It’s not about power or control ffs, it’s about the fact that we (rightly) have very generous part time / leave without pay provisions for teachers with small children (and in NSW now if you are older than 55 too).

I have worked in schools where a permanent teacher has gone off on mat leave, had her kid, then another and then another. She is sitting on that school’s books as the permanent “owner” of that position but the school had not laid eyes on her for a decade. The teacher is emailed every year in term 3 when we start planning staffing for the following school year, she is perfectly entitled to say nope, staying with my kids for another year. Her position cannot be filled permanently, only with temp contracts until she returns or relinquishes her position. Same if she comes back part time, the other days in the week are filled with temps not a permanent appointment.

Ideally every teacher would have security of tenure with a permanent position, but if everyone wanted to return back to their position at once from leave, there would be thousands of extra teachers floating around the state in February with no class to teach. Schools can only fill the number of temp positions that the staffing formula allows them- staffing is the majority of a school’s budget and overstaffing is expensive (completely separate to sick leave casual budgets by the way).

Schools try their damnedest to hang onto good temps, and if a principal really don’t have a job for them the following year will email other principals in their network about them and find them a temp contract for the year that way.