Mr. Colm Kelly:

We have grades in adult and further education beyond the teacher and lecturer grade. We have in excess of 40 grades, many of whom are on the whole-time equivalent of 37 hours per week, as are most other public servants. Those grades are obviously finding it more difficult to hit those 37 hours. Again, like the teaching grade and the lecturing grade, they had previously been appointed permanent, and up until the last four to five years, most of those grades had regularly been appointed permanent.

The tutor grade is slightly different. It is deployed within education and training boards. It is paid at the unqualified teachers' rate and is generally deployed in adult literacy at this stage. The TUI has been campaigning for the last few years and taking a variety of cases to insist that these jobs are teaching jobs. It has had some success with that. Those that remain in those jobs have reached a higher bar of 37 hours per week over a 42-week year as opposed to the school year, which is a 33-week year, and it is a much more difficult prospect. Almost the entirety of our tutor membership could be considered part-time, which is some ways an opinion rather than an assertion, as the Department of Education and Skills has not advised us as to the number of hours a whole-time equivalent would have, but they certainly have significantly fewer hours than a teacher would have and are paid at the unqualified rate. Recent agreements with the Department of Education and Skills have seen us converting those grades into teacher grades and then applying the same provisions as for teacher grades.

We also have a resource person grade which is deployed within Youthreach settings, which was appointed on a permanent, whole-time basis until recently. Further to an agreement with the Department of Education and Skills around 2012, which saw a proliferation of resource persons being hired into the Youthreach sector where previously teachers had been hired, we now have a proliferation of part-time resource persons which we did not have previously. The problem that we had with the teaching grade, which we were addressing through a variety of collective agreements, then became a problem for that resource person grade on 37 hours per week. We addressed that in the last agreement, which is called the Department of Education and Skills/TUI May agreement 2016, which was the agreement that brought the TUI into the Lansdowne Road agreement. Over the last number of weeks, the Department of Education and Skills has issued a direction to all education and training boards to make all of those persons and resource person contracts permanent immediately. We will look for solutions like that for our other grades that are having problems. As I said, we seek immediate permanence and then, as quickly as possible, a ladder towards whole-time permanence.