Cessnock Correctional Centre teaching staff are still fuming from the NSW Government's proposal to outsource inmate education, replacing nine and a half teaching positions with four under qualified training staff.
Teaching staff held a one-hour stop-work meeting on Monday to protest the government's proposed reform.
The proposed changes come after a review in May found the current system isn't sufficiently focused on job skills; however a decrease in education is also found to see the number of inmates double.
"If you take those teachers away, then you are essentially just condemning all of our prisoners to an eternal cycle of being in gaol which on the one hand some people out there might think is fantastic, which I don't, but the other is that every prisoner in gaol comes at a certain cost to the community and the tax payer and it's in all of our interests to absolutely reduce the numbers of prisoners, not increase."
"Scaling back the level of qualification of teachers has been proven to fail in jurisdictions right across the world. Taking away the skills of the teachers fails as a solution to the prisoner population."
Clayton Barr was unable to attend the meeting on Monday, but encourages staff to continue meeting with one another to discuss the issue.
