Ms Annette Dolan:

There is one very straightforward way of addressing it. That is that permanent jobs would be advertised. That was the reality up until quite a short time ago. The introduction of the Protection of Employees (Fixed-Term Work) Act 2003 was meant to address casualisation but had the opposite effect, whereby individual appointments were being made on a part-time basis rather than a full-time basis. So one was employed as a second level teacher for ten hours, maybe, if he or she was lucky, and could be stuck on that until after four years, when one became entitled to a contract of indefinite duration, CID, if there were not objective grounds preventing that.

With the recent collective agreements now, a person can get a contract of indefinite duration after two years. The reality is that many of our members are getting contracts of indefinite duration on maybe a third or half of a job, but not full hours. There is a provision in that recent agreement arising from the Ward report and the Cush report at third level, whereby if hours become available and those hours are held for a year, then one's contract of indefinite duration can be augmented. So if one has a contract of indefinite duration for ten hours and gets another two hours on top of that, then holds that for the year, then one will have a CID for 12 hours, but still has a long way to go to get a CID for 22 hours, to have a full contract.

In our view, if permanent jobs could be advertised from the outset, that would be one way of addressing it. A legislative basis would be helpful for the augmentation, because what we have is a collective agreement where we feel that hours are not being added on. We end up talking about it in an industrial relations space, but a legislative basis would be helpful.

We have some other difficulties with adult education and further education. I ask my colleague, Mr. Colm Kelly, to deal with that.