Teachers say the quality of education is declining in New South Wales amid a dire teacher shortage and immense workloads.
NSW Teachers Federation members walked off the job on Wednesday in support of their demands of a 5 to 7.5 per cent a year pay increase and two extra hours of release time.
Teachers rallied in Queanbeyan as teachers also gathered in Sydney.
Primary school special needs teacher at Queanbeyan West Public School Rebecca Kearns said as a teacher and parent she saw the important role that educators have in students' lives.
"I get really sad and disillusioned when I see statistics like 73 per cent of teachers say that their workload is unmanageable. And I can attest to that as a teacher myself," Mrs Kearns said.
"We're having split classes every day. We have whole cohorts put on minimal supervision. It's not good enough for our kids. It's not good enough for our communities, and it's not good enough for our teachers."
High schools in Queanbeyan have particularly suffered from teacher shortages.
Queanbeyan High School teacher Mitch Andrew said his school had between 16 and 22 teachers away each day in term one, prompting staff to walk off the job for two hours in March.
"I counted over a three-week period, we needed 157 teachers to cover classes and the department sent us 12. So it was a very hard term," he said.
Mr Andrew also said an unmanageable workload and non-competitive salary was the reason experienced teachers were leaving and new people were not entering the profession.
"When students that have the academic ability to be a teacher see how much work that teachers have to do they go, 'I don't want to be a teacher'. They go into different professions where they can make more money that have better conditions.
"This is a systemic issue that's been years in the making, and it's going to take years to fix."
On Tuesday NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell asked the union to call off the strike.
She said she would seek to defer the salary component of the Industrial Relations Commission arbitration in order to factor it into the state budget process.
The NSW government has offered a 2.04 per cent salary increase and 0.5 percentage point increase to superannuation.
"NSW public school teacher salaries are competitive with those offered by other state education systems," a NSW Department of Education spokesman said.
However, analysis from the McKell Institute showed teachers would receive a real wage cut of about $2000 over the life of the agreement because inflation is running higher than the 2.5 per cent public services wage cap.
The union has not ruled out further industrial action.
"Standing with all of my colleagues, you get this overwhelming feeling of that we do have each other's backs," Mrs Kearns said.
"It doesn't matter if you're a primary teacher or a secondary teacher, we're all there for each other."
