Mr. Diarmaid de Paor:

I thank the committee for the invitation to address it this afternoon on behalf of the Association of Secondary Teachers of Ireland which represents 18,000 second level teachers. I also take the opportunity to welcome this Bill albeit with some hopes for amendment.

Second level teaching has suffered immeasurably over the past decade as a result of the continuing casualisation of teaching in our schools. Short-term contracts, small hours and casual hours have meant that teachers have found it very difficult to feel the security in their employment that is necessary for them to be able to give of their very best. A lack of continuity in the relationship between students and their teachers does not lead to optimum results for these students in their academic, emotional and social development at a crucial time in their lives.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, has, in the past, drawn attention to the fact that Ireland has a very high level of teachers employed on part-time or fixed term contracts and to the potential damage to the education system that these atypical work patterns can cause. It must, however, be acknowledged that some progress has been made in recent years on fixed term contracts. This is largely thanks to the implementation of the expert group on fixed-term and part-time employment in primary and second level education in Ireland, which arose out of the Haddington Road Agreement. Its report is colloquially known as the Ward report. Of course, ASTI members are not benefiting from the provisions of the Ward report at the moment, but perhaps that is a matter best left to another day.

However, the issue of hundreds of teachers on part-time hours remains a blight on second level education in Ireland. The conditions of these teachers range from those who have 15 or 16 hours per week on a permanent basis by way of a part-time CID right down to teachers who get a few this week and a few the next on an entirely casual basis. In a recent Red C survey of teachers who commenced teaching in the past six years 27% of those teachers work on a part-time basis.

Teachers who are not on full hours, and particularly those with no certainty as to hours, are not able to establish themselves as full members of their school communities. They do not know from one year to the next, and often from one week to the next, how many hours they will have, what they can and cannot afford to do about living arrangements, will they have to work another job to make ends meet, as many teachers do. This is not conducive to helping new teachers to blossom into their careers as the educators of our children as they should. In fact, this mode of precarious employment militates against the integration of these teachers, who are the best qualified than at any other time in the history of the State, fully into their school communities.

There have been some attempts, following negotiations with the Department of Education and Skills and the school management bodies to deal with increasing the hours of CID holders by way of circular letter. However, these circulars only benefit those teachers who have already acquired CIDs and they are often more honoured in the breach than the observance. In short, there needs to be a legislative basis for these measures in order to ensure that our young teachers – and by extension our adolescent students – can gain the full benefits. We hope that at a later stage the Bill can be amended to include measures such as a minimum call out for part-time and casual work and some form of commitment to a minimum number of hours per week for casual workers, for example, so that they are not sitting by the phone not knowing whether they can make commitments or what they can do. On the basis of the improvements that are in the Bill the ASTI welcomes any move to increase the hours of our many part-time teachers and therefore in principle welcomes the Bill.