the brunt of drought and a credit crunch.

Teachers are preparing to march on State Parliament for the fourth time this year in an industrial campaign unprecedented in this state’s education history, let alone under a Labor government.

As the president of the Education Union, Correna Haythorpe has masterminded this campaign; South Australians have seen her almost nightly on television news; she has become one of the government’s most feared antagonists, and among the highest-profile figures of Adelaide life. But precious little else is known about her.

One reason for this is her surprising shyness: “I generally don’t talk about myself,” she flushes.

So who is Correna Haythorpe? Opinion, as they say, is divided. One of her predecessors in the Education Union, Janet Giles, says she is “the right leader at the right time for the AEU”.

If, on the other hand, you trust the government’s innuendo, you’ll estimate her as something of an Antipodean cross between Arthur Scargill and Germaine Greer; Dean Mighell in a dress. This view is not entirely dispelled as I arrive at AEU headquarters on Greenhill Road.

The president’s office door is adorned with that iconic J. Howard Miller portrait of World War II factory worker Geraldine Doyle, emblazoned with the legend “We Can Do It”, a symbol and slogan that came to embody the feminist struggle in the latter 20th century. In present circumstances though, it suggests an exhortation to the state’s educators, battle-weary but resolute.

And their leader seems less a militant radical than simply someone who genuinely cares about education.

“Our members are sick and tired of the government using our Enterprise Bargaining Process to basically not fund education... People have had enough,” Haythorpe argues.

“That’s the thing that’s unique about an education dispute – when you’re dealing with conditions for education workers, it has a direct impact on the quality of service we can provide for students.”

The teachers have long argued that the issue of schools funding – the government’s proposed model entails a restructure that allows individual schools to administer their budget – is as fundamental to their cause as pay. Many rail against media descriptions of the stand-off as a “pay dispute”.

Nonetheless, the union conceded this week that if an acceptable interim pay offer was made, debate on the funding model could wait for another day.

“The government has changed the parameters of the dispute by lodging a request to go to arbitration,” Haythorpe explains.

Thus far, negotiations have continued with the belief that any pay agreement would be backdated. This is no longer the case. With arbitration likely to take up to a year, “it will be effectively this time next year before anyone has a salary payment”.

“Our capacity to deal with the funding model has been taken off the table.”

At the heart of the union’s concern about the funding model is a perceived lack of industrial protection. At present, “around 85 per cent of the education budget, (Kevin) Foley can’t get his hands on”.

“If that protection is taken out of our agreement, our budget is open to the whims of Treasury.”

The average age of teachers in South Australia is around 47. Most of them remember 800 of their colleagues losing their jobs the last time Treasury had access to the education budget in tough economic times.

“They saw their class sizes increase with changes to the funding models, and they don’t want to go through that again – enough is enough,” Haythorpe says. “We have a very highly feminised workforce...they generally tend to be fairly conservative about getting involved in industrial disputes. This year many have just really stood up and said: ‘We won’t accept this!’”

Janet Giles, now secretary of SA Unions, can attest to the challenge facing Haythorpe. She was AEU president when, back in 1996, the union embarked on what was then its most bitter industrial campaign, going out on strike for five days.

“Getting teachers to strike is very hard work – I know that from personal experience,” she recalls. “They’ll do it as a last resort.”

At that time, Rob Lucas was treasurer and Dean Brown was premier. By the time the strike was resolved, Brown was no longer premier. His challenger, John Olsen, made resolving the strike one of his first orders of business.

Giles says there are parallels with the current dispute, with one key difference – the involvement of a Labor government. As far as the union is concerned, that is the great betrayal. In a sense, the Liberals were just adhering to their political ideology; but the union movement and the ALP were supposed to be hewn from the same rock. “The Liberals were clearly out to smash the union in ’96, dramatically cutting staffing and education resources...but this is largely just mismanagement of the bargaining process,” says Giles.

The dispute has already seen off one industrial relations minister, with Michael Wright exiting for Paul Caica in the mid-year reshuffle.

Caica didn’t contribute to this article, feeling that he had little insight to offer on Correna Haythorpe. Whether this reflects the minister’s aloof approach to mediation or the union leader’s background – unusually, she is not an ALP member, and came not from the industrial circuit, but the classroom – is not clear. Possibly a little of both.

Haythorpe’s quiet origins belie her emerging status as one of the state’s most recognisable public figures. She grew up in the western Eyre Peninsula fishing community of Streaky Bay, and left school in Year 11.

“For our community there was no Year 12 curriculum... a lot of kids dropped away as time went on,” she says. “Some went to private schools, but for me that was never an option.” Instead, she became a “deckie” – a deckhand on her grandfather’s fishing boat.

“It was probably not quite what my parents had in mind,” she laughs, “but it was a good life. It certainly gave me a grounding in how to work hard, because it was seven days a week, 5am starts.”

Finally, the community rallied together to map out a Year 12 syllabus. Haythorpe returned to complete her studies.

“That cemented my desire to get involved in teaching – the extra work and commitment that the Year 12 teachers put into that year for us, to make sure we had all the skills and experience to be successful; I thought, ‘This is what public education is about!’ It actually gave me a different future than what I was probably going to have.”

After graduating from teachers’ college, Haythorpe worked at under-privileged schools in Port Pirie and Adelaide’s northern suburbs. It was during this time that she became active in the union movement, as the state’s teachers took on the then-Liberal government.

It was the debate over the proposed Partnerships 21 scheme, which represented a “major change to the way schools were managed”, that steeled her resolve.

“That dispute really fuelled my commitment to wanting to do more within the AEU…certainly the impact that had on staff morale, the divisions that it caused for people,” Haythorpe recalls now.

She gained a foothold in the union movement, working her way up at the grassroots level in Port Pirie, where she ran for election for the union’s executive. Then, three years ago, she opted to work for the union full time, as its women’s officer. Last year, she successfully contested the AEU presidency, with the support of outgoing president Andrew Gohl.

Her ticket united members from a diverse range of education professions.

“Fundamentally we believe in the concept of public education being free, that it’s a right for our students, that it needs to be adequately resourced,” she says.

Haythorpe began her tenure on January 1. The enterprise bargaining dispute began within days. Not that she – or anyone – could have expected the issue to so dominate her first term.

“I don’t think anyone really had any sense that this EB year was going to be so difficult…It’s been a huge learning curve,” she says.

It’s a curve she has navigated with the aid of a tight leadership team and “a very tolerant husband and children”. Her daughters, Anna, 9, and Kate, 6, are both at primary school – public, of course.

“I have to say the dispute has taken quite a toll on my family life,” she says, a grim weariness creeping across the face that fronts the cameras day after day.

“I guess for me there’s a sense (my daughters’) schools are likely to lose anywhere around $40,000 a year…Kate is in reception; with another six years of school, that means her school may have $240,000 less for the time she’s there.

“So there’s a sense of personal commitment to it as well, and not wanting to see this happen...the impact it’ll have on my children, but also the impact for our members and their children.”

Even amid the bitterness surrounding the Partnerships 21 debate, the Olsen Liberal government offered one key concession – a promise that no schools would be worse off. And, says Haythorpe emphatically, “they funded it”.

The Rann government has constantly evoked the same mantra, that no school will lose money under its funding model. But, unlike its Liberal predecessors, Labor is not putting its money where its mouth is.

That, coupled with the newly elected WA Liberal government immediately acquiescing to a 20 per cent pay rise over three years for teachers in that state, has led Haythorpe to a grim assessment of this state’s first Labor government since 1993: “It’s been a huge disappointment.”

“Mike Rann actually addressed our branch council before he was elected; he pledged to be the ‘Education Premier’,” Haythorpe recalls. “I think the disillusionment our members are expressing is about the way he’s not met that commitment, and the way he’s let education down.”

Rann’s focus has been on infrastructure development, often with somewhat hyperbolic titles. (Look, up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It’s… a Super School!)

There was widespread anticipation that the Premier might “come out and have some positive intervention” in their dispute. Needless to say, his public utterances have not borne that out.

“Any threats to disrupt kids during exams would be an appalling thing to do and, I have to say, I can’t imagine the vast majority of teachers agreeing to that,” Rann said this month.

The government is taking on the teachers with the zeal of a political campaign; indeed, this dispute is easily as hotly contested as any election. But there is much at stake, for both sides. As Janet Giles explains: “Nobody wins when you take on teachers.”

Haythorpe plans to stand for re-election when her two-year term ends, if nothing else, to experience a peace-time presidency.

“I’m yet to find out the other aspects of AEU president’s role,” she laughs.

She wants her tenure to be remembered “not as the time when public education was destroyed”, but rather as a time when the union movement was galvanised, and 2008 as a year that saw the AEU gain 1000 new members.

But for now there are dark clouds to be weathered; as such, the president must draw strength from wherever she can. She recently held a phone conference with country delegates, many of whom come from rural communities that are bearing the brunt of drought and a credit crunch.

“Everybody out there is suffering…some of them are married to farmers, and their local communities are suffering; and yet, they were still saying: ‘Whatever it takes, even if I have to take out a loan to get through this stop-work period…we can’t let the government get away with changing the funding to our schools’.”

Haythorpe has no designs on politics. The union movement looks after its own, and she will probably return to the classroom someday. Her last post was teaching middle primary (“They’re great – they’re still keen and interested, but not too young that you have to tie their shoelaces and wipe their noses for them”).

But for now, the future of her 14,000 members depends on the former deckie from Streaky Bay’s ability to stare down the Rann government. Few doubt she has what it takes.

“Everybody out there is suffering…some of them are married to farmers, and their local communities are suffering; and yet, they were still saying: ‘Whatever it takes, even if I have to take out a loan to get through this stop-work period…we can’t let the government get away with changing the funding to our schools’.”

Haythorpe has no designs on politics. The union movement looks after its own, and she will probably return to the classroom someday. Her last post was teaching middle primary (“They’re great – they’re still keen and interested, but not too young that you have to tie their shoelaces and wipe their noses for them”).

But for now, the future of her 14,000 members depends on the former deckie from Streaky Bay’s ability to stare down the Rann government. Few doubt she has what it takes.